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Bitcoin still makes no sense

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Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#11

Post by seibelj »

Skunkleton wrote: post #8
seibelj wrote: post #6

Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. That’s the magic! Whether you think this is good or bad is for debate, but there are apps in every country where you can buy and hold bitcoin (even countries like Nigeria and Venezuela) and it doesn’t take that many people who value it globally to make BTC shoot up in price. If even 1 out of 1000 people on earth desired bitcoin, its value would go up and susta…

> Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. It certainly can, at least if you intend to exchange it for tangible goods or services, or if you convert it to a government currency. Why do you think these sorts of transactions cannot be regulated?

The settlement layer is purely peer to peer. Governments can enact laws to make actions illegal, and tougher for centralized entities like banks and corporations from using it. But there are addresses out there known to authorities with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen bitcoin - and there is absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it from being moved. If you have the private key, you own the coins.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#12

Post by beaner »

tomerico wrote: post #4

The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it. The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous…

Money is a self-organizing system of resource management.

Bitcoin is better money, because it allows for more pure self-organization, as a result of its money supply being predetermined by hard-coded algorithm, rather than by fiat decree.

This single benefit far outweighs the mentioned negatives. It has the potential to completely eliminate the boom/bust cycle, eliminate currency manipulation that facilitates international trade imbalances, and free hyperinflated jurisdictions from that aspect of their poverty.

Many think these expectations are unreal, and that's fine. I'll see you when we get there.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#13

Post by gjs278 »

Skunkleton wrote: post #8
seibelj wrote: post #6

Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. That’s the magic! Whether you think this is good or bad is for debate, but there are apps in every country where you can buy and hold bitcoin (even countries like Nigeria and Venezuela) and it doesn’t take that many people who value it globally to make BTC shoot up in price. If even 1 out of 1000 people on earth desired bitcoin, its value would go up and susta…

> Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. It certainly can, at least if you intend to exchange it for tangible goods or services, or if you convert it to a government currency. Why do you think these sorts of transactions cannot be regulated?

you can just do the transaction in any other country and then convert their currency to ours. and nobody can stop you trading coins for things.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#14

Post by jimmysong »

Posts like these make it clear to me that the author does not really understand money, not Bitcoin. It's hard to reason about what Bitcoin's advantages are without first considering what the purpose of money is and the analysis from this article is mostly just sniping at the edges about some of the perceived flaws and not the actual usefulness which is the good part of the trade-off.

For a better understanding of money and why Bitcoin is a better money, I would recommend this article:

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

I'll also toot my own horn a bit which also delves into this confusion:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Bitcoin-Book-Matters-Finances/...

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#15

Post by ffwd »

some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong:

>I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it.

I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post

>The enforcement of debt and the ability to track money seem, to me, like some of its most important properties

I don't think you could track money at all, because I think in a world where bitcoin is dominant, you can bet that you would have many other cryptocurrencies as well. And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.

Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course

>I’m also interested in what a world with a fixed amount of currency really looks like.

It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists and each currency and inflation would have to be determined individually and you would have booms and crashes based on just how individual markets supply/demand progresses (i think?)

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#16

Post by scoopertrooper »

ridaj wrote: post #3

It makes sense to me about as much as the trade in ancient coins, stamps, and other collectibles. These are reasonable asset classes if you like gambling, with a somewhat fixed supply, not a lot of industrial applications, and wild price fluctuations based entirely on subjective appreciation. Bitcoin is more liquid but otherwise the price dynamic looks about the same...

I guess the key difference is that less startups have bilked investors by peddling fantastical dreams of post-fiat ancient coin based economies.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#17

Post by Skunkleton »

seibelj wrote: post #11
Skunkleton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. It certainly can, at least if you intend to exchange it for tangible goods or services, or if you convert it to a government currency. Why do you think these sorts of transactions cannot be regulated?

The settlement layer is purely peer to peer. Governments can enact laws to make actions illegal, and tougher for centralized entities like banks and corporations from using it. But there are addresses out there known to authorities with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen bitcoin - and there is absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it from being moved. If you have the private key, you own the coins.

Ultimately, you will need to exchange your bitcoins for _something_ for them to have provided you with value (dying with a horde of bitcoin, stocks, USD, ect is a waste). Yes, there are many bitcoins moving around that the government cannot influence, but who cares? Go try and buy a car with these bitcoins, and it will be a different story.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#18

Post by ridaj »

sesuximo wrote: post #7
ridaj wrote: post #3

It makes sense to me about as much as the trade in ancient coins, stamps, and other collectibles. These are reasonable asset classes if you like gambling, with a somewhat fixed supply, not a lot of industrial applications, and wild price fluctuations based entirely on subjective appreciation. Bitcoin is more liquid but otherwise the price dynamic looks about the same...

AFAIK, stamps don’t use our resources enough to move prices for energy/chips/etc

Right. It's scaled up. I suppose that if people became suddenly interested in old stamps to the tune of billions of dollars, stamp-dealing would also start competing for resources with the rest of the economy.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#19

Post by dmitriid »

Bitcoin is just a part of a larger problem disucssed in these two articles fro m3 years ago. They are still as true as three years ago:

"Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain": https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

Follow up, "Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future": https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#20

Post by weare138 »

seibelj wrote: post #11
Skunkleton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. It certainly can, at least if you intend to exchange it for tangible goods or services, or if you convert it to a government currency. Why do you think these sorts of transactions cannot be regulated?

The settlement layer is purely peer to peer. Governments can enact laws to make actions illegal, and tougher for centralized entities like banks and corporations from using it. But there are addresses out there known to authorities with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen bitcoin - and there is absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it from being moved. If you have the private key, you own the coins.

>If you have the private key, you own the coins.

Until you get arrested and the government just makes you hand over your private key.

https://www.wired.com/story/feds-seize-billion-stolen-silk-r...

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