101–110 of 355 posts
How does Bitcoin work offline? Let's say the world goes to hell (assume internet has been taken offline) and we need to trade using a form of trusted currency. Just curious...
How does Dollar work offline? How much do you have in your pants? Because if the world goes offline, Banks would not have all the "money" necessary to give it back to people.
How does Bitcoin work offline? Let's say the world goes to hell (assume internet has been taken offline) and we need to trade using a form of trusted currency. Just curious...
How does Dollar work offline? How much do you have in your pants? Because if the world goes offline, Banks would not have all the "money" necessary to give it back to people.
If for some reason all our computers simultaneously failed without any warning, it would obviously be chaos, but at the end of the day the banks would be in a much better position to recover than anything like Bitcoin. Banks only use computer networks because they are more efficient than the alternatives; Bitcoin requires everyone to be online and does not have any alternatives. The worst thing that would happen if all computers failed simultaneously is that the banks would lose track of everyone's accounts -- a general amnesty for debtors and a big loss for people without debts -- and in the aftermath the banks would just start from scratch using older technologies.
This isnt directly related to the article, but I have two questions about ICO coins I was hoping someone here could answer. I read that recently a group raised millions of dollars in less than a minute to fund the creation of a new web browser. 1. How are coins valued when the underlying company is building a product it will never be able to, or never intends to monetize (eg if Wikipedia had an ICO). 2. If another co…
The coins themselves are valued based on what people are willing to pay for them. In contrast, when a story claims "a company raised millions of dollars" it is typically talking about the currency Ether that was PAID to the company in exchange for the tokens. That is also worth what people are willing to pay for it, but because Ether has been around longer it has more of an established value. If the company is acquir…
Say people paid a company called Microhard $30 million in Ether during their ICO for Microhard coins. Can Ether be readily be exchanged for $30 million USD?
Assuming it can, and Microsoft acquires Microhard, and has no interest in crypto doesnt this leave a coin on the market with a name of a business that doesn’t even exist?
Fiat money with better programming apis and permissions
Bitcoin has no flexibility as a currency. It cannot be manipulated to stimulate or slow an economy. The growth rate of bitcoin is so slow that it ensures that the population growth will probably always outstrip bitcoin growth, severely lowering the number of bitcoins available per capita, leading to permanent rentiers of the money supply. Also, as lost bitcoin are not replaced, the supply dwindles further. At some po…
"Bankers talk about “governance”, ways to ensure private banks and central bankers make sound decisions—so they create just enough money make commerce easier, but not so much that the system collapses through inflation or panics." Many people don't know that central bankers literally, not figuratively, mean CREATE money out of nothing.
Someone has always been able to "create money out of nothing." At some point there was no money; some time later there was. Someone or some group of people had to create the first money. People have actually "initialized" money many times throughout history e.g. when starting a country. As long as you can separate "money" from its representation, there is nothing particularly problematic about some people being able…
Bitcoin is a commodity for efficient bartering that has a governance structure to ensure that the commodity doesn't flood the market and crash prices. It will become a currency when it can be directly used to satisfy a tax debt, to avoid the punitive threat of the law.
Incidentally I just wrote up some thoughts today on what Bitcoin is: https://grisha.org/blog/2017/09/22/bitcoin-value/ In some way it is fiat, Satoshi's fiat, but that's not the same as USD. The most puzzling thing is how things like Bitcoin get priced, since it's just a number, but I haven't finished my research on it yet.
In my opinion, you got it exactly right, simply by sticking to "it is a ledger." The value (not price) of BTC is wholly in the authenticity of who has what, and that this is backed by distributed consensus rather than states. BTC demonstrates that the truth about "who has what" is more important than what the "what" actually is. I think the "what" is simply currency, or the debt-based value you wrote about. People bu…
(Why are those things almost certain? Consider the scale at which Bitcoin operates; then take a look at ACH, Swift, Visa, Mastercard, etc. We are talking about orders of magnitude in difference. For all its gains over the past few years Bitcoin remains a tiny niche.)
In other words, don't view Bitcoin as money; view it as a system for transferring money and converting between different countries' money.
Bitcoin is a commodity for efficient bartering that has a governance structure to ensure that the commodity doesn't flood the market and crash prices. It will become a currency when it can be directly used to satisfy a tax debt, to avoid the punitive threat of the law.
Transaction fees on Bitcoin are essentially a tax, and they can be paid for with Bitcoin.
If you owned only property, but no dollars, you would need to convert some of your property into dollars to pay the tax, or go to jail.
If you owned only property, but no bitcoins, you would need to convert some of your property into bitcoins, to use bitcoins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, some people treat it as an investment that can be hoarded, but that doesn't change the fact that it can be exchanged. Your narrow definition of medium of exchange sort of excludes any deflationary currency that someone may hold on to as an investment. It could even be expanded to include inflationary currency in a country where hyperinflation is occurring. People will hold on to USD or some other currency as an…
By that logic any tradable thing can be a 'medium of exchange'. Sure, people will hold a stable currency when their own is sinking, but deliberately designing a currency for deflation is stupid.