81–90 of 355 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must live in: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon. (Or be oblivious) States where the sale of a cup of coffee doesn't involve a tax.
When you grow up and have kids (ie you aren’t 11 anymore) you may appreciate things like schools, safe roads, etc... that come with those sales tax dollars instead of viewing it as totalitarian expropriation.
Interestingly the economist misses the traditional definition of Fiat: a currency whose value is determined by the Fiat of a state. Whether or not Bitcoin exhibits similar trends as currency that isn't backed by the state is immaterial to the ethical appeal (to some) of a medium of exchange where participation is voluntary and consensual.
Is Bitcoin actually a medium of exchange? It seems to be functioning more as an investment to be hoarded rather than spent.
Why did you think that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price doesn’t define the success of bitcoin.
It's worse. Continuous deflation (increasing real value) is a very undesirable characteristic for a currency as it dis-incentivizes the actual use of said currency. Why spend money on anything not absolutely essential if the money itself will appreciate in value more than any investment you can make with it, and with no risk? It might be okay for domain specific uses but for general purpose currency use it's awful. I…
Many people don't know that central bankers literally, not figuratively, mean CREATE money out of nothing.
It will become a currency when it can be directly used to satisfy a tax debt, to avoid the punitive threat of the law.
Fiat money with better programming apis and permissions
This is not a how a society's currency should work.
How does Bitcoin work offline? Let's say the world goes to hell (assume internet has been taken offline) and we need to trade using a form of trusted currency. Just curious...
How does Dollar work offline? How much do you have in your pants? Because if the world goes offline, Banks would not have all the "money" necessary to give it back to people.
Interestingly the economist misses the traditional definition of Fiat: a currency whose value is determined by the Fiat of a state. Whether or not Bitcoin exhibits similar trends as currency that isn't backed by the state is immaterial to the ethical appeal (to some) of a medium of exchange where participation is voluntary and consensual.
"Code is governance" -- the article does support the idea of cryptocurrency as fiat money because the laws, in this case, are the code. The developers and miners, no matter their good intentions, do hold power over the currency that everyday investors do not have. No matter how egalitarian the distributed ledger set up looks on paper, we'd be remiss to think the power structures behind cryptocurrencies are so radical…
The truth is that the everyday user gets full control over the law of their currency simply by running a full node. Your node will reject any transactions that do not comply with the rules of your node.
The soveirgnty of bitcoin comes from knowing that the devs can't force an update upon you or the network, if you do not consent you can always reject the change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure it doesn't. Except you can use it to transfer value without first consulting your potentially totalitarian government without much effort for the first time in the entire history.
ROFL, "the first time in the entire history". Gold would like to have a word with you... And seashells. And giant stone coins. And on and on and on. In fact, as far as history goes, government backed fiat currency is a very recent invention.