151–160 of 280 posts
How does the saying go? First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. After that, they fight you. Finally, you win. When a significant portion of established powers start claiming that new threat to power is (insert hyperbolic word here), I’d say we are on step 3 of the above process. Bitcoin has a lot of issues, but cryptocurrency/blockchain in general are real, useful technologies. Don’t let the prevalence of scam…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary use case of Bitcoin is to evade governments control over capital. Sometimes that’s good (governments disgorging kidnappers of their ransom). Sometimes that’s bad (Nazis seizing wealth of targeted groups). Sometimes it depends on your perspective (governments preventing the trade in illicit drugs). Overall how you feel about this in aggregate will depend on how comfortable you are with government power. Le…
You… really think a tyrant would fail because of a bunch of armed general population? The make or break is having public support, a bunch of people armed with guns don’t make a difference - maybe they would when the amendment was written, but the efficiency gap between a person with a gun vs US military has increased 1000x.
The real issue with Bitcoin is tether. Tether printing is practically responsible for almost all the gains in Bitcoin. Just look at Tether volume versus Bitcoin volume and tell me you trust bitcoins valuation when it's backed by make belief tethers. When you can print make belief dollars, in volumes that were never proven to exist, and pretend trading them for Bitcoin is the same as trading dollars, then of course Bi…
> "Tether printing is practically responsible for almost all the gains in Bitcoin" It was a meme in the crypto community that when you see tether being printed, you long. Maybe it was true at some point that tether was propping up the market or maybe not fully backed[0], but AFAIK they are now doing audits[1] and transparency reports[2]. > "The day regulators finally ban tether" I'm not sure how you would go about ba…
The same way we ban heroine. Or murder. We just make trading cryptocurrencies illegal and prosecute people who are found doing it.
Many IT people are biased by their work into thinking that any solution to a problem is a failure if it does not solve 100% of the problem. But in practice, most solutions are good enough if they solve 99.9% of the problem.
Regarding cryptocurrency, making it illegal would mean that no sane company would touch it with a ten-foot pole, which would not just hamper legal usage of cryptocurrency, but also illegal usage. (For instance, ransomware would not be able to have their victims pay in bitcoin if the victims don't have a legal way of exchanging legal tender for bitcoin.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but cryptocurrency/blockchain in general are real, useful technologies. Whats the last time you bought anything (besides other coins) with cryptocurrency?
I’m guessing you’re from a country with a reliable banking system and without rapid inflation. In places where this doesn’t exist, crypto is a miracle. Beyond that, crypto has existed for about a decade now. It’s absolutely absurd to claim that it’s “not useful” because it hasn’t been widely adopted by everyday merchants. Traditional currency has a ten-thousand year head start. Perhaps we can be patient? And that’s n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s the same reason I support the Second Amendment [...] would make things a hell of a lot harder for any would be tyrants. Yet, somehow the rest of the democratic world spins around just fine without millions of semi-automatic weapons sloshing about.
Most of the democratic world fell under fascist and/or Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regimes within living memory. There’s only four independent democracies uninterrupted over the past century. Two have widespread civilian firearm ownership.
Remember that Coca-Cola is responsible for one of the biggest health issue of our civilisation: obesity, and Berkshire invested heavily in it.
The context of the quote: > I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth... So, I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interest of civilization. I find it strange to criticize an asset for how it gets used in extremis. I feel like the same criticism could be levied against the dollar.
The explicit purpose of bitcoin is to avoid government interference. In all other respects, it is inferior to standard government-backed currency, with slow transactions and huge amounts of wasted electricity. We should therefore expect BTC's primary use-case to be activity the government would interfere with, i.e. illegal activity.
How are bitcoin transactions slow? Bank transfers and credit card payments take forever to settle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m guessing you’re from a country with a reliable banking system and without rapid inflation. In places where this doesn’t exist, crypto is a miracle. Beyond that, crypto has existed for about a decade now. It’s absolutely absurd to claim that it’s “not useful” because it hasn’t been widely adopted by everyday merchants. Traditional currency has a ten-thousand year head start. Perhaps we can be patient? And that’s n…
How would crypto different than forex in that case ?
The guy behind Cardano has talked a lot about crypto in Africa, so if you’re interested, I would start there.
The real issue with Bitcoin is tether. Tether printing is practically responsible for almost all the gains in Bitcoin. Just look at Tether volume versus Bitcoin volume and tell me you trust bitcoins valuation when it's backed by make belief tethers. When you can print make belief dollars, in volumes that were never proven to exist, and pretend trading them for Bitcoin is the same as trading dollars, then of course Bi…
> "Tether printing is practically responsible for almost all the gains in Bitcoin" It was a meme in the crypto community that when you see tether being printed, you long. Maybe it was true at some point that tether was propping up the market or maybe not fully backed[0], but AFAIK they are now doing audits[1] and transparency reports[2]. > "The day regulators finally ban tether" I'm not sure how you would go about ba…
I don't think it's ever been tried in a western country.
The process is fairly simple. Pass a law banning it, if necessary with certain exemptions. Arrest and charge people who purchase, sell or even possess Bitcoin.
Most demand will disappear in that country. For the rest, handle it as we already handle similar financial crimes, like tax evasion and money laundering.