631–640 of 992 posts
If the best excuse for Bitcoin is that it's the only thing that works when a governed society has broken down almost completely then maybe it's better to think about how we can avoid that kind of breakdown than it is to invest energy into trash like cryptocurrency.
Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That's it really, everything else is noise. I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits. On top of this, governments could ban btc.
> Governments can't print more of it. I never really understood that line of reasoning. Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country? Certainly, you could use Gold instead of Bitcoin as a similar investment tool, right?
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Getting most people to agree to such a fork is likely impossible
It has happened before. Ethereum Classic is the "original" version of Ethereum, but it's a nondescript altcoin, while the one that reversed transactions is the number #2 in the world. I don't see why that can't happen to Bitcoin if the network participants (ideally normal users but practically the miners) and major stakeholders can benefit from it.
Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That's it really, everything else is noise. I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits. On top of this, governments could ban btc.
Government forks bitcoin, adds the ability for a trusted address to add more coins. Kills anyone who doesn't switch. Welcome to China, you just lost the majority of your mining pool.
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Government can do whatever inflation adjustments that it wants. What it can't do, though, is force people to accept them. If you want your money to inflate, you are free to use any infatuation currency that you want. But other people, who prefer to not be subject to inflation, are now free to not be subject to it.
Can't the government force taxes to be paid in the currency of its choice, thereby making taxpayers (residents, visitors, and their counter-parties) subject to its currency?
It does not make them subject to inflation, no.
If you hold entirely cryptocurrency, you are not subject to the inflation of holding the currency. Instead, you can simply convert to that currency, only when you need to pay taxes.
This avoids the inflation, in the same way that hold stock in a company, and not holding any dollars, avoids you from being subject to inflation.
Many in the industry conveniently overlook over the fact that the government can just ban you from wiring money to anyone selling cryptocurrency on a whim.
It is my theory that cryptocurrency is being actively allowed because of its political, counter-intelligence value.
Imagine if you invited all the bad people in your country and tricked them into using a currency they all believed to be infallable and anonymous. You simply ignore the middle level dealers or criminals and able to keep track of potential state level actors utilizing criminal networks to subvert your country.
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Many, or even most people, believe that money must be controlled by the government for the economy to function. "Sound money" is money whose supply cannot be controlled by the government. Some further reading: * https://fee.org/articles/what-do-we-mean-by-sound-money/ * https://mises.org/library/principle-sound-money * https://www.aier.org/pertinent_category/sound-money-project/
Thanks, a good explanation. And I don't think money has an inherent need to be government controlled in order to be stable either. (Though I do see some benefits) But I think it's relevant to split hairs a bit and say that "sound" often has the sense of "firm" or "solid/reliable", but that is not an inherent property of non-governmental currencies that can be controlled by groups that are no more beholden to users of…
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The entire BTC market cap is minuscule -- about 600bn as of this writing. That seems like a lot, but compare it to Apple -- the market cap of just this one company's stock is currently ~2,238bn. The market cap of gold, US dollars, Euros, etc. are all many times more than Apple. The value of all BTC is a tiny microscopic speck compared to the amount of USD or gold in the world. This means (among other things) a few sm…
To give an another view: 600bn is more than gdp of majority of countries.
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Bag-holder usually has the connotation of holding a worthless asset, bitcoin is currently at an all time high.
The underlying asset is utterly worthless, for all the reasons posited here in the article and more — that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.
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No, the government can't "just shut down the internet". If any government did that, then the country would suffer extreme economic damages, if such a policy was maintained for a long time. Your argument would be like if someone were to say "actually, the government can stop all theft, now and forever. All it has to do is launch 1 thousand nukes, start world war 3, and kill off 99% of the population". Like, sure. The…
My point was that the government has control of the internet, and thereby all activity on the internet. > extreme economic damages We're talking about Venezuela, which has had extreme economic damages caused by a government trying to maintain control over its population. It seems that they don't care about damage, only power domestically, not internationally. The comment we're replying to said that Bitcoin is valuabl…
And yet, here we are, living in a world where such controls are pretty difficult to enact and simply aren't happening.
Even in places where there are government controls over the internet, such controls are apparently not even close to perfect, on many many people are successfully able to get around them.
So, the evidence shows, that despite any argument that you are making about how governments might control the internet and stop anyone from ever doing anything at all that they don't like, that is simply not happening right now to such a perfect degree that you suggest should happen, even in currently authoritarian countries.
> We're talking about Venezuela, which has had extreme economic damages caused by a government trying to maintain control over its population
And yet, despite all of that, it doesn't really seem to be enacting extreme/perfect control over the internet, despite many motivations to do so, that have nothing to do with crypto.
> The comment we're replying to said that Bitcoin is valuable in transactions with Venezuelan counter-parties because of Venezuela's government's damage to the domestic economy.
Ok, and Venezuela isn't at all successfully preventing this damage. They aren't doing that. So the evidence shows that, for some reason, Venezuela is unable or unwilling to put extreme controls on crypto, do the the consequences or difficulty of doing so.
Any hypothetical, or arguments that you can possibly think of, as for why Venezuela should put extreme controls on crypto or the internet, needs to deal with the fact that Venezuela simply isn't doing that right now, likely for a good reason. Because it is very difficult to do that.