281–290 of 343 posts
So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?
this isn't why people buy Bitcoin. they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets. It's the equivalent of gold, that is people turn to it when they think shit may hit the fan but it doesn't have the downsides of physically holding gold.
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'Digital gold' is a meaningless sentence. What is digital gold? How does it differ from, say, digital iron?
People buy gold coins and hide them under the mattress. For when the zombie apocalypse happens. Bitcoiners think BTC can be used for the same purpose.
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Are wrenches single-use, or are you allocating individual attackers per-citizen? In the case of a successful wrench attacker, how are the stolen funds recovered?
This is the classic time-money tradeoff. Theoretically you only need one wrench and one attacker—but even if she attacks 100 people a day it would take thousands of years to reach everyone. And word of the attacks would spread, so later victims would take steps to safeguard their money and the attacks would become ineffective. To be maximally effective you'd need to mobilize enough attackers and enough windowless whi…
i would guess that percentage of people with wallets would be very small and a relative small team could with a relative small number of white vans and wrenches could get every single one in relative short time..
and for countries that heavily monitor internet usage, like china, i bet they could have a list with pretty good assumptions on who has crypto that they can target for further investigation before sending the wrenched goons..
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There is no scenario where the government doesn't know it exist and the Bitcoin is useful in any way to your life. If you ever use it for any thing there's a bright line directly to you. The silk road guy was taken down for screwing up one time years before he even started the website. Maybe a criminal organization that forces their grand children into it can potentially hide a wallet.
The silk road guy pretty much had a government department trying to shut him down. They don't have the resources to do that for the average individual.
i bet the analysis for that is all automated by now and built into their systems, making it much easier to go after the average individual.
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Your due diligence should be the same as for a financial advisor handling your USD. Bitcoin is big enough now that they'll have a playbook for it. Don't hire a "crypto" professional.
I have neither a financial advisor nor USD...
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If Bitcoin can be traced (which it can), then it isn't fungible.
That is not the definition of fungible. You can put a mark on a USD$100 bill and trace it, but it still has the same value as any other USD$100 bill, or 5 20$ bills, etc.
If you had the choice of receiving BTC from a brand new minted batch, or from a darknet market, which would you prefer? If you have a preference, then they do not have the same value.
I would value BTC from a darknet market less because of risks associated with spending it.
I would value freshly-minted BTC because it doesn't have any question about its providence.
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As I said, this does not apply to monetary assets, which don't have returns or expected future returns, like gold or bitcoin. In addition, these assets do not change. There are no news. All we know is how the price has behaved in different market conditions, and investors try to create models based on that alone. I didn't say that the future price could be predicted or that it is guaranteed. I just said that the hist…
> There are no news... I just said that the historical price information should contain all the relevant information about the asset. No, the news is changes in supply and demand, and the factors behind those changes, and how we expect those to change in the future. Those determine the current and future prices. And those are not contained in historical price data. Historical price data is irrelevant to those. Good l…
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So, access to a permissionless SWIFT-like system from anywhere around the world has no economic value in your opinion? Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.
I said _mathematical properties_ have no economic value.
So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?
I just ask the checker for the store's wallet address and preferred currency. Sometimes we have to negotiate about which currency I use that they also use, but this is a detail that only takes 5-10min. Once we agree on a proper currency, I pull out my 2FA dongle to auth my phone wallet app, scan their QR code, check the address twice and click send. Occasionally I will have to add or subtract a bit from the posted price, to account for market moves since I put the items in my basket.
Then I just have to wait about 20min or so for enough nodes to confirm the transaction. Then I can go with my ice cream and broccoli.
It's just that easy!