71–80 of 486 posts
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Users have the money. If there's a fork, users can value one side higher than the other and then developers and miners will follow the money.
How many forks of Bitcoin have been as successful as Bitcoin?
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Corrupt governments and central banks can be pushed to change the rules with methods like "voting" or "mass protests".
Except corrupt governments and central banks do not care for either. Central bank policies are not subject to voting by people. Did any of us vote for bailouts, QE?. corrupt governments also know how to suppress "mass protests". If these are the only ways to hold them to account how would that work.
Isn't the role of a central bank to enact monetary policy and to contribute to financial stability? I mean, actively working to stabilize the value of money and to ensure inflation meets the government's policy goals, which are motivated by the need to ensure the economy stays healthy, don't sound like something that creates controversy. I mean, do we really need a vote do check if we want Zimbabwean hyperinflation?
Given the alternative is the perpetual risk of seeing the value of your currency halve in less than a week, like BTC experienced a few months ago, how exactly is the service provided by a central bank bad or undesirable?
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It's precisely about volume, because that shows us that ~$1B/day of new money buying into bitcoin is already happening (actually $36/BN a day since for every seller - which includes miners btw - there is a buyer). Since the price has been going up, that means demand has been even exceeding supply lately.
You’re mixing up trading volume and inflows. Volume is just people trading back and forth. As a limit example, you and I could wash trade a single bitcoin back and forth a trillion times, for a volume of $60,000 trillion dollars. But that would pay no electric bills! It’s just money moving around. Miners pay bills from net dollars moving into the system from outside. There are no stats which track such inflows in cry…
But let's say they do $2B USD per day. That still seems to be plenty, given that supply is meeting demand.
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The federal reserve exists at the pleasure of Congress, and Congress can abolish the fed if it chooses to.
You have a lot to learn. https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv...
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This is just desperate whataboutism. The inequality of life is certainly brutal but it doesn't make Bitcoin a populous utopia either. Besides that the numbers aren't equivalent. Holding stake and controlling its exchange are not the same thing, at least not for Bitcoin or democratic state controlled currencies.
> This is just desperate whataboutism Wat
> the ecosystem is still dominated by a concentration of key players, making the ecosystem susceptible to systemic risk like a 51 percent attack, where a group of miners could take control of the majority of the network. Never mind that doing so would destroy the value of the cap/opex invested. But yea... bitcoin is dead, again.
> Never mind that doing so would destroy the value of the cap/opex invested. "Bitcoin is centralized, but that's OK because the central authorities can be trusted to do the right thing" isn't exactly a compelling argument. Especially when decentralization is supposed to be one of Bitcoin's major selling points.
We don't need to trust miners for bitcoin to work and if we do trust them, what is the downside to someone who is just validating transactions?
They built a better gold. People trust gold. They put the majority of it into vaults and trust the people who run those vaults. This is the best solution anyone has ever come up with to digitize gold. It doesn't tick all the boxes 100% and isn't perfect, but it sure does one single thing well.
The world revolves on financial transactions. I wish I could have said that I built something that can be validated by anyone at any time and then get people all over the world to freely invest insane amounts of capex/opex. All without a marketing budget or CEO. It has never been done before.
Money is largely controlled by a small group of investors and central banks. [citation needed]
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Corrupt governments and central banks can be pushed to change the rules with methods like "voting" or "mass protests".
Except corrupt governments and central banks do not care for either. Central bank policies are not subject to voting by people. Did any of us vote for bailouts, QE?. corrupt governments also know how to suppress "mass protests". If these are the only ways to hold them to account how would that work.
And there are countless historical examples (even recent) of peaceful or violent protests causing change to corrupt governments.
Importantly, distributed public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum don't give large holders the power to tax other participants, engage in seigniorage (1), or censor transactions and thereby become gatekeepers/tollgaters. (1) PoW hardware or staked coins, in PoW and PoS Sybil control mechanisms, respectively, do give their owners the power to issue new currency and collect transaction fees, but it is an open marke…