61–70 of 84 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it’s called greater fool theory for a reason.
Is the person who posted this "Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created." right or wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can transact with people who choose to use it and convert to fiat currency when needed. I have been doing this for over ten years now. It works. What's the problem? Are you saying that me merely using Bitcoin endangers others and is akin to driving into oncoming traffic? edit: Sure, driving into oncoming traffic is bad. So let's criminalize and punish that, rather than banning vehicles because I could drive on the…
If you do it on your own, it’s like living off-grid and driving your off-road vehicle at whatever speed you like. Go right ahead, nobody is stopping you. The problem with crypto is where it interacts with the financial system. The exchanges are hives of scum and villainy. Criminals use it for money laundering and ransomware. That’s the part where you do need to follow the existing rules and laws, whether you like the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it’s called greater fool theory for a reason.
Is the person who posted this "Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created." right or wrong?
For investments of which the only purpose is to make more money, right.
Of course it's not that black and white, since every investment technically has at least two utility purposes: 1) hedging 2) emotional utility (the false hope of getting rich).
wonder why HN feels so anti-bitcoin?
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised that some people in HN would find that making cannibalism illegal is an outrageous restriction of their holy personal freedom. I would find it surprising that it would not shape a clear anti-cannibalism consensus.
Now of course cryptocurrency is nothing close to cannibalism, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does crypto solve any of that if its future is just more regulation pressing it into the molds of already established systems? I can’t pay my moving guy in crypto, I have to convert it to cash and all that “protection” is easily surmountable.
The problem that Bitcoin aimed to solve was that cash cannot be transferred online. The headline of the whitepaper - "a peer to peer electronic cash system". You can transfer cash in person by handing someone coins or notes. It might be illegal in some jurisdictions to do that for high amounts or certain items, but it is at least physically possible i.e. permissionless. Bitcoin is that, but online. The regulations yo…
Hmm.. the government effectively owns the network, the land, and the police force. The idea that the government cannot stop a monetary transaction is woefully naive; the only reason they haven't in the case of BTC is that it isnt money. If it came anywhere close to rivalling a state-backed currency, you'd be undermining the monetary and financial ability of a democratically elected government to exercise its economic…
You're thinking too far ahead: governments define the currency that can be used to extinguish debts, particularly to the state (taxes). You can't pay your taxes in Bitcoin: you can only use Bitcoin to buy enough local currency to pay your taxes from someone else who has some. Which they get from the state. While the endpoint of this is jail and the monopoly on violence of government, it's also just regular economic r…
What you can't handwave way is: in your utopia, why does everyone have more of an incentive to buy-into your system than to ignore it or destroy it?
This is the fundamental question of all national social institutions. A distributed database is so far away from answering the problem that it comes across, at best, as childlike.
No utopian projects can answer this question, and utopians in my experience, hate it: the communitists as much as the libertairian objectivists. They are all committed to a theory of sin in which we live in a fallen world because people do not behave the right way, and if we just programmed to them to behave that way, all our problems would be solved. Neither care to note how radically different their opponents programs are.
Ironically, of course, the utopian is the problem that they are trying to solve: a person with a Mission to divest from The Existing Social Order, and found a new one. The very existence of people with this mindset demonstrates that some people will prefer to destroy an order than to participate in it -- if they could. They are each trying to forment The Final Civil War.
Thankfully many, but not all, countries today have got out of this doom-loop.
Hmm.. the government effectively owns the network, the land, and the police force. The idea that the government cannot stop a monetary transaction is woefully naive; the only reason they haven't in the case of BTC is that it isnt money. If it came anywhere close to rivalling a state-backed currency, you'd be undermining the monetary and financial ability of a democratically elected government to exercise its economic…
There is a multitude of governments involved in Bitcoin with different incentives and strategies. If you claim "The government can do X to Bitcoin" you should explain which government(s) and how exactly that would work. When was the FED a "democratically elected government", by the way?
They will put you in jail; withdraw your business licence and suspend your limited liability; deny your bankruptcy claims; tax you into oblivion; and so on. The state has every incentive to destroy a private currency, or a private army, or a private police force.
The only reasons states have take some interest in bitcoin and the like is that they aren't currencies. If there was any viable way of making ordinary daily economic transactions in BTC, it wouldnt exist. Inside the crypto system, "coins" are mere tokens with basically no ability to be traded for any goods or services. To buy anything you need to exist the system into an actual currency. So long as that latter step is required, BTC/etc. isnt a political project in the sense of this article.
"Money" isn't much more than a veil over the good-and-services of a society, an approximate quantitative measure of their marginal value. Governments require control over the money supply to manage this activity (eg., in pandemics) so they can, eg., prevent a widespread economic depression by temporarily exploiting inefficiencies the gap between the notional-and-actual value of money, giving people lots of it. Woe betide anyone who sells cars in BTC when there's a war on; you'll be in prision as a traitor.
"I've seen people get rich off crypto" and I've seen hundreds of gambling addicts lose their house and put their family on the street when the bet didn't go right. Even when you're talking about serious coins, ignoring the rug pulls. That money comes from somewhere. Who's holding the bag? Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.
Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created. In this way crypto is actually a less than zero sum game since some money is always lost to the machine through sending to abandoned wallets, lost private keys, etc. So on average everyone loses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a multitude of governments involved in Bitcoin with different incentives and strategies. If you claim "The government can do X to Bitcoin" you should explain which government(s) and how exactly that would work. When was the FED a "democratically elected government", by the way?
Any nation's legislature, if threatened with loss of control of the nation's money, would immediately make it illegal to use any tender not sanctioned by that state. A vast amount of the state's historical policing was aimed largely at preventing alternative currencies from forming (consider, e.g., Isaac Newton's role at the Royal Mint). They will put you in jail; withdraw your business licence and suspend your limit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any nation's legislature, if threatened with loss of control of the nation's money, would immediately make it illegal to use any tender not sanctioned by that state. A vast amount of the state's historical policing was aimed largely at preventing alternative currencies from forming (consider, e.g., Isaac Newton's role at the Royal Mint). They will put you in jail; withdraw your business licence and suspend your limit…
Cars were sold/bought for BTC and ETH when the war came to central Ukraine, nobody went to prison for that. Many people there do transactions daily via TRON chain nowadays.
My point was that during any major event in which the state requires control over the money supply, people making any meaningful difference to that control, won't be free to do so. In order to conduct a modern war, all states need to place large parts of their economies on a war-footing and requisition industries for defence (eg., iirc, 40% of the UA economy is now on defence).
Since BTC isnt a currency, trading with it has little impact on any state; it might as well be old bottles of wine. If it were to ever gain this status, and companies during a war were meaningfully offering their services in it, that would severly interfere with a state's ability to operate.
This just won't happen. It's absurd even to imagine it. If the libertarian problem with the state is how it uses its overwhelming legal, political, social etc. power to mismanage and economy and force people into capital controls etc... it's the dumbest thing in the world to suppose that by having people install a database, you've somehow undermined the state's ability to act.