471–480 of 930 posts
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Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.
Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?
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> 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.
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The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins)…
>Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee. It not being "used" in this context is referring to it not being used as legal tender. The law that was walked back was one which had made bitcoin legal tender throughout the country. As others have mentioned, it seems to have largely failed in being adopted as such, as surveys seem to indicate that less…
Structurally, Bitcoin is a lousy idea for a currency as it is intrinsically deflationary (i.e., even without the speculative inflating of the cost of a Bitcoin, the structure of the coin is such that coins become increasingly scarce and expensive as time goes by). You do not want this in your currency. The ideal is a low-level of inflation which provides an incentive to spend sooner rather than later. With a deflatio…
>You do not want this in your currency. I really want this in my currency. Bitcoin might be a Ponzi scheme, but fiat currencies are even more so.
A deflationary currency that you own a disproportionate amount of is great. For you.
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Despite that interference, from everything I’ve read though it’s hard to describe the bitcoin experiment as anything else than a massive failure…
If I could convince someone to give me 1.x billion to change my behaviour, I would consider that behaviour a massive success without much further thought. It isn't a huge amount of money at the scale of a national economy but >$1 billion for nothing is a win. Although of course it is unknowable how much of that money was bribe and how much El Salvador would have gotten without additional leverage.
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Massive success actually for anyone holding. Did you forget the price is $100k?
I sleep better at night knowing my savings aren't part of a massive Ponzi scheme that's going to one day leave lots of working class people holding the bag as the savings they invested in bitcoin are transferred to the wealthy insiders.
Japan already has houses worth $0 because Japan has run out of population growth to keep the demand for houses growing.
The same issue will occur in other countries that have low population growth. In New Zealand we have been importing people so house prices have been appreciating. However my impression is that other countries are competing for immigrants (NZ seems to be slowly relaxing our filters).
Also if you ever had a mortgage then you had a leveraged investment (often dangerously leveraged).
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It is highly divisible though, there’s 2.1e15 satoshi and 2.3e14 cents in the world (re google). It can lose 90% of itself before being unable to replace cents. Also, the network can just agree to change the protocol to fix this issue, should it arise. Countries do redenominations all the time.
How can anything ever be changed once 51% is abandoned? I also think there will be a gold rush of hacking old wallets one day when the encryption is broken. Not sure if that will happen before or after btc failure though. You can’t upgrade security on lost wallets.
Structurally, Bitcoin is a lousy idea for a currency as it is intrinsically deflationary (i.e., even without the speculative inflating of the cost of a Bitcoin, the structure of the coin is such that coins become increasingly scarce and expensive as time goes by). You do not want this in your currency. The ideal is a low-level of inflation which provides an incentive to spend sooner rather than later. With a deflatio…
> With a deflationary currency, the incentive is to put off purchases as long as possible as your currency will buy more tomorrow than it does today.
What I hear from this is that people think twice before making a purchase, that is, they use their money more wisely. Seems like a bonus to me. Regardless of this, people will still need to buy things to conduct their lives, and there will still be people who are reckless with their money. So this seems like a non-issue.
> Deflation ends up being economically disastrous, as Japan’s battles with deflation over most of the twenty-first century have shown.
Any other example or it's only Japan? Because honestly it's not the country one associates with economic disaster, on the contrary, they were for quite a long time the 2nd world's economy, and if you visit it's a lovely place all around.
On the other hand, the list of countries that have had to contend with inflation is much much longer, as far as I can tell, and the problems stemming from inflationary currencies orders of magnitude more severe. If you put both prospects on a balance and weighing the evidence, deflation seems like a much better problem to have.
> This is why, aside from speculation, purchase of illicit goods and ransom payments, Bitcoin has had little traction as a currency.
It has had little traction as a currency because it's unusable. You have to pay exorbitant fees to move it around and it takes way too long to work for every day transactions. Not to mention another host of problems, which other cryptocurrencies fix, by the way.
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But you’re wrong. People sell S&P and BTC everyday even if they aren’t dying. This is time value of money. If I wait 20 years instead of buying a house, I can have more money. But that’s 20 years of my life I didn’t live in the house I wanted. I could invest more in S&P and not go on vacation, but then I won’t have as much time to go on vacations. Goods and services now can be more valuable than money later, and that…
I notice you mentioned big ticket purchases which I specifically did not mention. Your argument looks a bit different if you replace houses and vacation with lattes and sneakers. We live in a consumer economy where a marginal drag on purchasing activity due to currency deflation would probably be pretty disruptive to put it mildly.
If you’re asking if people would not use their deflating currency to buy lattes and sneakers, I disagree. People like sneakers and lattes more than money. They prove this everyday by buying them instead of s&p.
There is an issue of the cost of a transaction - which nis bad for btc and s&p. Nobody wants a tax form for buying a pizza. But the regulatory environment creating high selling costs is orthogonal to the deflationary property.