131–140 of 203 posts
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Fungibility implies interchangeability not privacy.
In monero's case, the blockchain privacy is what provides fungibility. The fact nobody knows where the coins are coming from makes them interchangeable.
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I feel like beating a dead horse, but there's tons of L2 technologies at this point, lightning payment channels or rollups on eth, etc. The blockchain itself is like a settlement layer. Our current financial system is also layered similarly btw. When you buy something with your credit card, it doesn't settle right away.
There's also Monero which is everything Bitcoin was supposed to be and much more. Why bother trying to fix bitcoin when a solution already exists? There's absolutely no need for this layer 2 stuff.
This is the case of having a better technology doesn't matter, Bitcoin came at a very lucky time and also grew organically for many years and had arguably the fairest coin distributions (most coins nowadays are shilled very heavily by it's developers and investors). It's also the most secure and well-known.
Because of those things, it'll be very difficult if not impossible to unseat Bitcoin when it comes to store of value/currency. Bitcoin also sees development in form of lightning network. For all other use cases, I think eth covers most bases and has also developed a very large network of users and developers.
So whatever next big crypto project comes needs to be not just "better", but like at least 10x better.
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That feels like a rationalization of an emotional argument. Gold's current value is not related to its function as a material for jewelry, but from a myth that it is a store of value. If people would stop believing the myth, the cost of gold would plummet and stabilize around the value it provides as a material for jewelry. Similarly, "art is lovely" is a really stretched argument. If you want, you could print your t…
> If people would stop believing the myth imagine if tomorrow, we suddenly find ourselves mining gold from asteroids, and that gold suddenly became super-abundant. Would the price of gold drop to match just the material usage value (e.g., for jewellery and electronics)?
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Bitcoin's only value is the fact it's the most popular and well-known cryptocurrency. It came first and a lot of people are aware of it. Technologically it's already been surpassed by everything that came after. Monero in particular is essentially bitcoin with all the problems fixed. I wish it'd just lose it's value already so that liquidity will flow into all the much better coins out there. Not likely to happen tho…
You say that like it's not important. The fact Bitcoin has become so ubiquitous is an achievement in itself. A large aspect of currency/store of value/whatever is social/network effects.
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> I understand, certain people really hate bitcoin— and fir good reason. Bitcoin will eventually obsolete the fiat inflation system which has created all the wealth inequality in much of the world. The system that lets politicians buy power and escape responsibility for violating rights. What part of Bitcoin abolishes corruption, power-grabbing and bribes? How would it fix anything you accuse the current system of? A…
When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them. The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal, effectively confiscating the nations wealth and replacing it with massive fiat inflation. It was a period of monetary inflation that caused and economic contraction. One if the ways inflation is used to indoctrinate people against their best interests is demoni…
Claiming that the great depression or the long depression that preceded it were not exacerbated by the governments inability or unwillingness to artificially inflate the money supply is delusional. The deflation rate was above was 9% in 19931, 10% in 1932 this continued until 1934 which when prices started rising again, however 38 and 39 again had negative inflation.
The period preceding the great depression was not inflationary either, inflation in 1921 & 1922 was -10% and -6.15% and the rest of the years had relatively low inflation. In fact the Dollar's value only fell back to what it was in 1920 in 1946.
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Now apply that logic to gold.
Gold is a usable, consumable product. Unlike Bitcoin, the value of gold in a given market has a tangible backing that isn't purely speculative.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
It's like saying, "Bitcoin has residual value because you could always sell the GPU mining equipment"
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I’ve basically come to believe the argument described in the following is true: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skepti... Bitcoin isn’t a cash competitor, it’s a gold competitor - and it’s a pretty good one. Part of something like gold is the shared social belief in it as a store of value. Bitcoin has this and there’s enough time and infrastructure behind it at this point that I’d bet it’s likel…
> Part of something like gold is the shared social belief in it as a store of value. Gold has inherent uses as a precious metal. Bitcoin mining only computes SHA256 hashes for no actual purposes.
This article is knocking down a squadron of strawmen. First off, bitcoins key attribute is not “privacy” but censorship resistance. It’s why wikileaks has been able to keep operating all these years after being cancelled by the mainstream payments industry. Not to mention many smaller, politically oppressed activist organizations, and much of the marijuana industry. Secondly, the attributes of money are, according to…
I cannot believe I forgot one of the requirements for money. Thst is scarcity. In this regard bitcoin beats everything else, and especially beats baseball cards. Unlimited dollars can be printed and baseball cards rven more so. Gold is genuinely scarce but there is %1 inflation and the asteroid mining risk. Meanwhile bitcoins inflation rate gets cut in half every 4 years until it becomes zero in 2140.
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Gold is a usable, consumable product. Unlike Bitcoin, the value of gold in a given market has a tangible backing that isn't purely speculative.
It appears less than 8% of gold's annual production is for industrial use [1]. If you remove the "store of value" demand from its price, then the residual value is peanuts. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... It's like saying, "Bitcoin has residual value because you could always sell the GPU mining equipment"
I'm not sure your analogy of GPU mining hardware makes sense to me. You can have Bitcoin without having GPUs. Just like you can have gold without having a mining operation.
So if Bitcoin crashes to some hypothetical value tied to consumability, you're left with nothing. Whereas gold is still something you could sell for industrial and fashion use.
I don't think there's a good analogy between cryptocurrency and gold because they're not very similar at all unless people only narrow the scope to long term holdings and ignore risk/speculation.