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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#681

Post by garydevenay »

Galanwe wrote: post #663
TrackerFF wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no underlying value. No intrinsic value. The value is purely a function of speculative demand. And while previously people anticipated the demand would go up "organically" because of actual real-world usage, you know to pay for stuff and such, that hasn't really materialized in the way we hoped. How many actually use BTC for things like that? At its BEST it has usage to purchase other coins - but that's abou…

Bitcoin has no day to day usage because of its volatility. The more ETFs like that appear, the lower it's volatility, and thus you will be able to see real world usage pop up. Also, the more regulation, the easier it will be to hold and use BTC to buy stuff.

I use Bitcoin almost every day. Using fiat rails is painful.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#682

Post by Psychoshy_bc1q »

petesergeant wrote: post #592
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…

> but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game Am I misremembering or did the other blockchain do exactly that in response to the DAO hack?

That was Ethereum, not Bitcoin.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#683

Post by Psychoshy_bc1q »

lucw wrote: post #643
petesergeant wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t sound like a “hard promise”

You need support of the miners to effect a change on bitcoin, they won't support a change which is contrary to their interests.

not Miners, Users. The Users with their own Node govern the rules of Bitcoin. The Miners are bending to our will.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#684

Post by akoboldfrying »

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…

This is right on the money.

It's incredible to think about really: the one technical feature that truly differentiates crypto from all other forms of currency -- namely, a cryptographically strong guarantee that no one else can touch your money -- gets thrown away routinely and no one minds at all.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#685

Post by fidelramos »

qwytw wrote: post #668
npoc wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> just leave and live somewhere else, taking their wealth with Wealth can't really use to purchase anything with is not real wealth. If you can't convert bitcoin to $/€ it becomes effectively worthless > History shows that societies with the hardest money win. Objectively not true. Look at what happened with Britain after 1918 when tried doing everything they could to stick with "hard" money and avoid devaluation/dro…

> Wealth can't really use to purchase anything with is not real wealth. If you can't convert bitcoin to $/€ it becomes effectively worthless

I agree, that is why Bitcoin was supposed to be electronic cash, you were supposed to be able to pay for everything with it.

Bitcoin (BTC) doesn't scale today to this purpose, but you can still use it to pay directly for some products and services as long as the other party will accept it. For those wanting Fiat money you could exchange BTC to stablecoins, even in a decentralized way like with ThorChain [0].

What's missing is some seamless bridge between stablecoins and Fiat payment methods and bank accounts. Then you could pay for anything. However I would argue that Bitcoin was meant to become the payment method, as Satoshi Nakamoto described in the whitepaper [1].

[0] https://thorchain.com/

[1] https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/whitepaper/

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#686

Post by pjc50 »

roenxi wrote: post #631
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.

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.

The US is not at war with Russia and no US forces are engaging Russian forces. This is actually an important distinction. It's much less of a conflict than the Iraq war.

It does show two things: US hegemony over certain European countries that might want to take Russian money and gas is weak, and the US foreign policy coherence is weak as Ukraine policy is at risk from cranks.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#687

Post by pjc50 »

npoc wrote: post #630
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…

The difference is that they can never stop you custodying the bitcoin yourself. Bitcoin won't become "quaint" - it will always sit there as the hardest money mankind has ever seen (and likely ever will). If they try and create tokens that don't represent bitcoin i.e. creating them out of thin air, then they will go down in value relative to bitcoin, just as we are seeing with fiat currencies and people will move thei…

> If they try and create tokens that don't represent bitcoin i.e. creating them out of thin air, then they will go down in value relative to bitcoin,

Tether remains inexplicably popular.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#688

Post by soVeryTired »

herbst wrote: post #641
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the only difference between Bitcoin and stocks in 2024 is that stocks are backed by an actual underlying company. Nice.

Can you use stocks to trade with others worldwide in realtime with a super low fee and full control over the payment process? Bitcoin still is a lot more than just that

Traditionally you just use money to do that.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#689

Post by 0x0 »

fragmede wrote: post #228
0x0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One bitcoin is very much distinguishable from another bitcoin as they can be traced through transactions and wallets, with the outcome that some bitcoins might be rejected by recipients that are uncomfortable with certain source wallets or mixers.

There's no way for a wallet to block incoming transfers. If someone sends Bitcoin to an address, the transfer will be processed by the network.

Yes but you could refuse to deliver whatever the sender is paying for. I mean you need to wait for 6 confirmations or whatever anyway before "approving" the payment transaction.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#690

Post by RandomLensman »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #127
RandomLensman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. "Inflation rate" usually denotes price inflation not change in monetary base or similar measures. More money in circulation can mean price inflation, but it doesn't need to.

Sure. It's just that it generally does since the market as a whole understands scarcity value. The fact that having a much larger supply of something decreases the value of the individual unit is intuitively understood by most. The general public tends to price everything in relation to their home country's currency. They don't see the value of the currency falling, they view it as goods getting "more expensive". The…

That assumes that in increase in monetary base is not matched by an increase in goods and services - you cannot just ignore that part. Also, scarcity as such has no value whatsoever.

FX rate evolution is linked to many things (and sort of a random walk anyway) - I'd say you typically need quite high inflation/rates to see devaluation in line with uncovered interest rate parity type views, short-term it could also work the other way around at times.

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