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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#71

Post by arbuge »

keithwhor wrote: post #24

Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine. We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like…

> If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like AirBnB's IPO) then it could very well be that the actual value of a fiat dollar has dropped dramatically

Note that many other assets such as energy, financial, and real estate stocks, consumer goods, etc. are not experiencing sky-high valuations - indeed, some of those asset classes are down for the year.

So it's not just fiat dollars that have dropped dramatically in value by your reasoning.

It seems to me more likely the market is simply overpricing one class of assets (tech stocks) here. Occam's Razor comes to mind.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#72

Post by pvg »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #39
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

>The scarcity of block chain space has led people to re-invent every last feature of the banks they thought they were going to be escaping. This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist without even knowing it. From market-maker…

I don't see the irony. The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash. It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions…

The intent was 'actual digital cash', the result was 'instrument for speculation, money laundering and other fraud' which is entirely dependent on actual real money (and its institutions). Whether one finds that ironic or not is a matter of taste but it's clearly not exactly what the goal of "digital cash" was supposed to be.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#73

Post by jokethrowaway »

keithwhor wrote: post #24

Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine. We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like…

I think you're right. The economic stimulus is mostly going in rich people's pockets which happen to like the idea of BTC and Tesla. They're likely worried about inflation, so they need to invest the money.

And that's how you get BTC and Tesla's meteoric rise.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#74

Post by sunshinerag »

corty wrote: post #49
raziel2701 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things do you buy with it and where? I remember seeing some adoption back when steam started accepting it, but sometime later they stopped because it was too volatile. I thought paying fees for the transaction made bitcoin very unappealing as well. It's not anonymous either, so I just couldn't find a reason to use it as it didn't solve anything that I couldn't do with my credit card. And my credit card o…

> What kind of things do you buy with it and where? Drugs, CP, cryptotrojan ransom, other crime related transactions. Bitcoin value is directly related to relevant criminal activity.

Dollar is STILL the king of criminal activity, money laundering, kidnapping, ransom ... it will take awhile for the shift to happen.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#75

Post by brianobush »

loeg wrote: post #53
keithwhor wrote: post #24

Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine. We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like…

BTC prices have approximately zero relation to inflation in the real economy (for whatever definition of that you want to use). Rising BTC prices are driven by pyramid scams, fraud, and speculation. There is no useful signal here related to anything else.

Is there a useful signal in the dollar price? Price of silver? They are all used in hedging bets. Same for BTC, people with a lot of cash are looking for a safe spot while we have the possibility of hyper inflation.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#76

Post by Traster »

It really hadn't hit home to me that yes, BTC is being mined using ASICS by a handful of players, probably operating out of various authoritarian regimes. We've got the US getting all angry because TikTok is a Chinese country, and yet we've oestensibly got libertarians telling us to move out money into a currency controlled by Chinese BTC miners. It'd be fascinating if China could cause a recession in the west by taking down bitcoin overnight.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#77

Post by vulpesx2 »

doggosphere wrote: post #62
loeg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC prices have approximately zero relation to inflation in the real economy (for whatever definition of that you want to use). Rising BTC prices are driven by pyramid scams, fraud, and speculation. There is no useful signal here related to anything else.

BTC prices have been driven by institutional demand and federal monetary policy.

I've seen sources to corroborate institutional demand, but is there a source for your claim on the link to federal monetary policy? Ideally beyond correlation to show causation.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#78

Post by ryanianian »

loeg wrote: post #30
ryanianian wrote: post #5

I was following along until this bit which seems to hold up the entire argument: > [BTC mining] is often done using electricity which is effectively stolen from taxpayers with the help of government officials Can somebody elaborate on the stolen/corruption angle?

I mean: https://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+mining+using+stolen+... The first four links for me are: * 13 arrested for stealing $3million of electricity to mine BTC (China) * Illegal Crypto Miner Caught After Stealing More Than $400k [in electricity] (Russia) * Bulgarian Electricity Company Unveils Details of Historic Power Theft [it's Bitcoin miners] * Bitcoin mining operators steal $1.5 million in electricity (…

Those articles point out that the governments stopped it rather than enabling it for considerable periods of time. You probably have to pay off a police officer when you're climbing the tower, but I don't see any cases where corruption at wide scale was involved.

The articles point out the value of the electricity stolen but not the gained profit. E.g., what percentage of BTC was mined with stolen electricity based on the cases we've found so far?

If only a vanishingly small amount of BTC was mined with stolen electricity then the rest of the argument kind of falls apart.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#79

Post by aent »

doggosphere wrote: post #62
loeg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC prices have approximately zero relation to inflation in the real economy (for whatever definition of that you want to use). Rising BTC prices are driven by pyramid scams, fraud, and speculation. There is no useful signal here related to anything else.

BTC prices have been driven by institutional demand and federal monetary policy.

Or 21 billion fake tether dollars.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#80

Post by garmaine »

etimberg wrote: post #26
sunshinerag wrote: post #8

I have no idea what he is talking about. I use bitcoin to buy things both onchain and via lightning and the experience is so smooth and much much better than the circa 2017 period when fees were high. Don't keep it on exchange. The real thing that is stopping adoption is countries trying to classify it as a commodity and insist to pay capital gains on every microtransaction. Some countries are backwards (US, UK) than…

Why do you believe there should be no capital gains on it?

Or subject to VAT...
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