Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#631

Post by roenxi »

pyvpx wrote: post #597
roenxi wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude hi…

this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity? best of luck to your imagined future; but it reads very naive to me.

The US really dropped the hammer on Russia last year and yet Russian troops kept advancing. There isn't much proof-in-the-pudding right now that they can stop a top-10 global economy. This isn't the 90s and it isn't clear how much the US can throw their weight around.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#632

Post by gpderetta »

amjnsx wrote: post #602
pyvpx wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity? best of luck to your imagined future; but it reads very naive to me.

So what, it's "play by our rules or get bombed" ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunboat_diplomacy

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#633

Post by npoc »

ibz wrote: post #607
amjnsx wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what, it's "play by our rules or get bombed" ?

It is. It always was.

Bitcoin equalises this. USD is going to hyper-inflate to 0 relative to bitcoin, and bitcoin will ultimately be the world reserve asset.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#634

Post by troupo »

pavlov wrote: post #578
zubairq wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually a huge amount of Bitcoin that people bought from large institutions over the last 5 - 10 years was already not on the blockchain. (1) a customer would go to an exchange’s website and purchase 1 Bitcoin (2) the exchange would add 1 to an internal counter representing the Bitcoin balance for that customer on their internal SQL database (3) the exchange would use / trade that money sent by the customer to try t…

The popularity of these scammy exchanges despite the massive red flags shows that this is actually what customers want. They don't want the theoretical advantages of permissionless blockchains and private keys, they just want penny stocks that trade 24/7 and are called "crypto" because it sounds cool. So institutions will take advantage of that desire for convenience and work with regulators to turn "crypto" into jus…

> They don't want the theoretical advantages of permissionless blockchains and private keys

Because none of these theoretical advantages make any sense for the absolute vast majority of people, and don't make sense for about 99.99999999999% of things for which the advantage is claimed.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#635

Post by ericd »

pyvpx wrote: post #597
roenxi wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude hi…

this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity? best of luck to your imagined future; but it reads very naive to me.

What do you imagine the US could do with its weapons cache to demand global compliance? Even extremely authoritarian governments that have tried to stamp out crypto usage internally have been unsuccessful, so it's not like the USG could just lean on other governments to demand compliance.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#636

Post by ericd »

petesergeant wrote: post #608
roenxi wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare that to the ease of rolling back a transaction in USD. I think we'll find the cost was orders of magnitude higher.

That doesn’t sound like a “hard promise”

Wasn't that on Ethereum? My impression is that it has very different governance/promises.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#637

Post by npoc »

Nursie wrote: post #603
roenxi wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude hi…

> if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits They can happily regulate on and off ramps, and enforce traceability etc for anything that touches the 'real' economy though, should they wish.

Decentralised exchanges provide a solution, but if a country tries to stifle bitcoin like this, then the bitcoiners can just leave and live somewhere else, taking their wealth with them as 12 words in their head.

History shows that societies with the hardest money win.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#638

Post by soVeryTired »

DeathArrow wrote: post #568

So bitcoin became something like money and stocks, just a number in a SQL database? And we can now finally make bitcoins out of thin air? How long before the amount of bitcoins traded by hedge funds will be larger than the amount of bitcoins that exist in the actual bitcoin network?

ETFs don’t let you create the underlying asset out of thin air. They’re just a wrapper that allows the underlying to trade easily on an exchange.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#639

Post by troupo »

Kathula wrote: post #528
adastra22 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if you want to attribute the decline of Rome to any monetary policy, deflation is much more likely. Periods of deflation in the 4th and 5th centuries led to hoarding and burying of coins rather than productive use of wealth, leading to declines and further deflation. Rome never escaped from this deflationary trap and many of these coin hoards were never dug up. Ironically bitcoin attempts to replicate this faile…

Explain how Bitcoin, which for the next 100 years will continue to print new coins, is attempting to replicate deflation. Maybe inadvertently, by people losing access to their Bitcoins for various reasons, but the design itself certainly isn't deflationary. Not even in its final form, the supply will merely be constant. Also I find it humorus when people complain about deflation, which pretty much is the natural cond…

> Explain how Bitcoin, which for the next 100 years will continue to print new coins, is attempting to replicate deflation.

The supply of bitcoins is limited. It's harder and harder to print new coins. It means that 100 years from now the new generations will have to make do with 0.0000000000000001 of a bitcoin while people who hoarded just 1 bitcoin 100 years prior would be infinitely rich.

The only incentive in bitcoin is to hold on to it as long as possible. And we've literally seen this already.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#640

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #531

My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain. A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividen…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN