431–440 of 486 posts
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If those 50 people start playing by different rules, the sum of the value of the two resulting currencies will probably be less than that of BTC as it stands now.
No, if they start to play with different rules their mined blocks will be refused by everyone on the network and be worthless. That’s not what the issue is with concentrated mining power.
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> Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :) I understand the need to try to dismiss this problem, specially from those who have a dog in the race, but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer just falls out flat if…
> magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That's not what's exciting about bitcoin. What's exciting is that it is the first digital, global money that isn't protected by the proof of violence of the state. The US dollar is the world reserve currency because the United States is the best in the world at deploying destructive power, and the British and French…
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I am not who you are asking but I want to chime in: the problem is not missing regulation, the problem is the rich decide on regulation and this regulation helps keep them rich. Specific examples: UK capital gains tax is lower than income taxes. This means if you are born in to a wealthy family and given a £1MM index fund, you will pay less yearly tax on your capital gains while chilling at home all day than someone…
> the problem is not missing regulation, the problem is the rich decide on regulation and this regulation helps keep them rich. Ok - so the rich have decided on regulations which are not the ones that are best for everyone. So…missing regulations? By definition, if we have the wrong regulations, then we’re missing the correct ones. Capital gains taxes are lower for a specific reason: the capital that was initially in…
That is not a sensible reason for capital gains (which apply only to gains) to be taxed lower, since the gains have not already been taxed.
It also doesn't explain why the reduced rate (compared to “regular” income) applies to long-term gains, since the original capital was taxed regardless of whether the gain is long or short term.
The best fairness-grounded argument I’ve seen for reduced LTCG taxes is that, in a progressive annual income tax system treating gains earned over multiple years but realized at the end as single-year income at full tax rates overtaxes compared to what would have occurred if the income was spread out over the time it took to accumulate before realization, unless the recipient would already have been at the max marginal rate every year before the gains at issue were considered.
This is a valid point, but allowing free voluntary advance tax recognition of income and deferring tax recognition after realization for windfalls (say, spreading amounts above the middle actual realized income of the last three years over up to ten subsequent years) deals with that problem more comprehensively (not just for capital income) without undertaxing those who would be at the maximum marginal rate even without the particular long-term gain, or who are continuously rolling out long-term gains year after year repeatedly.
Favorable LTCG rates are a way to use a poor approximation of fairness for middle-class earners with occasional long-term gains to sneak in wildly favorable treatment forn the super-rich, instead of just treating income fairly all around.
(There's also a trickle-down economics argument for low capital gains rates, that is not fairness-grounded: “we want to encourage the already rich to invest and make more money, because positive side effects of this will trickle-down on the lower socioeconomic classes”.)
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You are confusing a validator with a miner. While most miners are validators, not all validators are miners, in fact the overwhelmingly vast majority of validators are not miners. Being a Bitcoin validator requires nothing particularly powerful in terms of hardware. A cell phone won't cut it, but a 10 year old laptop is enough to be a validator.
That's a theoretical difference, but in practice nothing will happen if your laptop consider a transaction as invalid. The only non-miner validators that count are exchanges, and those are almost as concentrated as miners. If miners are mining an invalid chain, and big exchanges are accepting it, your individual “validation” has no more value than when protesting against the Fed about how they should not do QE. The o…
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> the problem is not missing regulation, the problem is the rich decide on regulation and this regulation helps keep them rich. Ok - so the rich have decided on regulations which are not the ones that are best for everyone. So…missing regulations? By definition, if we have the wrong regulations, then we’re missing the correct ones. Capital gains taxes are lower for a specific reason: the capital that was initially in…
Capital gains taxation is not double taxation: it is taxation only on the increase in value of assets. CGT generally has the same rate as income tax: the reason why the rich are better off earning through capital increases than wages is that they get to decide when the capital gains happens, which means that their wealth managers and tax accountants can optimise their affairs to minimise tax. The fundamental misunder…
If by “CGT generally” you mean “short-term capital gains tax”. But, that's not true of long-term capital gains that kick in at a year and a day of holding the asset.
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Bitcoin isn't a currency, it doesn't function as such. It can only support at most a few dozen transactions per second. It's a speculative instrument, and its value is propped up by Tether, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
The Dollar isn't money, it doesn't function as such. It can't store value very well. Its a federal instrument, and its value is adjusted by the Federal Reserve, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
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You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network. The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewa…
So, let's play that out. Suppose 90% of miners (hash power) collude (as GP posited), for example validating blocks with a larger coinbase (mining reward). The "good" nodes don't accept these (but the "bad" miners can trivially have many nodes that do accept them). But now the "good" hash power drops to 10%, so only every 100 minutes a "good" block is mined (suppose this happened just after a difficulty adjustment), a…
> If they're bored, they can devote some of their hash power to double spend attack the "good" chain. Which chain will come out on top?
That's a different attack entirely.
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That's a theoretical difference, but in practice nothing will happen if your laptop consider a transaction as invalid. The only non-miner validators that count are exchanges, and those are almost as concentrated as miners. If miners are mining an invalid chain, and big exchanges are accepting it, your individual “validation” has no more value than when protesting against the Fed about how they should not do QE. The o…
Miners have known since day one that PoS was the goal. I find no fault in bootstrapping with PoW.
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As an asset not really subject to inflation (AKA tax on the poor), it could be helpful for those of moderate means to protect themselves against losing what little they have. I've experienced hyperinflation first hand some 25 years ago - it's not fun. I protected myself somewhat by buying (and then gradually selling) dollars, but that won't work if the dollar starts circling down the shitter, which it might. Going in…
People who have little, have little to lose in an inflationary environment. People who have any meaningful quantity of means invest them, and any investment other than holding a fist full of cold hard dollars isn't affected by inflation, although its real return may vary depending on how the underlying performs. Further lower income folks tend to have a disproportionate amount of their net worth in debt instruments,…
And there are only so many "assets" you'll be able to buy if there's a run on assets - their prices launch into the stratosphere immediately in this situation, and then they just disappear. Besides, people of moderate means spend a large chunk of their disposable income/savings on necessities: gas, housing, groceries, car repair, healthcare, all of which are going to also launch into the stratosphere in this scenario. Some of them you can cut down on, others not so much. What will happen to the stocks (which most people on this site feel "protected" by owning) I don't even know.
[1] https://en.numista.com/catalogue/photos/transnistrie/5eb1ed1...
[2] https://dic.academic.ru/pictures/wiki/files/66/Banknote_5000...
