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Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

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Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto can be used as a store of wealth when crossing borders preventing search and seizure of your wealth against overzealous governments. See Russia in the early 90s which would regularly search and confiscate cash from people leaving. That alone makes it very valuable.

What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet?

It's true that bank accounts are relatively secure from seizure when crossing borders, but literally everybody I know here in Argentina who's my age or older lost three quarters of the savings in their bank accounts 23 years ago, because the government took it by converting dollars to pesos at the 1:1 pegged exchange rate and then dropping the peg. In a cryptocurrency wallet (a real one, not an exchange like Mt.Gox, Coinbase, or Binance) they wouldn't have lost anything.

Another case is when a foreign government puts you on a sanctions list and freezes your assets in the banks under their jurisdiction. This has happened to a lot of Russians and Russian companies in the last few years. (It also happened to the foreign reserves of the Russian central bank, but Bitcoin is not liquid enough to be a significant international reserve asset.)

Another case is when the government suspects you of some kind of wrongdoing but can't physically find you, or can find you but for whatever reason isn't willing to torture you. For example, two and a half years ago, some truckers in Canada staged a protest for misguided reasons, and the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau froze not only the truckers' bank accounts, and the organizers' bank accounts, but even bank accounts suspected to belong to people who were suspected of donating to the protest: https://www.cato.org/blog/emergencies-act-after-two-years https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-... https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/bureaucrats-who-froze...

> In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.

Earlier this year, a court found that the government's actions at the time were illegal. https://freespeechunion.org/trudeau-government-not-justified... explains:

> In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

And of course it's well known that, when Wikileaks was targeted by the US government for their journalism, Visa and Mastercard cut off their donations despite apparently having no legal requirement to do so, while Bitcoin donations were able to continue. This was crucial in enabling Wikileaks to support Snowden's escape from the US when he revealed the extent of the US's illegal spying on its own citizens.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real use case is self defense against the arbitrary devaluation of fiat currency. As wildly imperfect as crypto is at that task, it's the best we have in a fungible, digital form. So pessimistic investors flee to it. The worst case for a crypto investor is for the dollar to be restored to a stable store of value. To outcompete crypto, just whip inflation.

How likely do you think governments/central banks would keep away from inflating the currency they have complete control over, when its normally in their best interest to print currency?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#176
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have it charted against the Malaysian Ringgit. It was 347k BTC/MYR high this year, compared to 326k today.

this should be the real headline. I am certain and beyond any doubt that I speak for all of us hackernews readers when I say that I have no frame of reference on the value of cryptocurrencies without comparing first with the Malaysian Ringgit

lmao

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#177
post #144
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - but imagine I got these things in 2012 and have been totally uninterested since then. What's "the trading book?"

Congratulations! Lucky you! You're a millionaire! Probably they were referring to an exchange site; the two most popular ones are Binance and Coinbase.

Definitely do not touch Binance. Coinbase and Kraken are the most reputable options.

If you're unsure, hire a professional. Think of it as paying 0.02% as insurance against mistakes.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#178
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Bitcoin and crypto is just fools gold, why get involved with blockchains and worst of all, proof of work?

I did not downvote you, but I want to respond to your question instead of taking the approach of weaponizing hn votes to simply suppress perspectives I disagree with, and I'd encourage my pro-crypto friends to do the same. We have to treat dissenters and critics with the same open-minded, good-faith, respectful dialogue we want them to offer us. I don't mean to suggest I'm not a biased partisan, but I will be a good-…

> [PoS] enables the rich to seize control of the whole system, and that would enable them to start stealing people's money

This is no more true for PoS than it is for PoW. A 51% miner can't directly steal people's money, because users will reject a chain that does that, even if it's the longest chain. Same goes for a 51% staker. The attacker could double spend in both cases, but with Ethereum the attacker could only do that once, and then would lose all its stake.

And with Ethereum there are no particular "core wallet developer accounts." There's a protocol, an open research community, and a bunch of independent client teams which all have to agree on any changes. Their meetings are public. Ultimately, just as with Bitcoin, it's up to the users whether to run any updates or not.

Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

#179
post #173
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TVs and memory cards keep getting cheaper, not more expensive.

yes, that is what deflation is

The deflation of a currency is when the currency gets more expensive, not cheaper. It's true that other goods get cheaper when measured in that currency. But what we're discussing here is whether, and how, the continued deflation of Bitcoin discourages its use as a medium of exchange, not whether some hypothetical deflation of the dollar would discourage the use of other goods such as memory cards and Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
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