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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#651

Post by chii »

beaner wrote: post #206
542458 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economists weren’t born yesterday. Inflation is measured in many ways, most often by looking at a basket of goods where the prices are relatively non-volatile. Using the USD/Bitcoin ratio as a yardstick for inflation seems very misguided, as Bitcoin is heavily speculated.

Inflation doesn't need to be measured in many ways, you can view it directly on the m2 money supply chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 Everything else is just a derivative of this. You're measuring the side effects of inflation. If you want the deeper cause, it's here.

> Inflation doesn't need to be measured in many ways, you can view it directly on the m2 money supply

but this chart doesnt take into account increases in productive capacity. If there exists production capacity to match this growth in money supply, goods will remain relatively priced the same, even if more is printed.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#652

Post by everfree »

_wp3r wrote: post #622
everfree wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but smart contracts will be disruptive to the finance industry. Why settle a contract in court when a computer can make a free, automatic, final deliberation based on software rules that both parties agreed to?

Because you only end up in court when the humans that agreed to the contract no longer agree on the contract.

In theory you only end up in court if parties don't agree on the intent of the contract, not when they just change their mind about the contract.

If one party no longer likes what they agreed to, yet the contract is clear and unambiguous, then a demand letter and/or a settlement often keeps the issue out of court.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#653

Post by blake1 »

graeme wrote: post #510
DeafSquid wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much electricity do you think traditional money printing and transfers consume?

Much less? Bitcoin currently powers almost none of the world’s transactions, yet consumes all that energy. The entire us consumes 75 twh in a year, the same as bitcoin’s global energy use. Of that, the entire commercial sector is about 12 twh. That’s not just banks. That’s every company. Banks alone are surely far less. Maybe 2-3 twh? And the us is 15% of global gdp. So, global finance might consume about 14-32 twh.…

The US consumes about 4 PWh/year, so bitcoin isn't comparable with the nation as a whole. However, that is more power consumption than many individual states, so your overall point remains completely valid.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#654

Post by cryptochamorro »

viraptor wrote: post #266
gruez wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's probably talking about the horror stories of people getting their cash/assets seized via civil forfeiture. eg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/01/police-seiz...

Yeah, that's different from carrying cash being illegal.

It makes it illegal in practice, just not in name.

Are you really free if you have any arbitrarily defined “large” amount of money, only to have it sorted and it become YOUR burden of proof to show the origins of the cash?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#655

Post by [deleted] »

colinmhayes wrote: post #343
brokencode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all terrible uses of Bitcoin, as mentioned in the OP. All transactions are publicly visible in an immutable database. With a little investigation, law enforcement can find out who owns certain accounts and trace transactions very easily from there. If you are a criminal, you want no paper trail whatsoever, which is why they use paper money.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous if you take enough precautions i.e. always use tor, only use addresses once, coin join everything before converting.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#656

Post by mareko »

majewsky wrote: post #429
rkagerer wrote: post #324

I bought my smartphone from Hong Kong, in part because I wanted a specific variant that would be more likely to work with open-source ROM's. The seller initially requested payment via Transferwise, who sought crazy amounts of personal information and bullied me into a privacy-hostile customer agreement. Days went by and they still hadn't activated my account. Growing frustrated, I convinced the seller to accept Bitco…

Can we have "cash you can email" that doesn't consume as much electricity as several nation states combined?

What about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2?

Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number.

Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#657

Post by rockstardev »

OOPMan wrote: post #631

People here talking about Venezuela seem to be ignoring the fact that maybe if that country wasn't such a disaster politically bottom-of-barrel solutions like Bitcoin wouldn't be needed. 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…

Sir, US nationals without ownership of assets like real-estate and stocks got robbed to the tune of at least 20% through this year's inflation and money printing.

What do you mean "if Venezuela wasn't political disaster Bitcoin wouldn't be needed"?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#658

Post by dleslie »

xapata wrote: post #581
sunshinerag wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: 1, I don't see conventional currencies working that way. Has any government promised how and why they will maintain their currency. They supposedly claim they help people why screwing up the very same people. Case in point, the 2008 crisis and the various modern monetary based crises.

2008 is a great example of why fiat currency is helpful. The government can simply create more to stimulate cash flow and/or prevent a crisis of confidence in a non-government institution.

Twelve years later and I'm still waiting on that severe/total economic collapse wrought of quantitative easing that the libertarian hawks envisaged.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#660

Post by lumost »

brokenkebab wrote: post #646
arcticbull wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that. I dare to insist it most certainly does. Anything is economically wothless unless there are people willing to participate in exchanging it.

In the long term this definition is murkier, see the Dutch Tulip bulb bubble of the 1630s.
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