Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#2"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency"
The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite:
- The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100)
- BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5.2M): http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitpay-eclipses-silk-road-i... (and this is just BitPay - there are many more Bitcoin-accepting vendors who make sales without using BitPay - so total transactions increased by a lot more than 7.6x, maybe 10x, 20x, who knows)
Therefore the volume of transactions is increasing faster than the exchange rate. How can a Bloomberg article (edit: opinion piece) be so wrong about such a stupid simple fact that can be easily found? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5499377 is right: a lot of journalists get a lot of facts wrong about Bitcoin.
Edit: BitPay is not the only datapoint. Many other metrics and merchants generally show big increases in transaction volume in the short past:
- Estimated volume of USD transactions (attempting to ignore "change"): http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u...
- Silk Road going over 2 years from zero to $2 million/month of Bitcoin revenues: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/study-estimates-2...
- A bitcoin casino went from 0 to $0.5 million profits in 6 months: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/bitcoin-based-casino...
- Etc
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#3"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency" The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite: - The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100) - BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5…
Maybe bitpay is growing faster than other payment processors?
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#4What a gigantic piece of FUD.
> How do governments collect taxes on transactions in Bitcoin? The answer is they don't, and they can't. Crypto-currency's strong protections on anonymity make it impossible for any state to know who is buying what, who is paying whom, who earns what, and who has what in savings.
BS! The state seems to be surviving just fine with its "inability" to track who is buying what with cash, and it could easily require and enforce documentation of large purchases (such as houses, cars, etc. as it already does btw).
> 2. Police:It would be almost impossible for states to detect certain crimes. One of the major alleged uses of Bitcoin -- though, of course, one can never truly know -- is buying illicit drugs.
Ohhhh noooo!! Cry me a river!!
You mean the batshit insane war on drugs that has destroyed countless lives will become even more ineffective than it already is?!? Please oh please, don't throw me into the briar patch!
Every one of these points applies equally to cash. Might as well write a second article titled: "Cash: An Existential threat to the modern liberal state"
BTW, there's nothing liberal about the war on drugs, the very existence of which is a cruel affront to basic human liberties.
> In a world where many transactions are anonymous, it’s unclear how governments could even compile accurate economic data, without which macroeconomic policy is impossible.
How exactly does having a public history of every transaction ever made somehow make it "impossible" to glean any useful economic data from it?
Add to it knowledge of certain transactions (such as those that go through companies), and you start to get a pretty clear picture of exactly what's going on.
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#5"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency" The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite: - The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100) - BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5…
How is this for data?
http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
There is a big discrepancy between number of transactions and the value
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#6"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency" The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite: - The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100) - BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5…
How is this for data? http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions There is a big discrepancy between number of transactions and the value
Wrong graph. You need to look at the volume of transactions, not at the number of transactions:
http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u...
As you can see, the graph is similar to the market price.
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#7"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency" The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite: - The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100) - BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5…
> there are many more Bitcoin-accepting vendors who make sales without using BitPay
Who have independent increases. If I accept bitcoins and I didn't see an increase in transactions, that decreases the total transaction volume change.
You can't just look at one particular vendor and apply their results to the aggregate.
And BitPay's numbers are odd, they reported an average transaction size of 10 bitcoins, that seems awfully large.
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#8What a gigantic piece of FUD. > How do governments collect taxes on transactions in Bitcoin? The answer is they don't, and they can't. Crypto-currency's strong protections on anonymity make it impossible for any state to know who is buying what, who is paying whom, who earns what, and who has what in savings. BS! The state seems to be surviving just fine with its "inability" to track who is buying what with cash, and…
I'm not sure why that second sentence is there, it doesn't really make much sense. The rest of the point is valid, especially regarding money laundering.
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#9I've been a bitcoin supporter. But there is a twinge in me that remembers government, properly set up, can often protect the weak from the strong. Extremely wealthy corporations and individuals moving around anonymous money would make it impossible to tax and impossible to know where political contributions were coming from. I don't know the answer-- I flip flop back and forth between total openness for everyone and total secrecy for everyone.
Re: Bitcoin Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State
#10"which, for many of its libertarian-anarchist advocates, is the whole idea"
The politics the community built around is for me the only reason why it sucks right now, the idea is interesting and it can certainly have some use. Selling all that I have.
TL;DR: Well, the link speaks for itself: http://imgur.com/r/cringepics/gkLJswu
EDIT: Ultimately what I hate about it is that the almost anywhere you go do discuss it there's this tribal mentality of believers vs. deniers. What about those guys in 2009 that thought it was a good idea to work as a currency and does not care about libertarianism/keynesianism talk?