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Bitcoin is fiat money, too

economist.com

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Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too

#351

Post by abritinthebay »

wuliwong wrote: post #309
labster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're telling me that government money, where everyone gets a say in policy through republican institutions, is worse than a system where the most wealthy users get more control of the currency. Um, okay. I guess the oligarchy is more explicit in the cryptocurrency.

In the specific case of the united states, the money is controlled by the Federal Reserve which is a private bank.

> the Federal Reserve which is a private bank

Not true. Literally by design actually. This is a common misconception about Central Banks and it's one the US system makes worse by being explicitly public but functioning extraordinarily similarly to a private company.

This particular structure was actually a compromise between various other possible implementations.

But seriously, it's not a private bank. Repeating that just makes you looking like you get your information from websites that put their titles in all-caps and have dodgy grammar.

Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too

#352

Post by Roshie5u »

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #284
b1daly wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. If any of these crypto currencies became a significant way to hide wealth from the government, all the government has to do is make the crypto currency illegal to use or hold. If the US did this, it could easily pop the speculative bubble in crypto coins, and your wealth would vanish.

Good luck making it illegal to remember a 20-word string.

US was able to force FATCA on other countries, creating a similar law crypto will kill all cryptofiat exchanges that don't follow anti-money laundering laws.

Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too

#353

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

jraines wrote: post #36
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? I think in terms of new technical details there are lots of cool stuff. Atomic cross chain transfers are starting in earnest, LN is looking more and more real, zcash style tx might land in ETH. In technical terms that's all awesome, but new use cases do those allow? They typically just allow the same use cases, but slightly better and cheaper. Those aren't the things that are holding back new use ca…

Yeah, I'm mainly referring to those you mentioned. But smart contracts in general allow tons of new use cases, which are furthered by those types of ground-level advancements. It will take years to sort out, there will be scams and useless schemes that repeat the mistakes of history as the article claims, but then there will be others. If predicting that unimaginable benefits will flow from this space, analagous to t…

I am keeping a close eye on smart contracts, but so far it seems like there needs to be new primitives to make them really interesting. So far they can only really act on tokens on the same blockchain. And still I haven't seen almost any new financial instruments, e.g. options, hedge funds of tokens.

There's obviously interesting things you can do with smart contracts when they're actually tied to real world events, but for that you need oracles. That hasn't been figured out as far as I can tell.

Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too

#354

Post by wahern »

AgentME wrote: post #146
aviv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the same people telling you it's going to $100K are the ones saying this is a digital currency that should be spent. Well, I sure ain't about to spend $100K to buy 2 MacBook Pros.

Even if you think Bitcoin is going to $highNumber, then using Bitcoin to make purchases isn't any more painful than using dollars: the dollars could have been spent on purchasing more bitcoin instead of the other purchase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too

#355

Post by tboyd47 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #334
tboyd47 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I see this argument pop up on HN all the time and can't understand why it's so common. You'd think if a 51% attack were such a threat to Bitcoin it would have at least been attempted by now, after so many years.

Why do you think that? Being able to fake blocks isn't significantly more useful than being able to double spend. I don't see why that would be the tipping point. The reason you don't see these attacks is that they are difficult and very expensive and they would ruin the value of the coin so you can't even profit off it.

That is precisely my point
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