Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.
I do.
El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
251–260 of 930 posts
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you don't really own land, you just rent it for a very long term from the government. This is probably economically a good idea, absent something like georgist land taxes. It eliminates some or all of the incentive to speculate in land, which is of course the whole problem El Salvador ran into with bitcoin as currency.
It hasn't entirely stopped rents in HK being untenably high, for many people. It has rent controls, but the system permits some very untenable outcomes which if left unchecked would re-create Kowloon Walled City. So whilst politically I agree, practically I am unsure there is no land speculation: A waterfront view remains valuable in and of itself, no matter what.
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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. This. Bitcoin proponents often claim that eventually everyone will use Bitcoin for payments ("Finally no more governments or central banks!") and that's why it will increase in value, so everyone should invest in BTC. But this argument is fundamentally flawed: A currency, in order for it to work (in order for people to be able to trust it), needs…
What currency is stable in value? Certainly not the U.S. dollar.
A better way to put it is that a deflationary currency is, counterintuitively, not a particularly good currency.
The reality is, Bitcoin and similar, are not being used to actually purchase things. Not at any notable percentage. You're "best bet" is to horde it, and that doesn't make a good currency.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#254Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. If king for the day with a sovereign wealth fund I wouldn't forbid investment choices like this on risk grounds, I mean you need risk assets as well as boring ones, right? But I have problems with the moral quality: it's like state investing in the casino business. Monaco? works fine. Anywhere else? It's got problems. Like a lot of people, I probabl…
> Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. This. Bitcoin proponents often claim that eventually everyone will use Bitcoin for payments ("Finally no more governments or central banks!") and that's why it will increase in value, so everyone should invest in BTC. But this argument is fundamentally flawed: A currency, in order for it to work (in order for people to be able to trust it), needs…
It makes sense when you realize that it's a religion
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#255Speculative asset class fails as non-speculative legal tender class. If king for the day with a sovereign wealth fund I wouldn't forbid investment choices like this on risk grounds, I mean you need risk assets as well as boring ones, right? But I have problems with the moral quality: it's like state investing in the casino business. Monaco? works fine. Anywhere else? It's got problems. Like a lot of people, I probabl…
> sovereign wealth fund That reminds me of Hong Kong, where I used to live and which maintains a large sovereign wealth fund to ensure its currency is pegged to the US dollar. While various US think tanks ranked it well on their checklists of "economic freedom", they tended to gloss over the rest of the recipe that made it work. Not just the huge sovereign wealth fund, but also how half the housing is government-run…
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Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't millions starve too in capitalism?
No. No liberal capitalist economy has ever had a famine. By contrast, most communist economies have created major famines, and history's largest famines have all been created by communist economies, outdoing even colonialism in their death tolls. These are well-known historical facts.
To save some time, can you define the True Scotsman here? Would the US in the 1920s count as a liberal capitalistic country for example? England in the 1860s?
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#257Bitcoin (BTC) was hijacked and oriented away from use as cash. It was quite obvious BTC was no longer capable of functioning this way and that the LN wouldn't help.
There were maybe a half a dozen other networks that might have made a more plausible and interesting experiment in testing crypto as a day to day currency.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#258Didn’t we learn back in the 1500s that asset-backed currencies are unsustainable? Bitcoin will never, ever be able to take the place of a fiat currency because it carries with it many of the same problems as Spanish silver the conquistadors were traveling all the way to SOUTH AMERICA to mine half a millennium ago. It was essentially a very difficult proof of work. The only real advantage bitcoin has is that it’s easy to carry.
Even when the entire world started selling off their gold to the US in the 30s and 40s it became obvious by the 70s that there wasn’t enough gold mining capacity on earth to sustain a global asset-backed currency.
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of us in the BC is digital money camp argued the case that more transactions and a lower transaction fee could be most easily implemented, within the spirit of the founders intent, if we simply increased the size of the transaction buffer, mitigating an obvious bottleneck. We argued against the complexity of SegWit and Lightning Network. I think greed and politics won rather than engineering or economics good se…
Transaction fees have been about as low as they can possibly be for months. It costs roughly $0.15 to move a UTXO right now. The people who argued for increasing the block size were making a tradeoff between decentralization and "low" transaction fees. Increasing the block size makes the chain grow faster which causes several problems: the time to sync new blocks goes up, initial chain download time goes way up, and…
While it's not here yet, Vitalik's future plans for Ethereum involve making it possible to run validators on smartwatches[1], which is far more accessibly decentralized than BTC could be and far more possible with Ethereum's PoS consensus as opposed to PoW, without needing to cripple transaction speed to boot.
[1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
Re: El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to be "magic" that causes it to go up forever. People need a way to put large amounts of money in places that are difficult for governments to get to and /or easy to move across jurisdictional borders. Think: money launderers, people that are worried their corrupt government will seize their assets, people hiding money from someone they owe like a spouse in a divorce. These all seem to me to be reason…
But that doesn't distinguish Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. The thing that distinguishes Bitcoin is fame, pure and simple. Everyone has heard of it.
Also nobody can premine it, no coalition of big stakeholders can lock you out of your coins, a 51% attack is less likely feasible than for any other PoW coin, the bandwidth needed for its blockchain is smaller than most alternatives, and it's less likely to conceal unknown cryptographic weaknesses. It's kind of shitty in some other ways, though.