851–860 of 930 posts
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To me its inevitable. And just a matter of time. Any year there could be a breakthrough that quickly leads to missing math.
They would just patch the software.
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The way I understand it, billionaires would hold it if they could, but then they'd actually have to pay tax when they spent it. This way, they get to control unlimited assets without paying any tax. Personally, I don't think that's so great "for the economy", because I actually don't care about the economy... I care about people, and having 500 billionaires owning everything and charging everyone to use it is not the…
No it's that billionaires mostly aren't worth their estimated net worth in actual cash. If Elon Musk wanted to turn his Tesla holdings into cash, then his estimated net worth of $436 billion dollars would very rapidly not be worth anywhere near that much (i.e. probably by at least an order of magnitude).
I know that selling 23% of a company in one go would move the market, but a 90% haircut would be bonkers.
Or are you claiming TSLA is special, and the haircut would be 90% just for Elon and just for TSLA because that particular stock is super overvalued due to his celebrity and reality distortion field? That seems a little more believable, but this was a discussion on net worth of generic billionaires to start.
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They would just patch the software.
You can't patch the rules for the existing bitcoins. People would have to move them to new rules.
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> Even the most firebrand crypto bro is forced to acknowledge that crypto currencies like Bitcoin have a number of traits that renders them unusable as money, among which the most popular one is the core reason driving it's popularity: volatility. This is essentially the other way around. It's volatile if it's predominantly used for speculation rather than as a currency, because "widespread use as a currency" is a bi…
> This is essentially the other way around. It's volatile if it's predominantly used for speculation rather than as a currency, (...) It's predominantly used for speculation. Back in the real world, it's the only purpose it has. There is no way around it.
There is also a pretty obvious way to avoid the volatility in the interim when using it as a currency: Don't use it to specify prices and don't hoard large quantities of it. If you have a Bitcoin wallet with the equivalent of $100 in it, it doesn't matter that much if it goes down to $50 and then up to $150 and then back to $100 again over the course of a year, because +/- $50/year is not a big deal. Meanwhile we have computers now, so prices can be listed in US dollars or any other currency and then use the live exchange rate when paying in cryptocurrency, while still accepting it widely.
And "it has no other purpose" is a weird claim. It has an obvious purpose: It allows you to exchange value without permission or identity. The "it's a public ledger so there's no privacy" claim is silly; your wallet address is public but you can have arbitrarily many of them, there is nothing inherently tying them to your identity, and there are known implementations (e.g. Monero) that provide even stronger privacy. These are things the existing banking system doesn't provide, and from the perspective of countries that actually respect the privacy of their citizens (or any citizens who want their privacy protected), are features.
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> a failure of the currency itself this is a really ambiguous phrasing. Is bitcoin a "currency"? is el Salvador adopting bitcoin as a ___?____ a currency?
El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as one of its national currencies.
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The IMF agreement requiring them to do this was from December, i.e. the prior US administration.
The IMF isn't run by the US any more than it is run by Russia or any of the other major members (those that have their own executive-director rather than being in a group that together shares one.)
Try starting an independent one if you think otherwise.
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>fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth That "other people's wealth" you're talking about is everyone's wealth. Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us, and they didn't do it fairly. I feel you underestimate how much a billion dollars is. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly. It's crazy…
> Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us This seems like a very skewed perspective. You work for a salary, I imagine, and you freely agreed to take that job and in return get a salary, even if the company was losing money or its share price was plummeting. I.e. taking a salary because of the security of payments. Lots of people who invest in businesses lose all their money. You can't point at the very ver…
But there still needs to be some mechanism to limit wealth inequality or we still get the inevitable conclusion.
The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!
Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.
It's just not fair at all. Governments are funneling money to the rich hand over fist. It's obvious who they represent and who they don't.
You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.
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There seems to be two concepts that are getting conflated. One concept is that BTC is a good investment. Historically that is undeniable. The other concept is that it is a good medium of exchange. I think that is not so true because 1) its neither cheap nor easy to buy a lot of things with it 2) a thing that goes up in value is not a good medium of exchange because people don't want to spend it, they want to hoard it…
Let me add a third concept which, to me, is a much more useful feature (as I wrote in a sister thread): a store of value for people whose governments like to control the money flow, dilute savings in the single available local fiat currency and confiscate savings calling it a money reform. Which, sadly, is a large part of the world. Value oscillating against some golden reference by a factor of 4? Many will likely ta…
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I think it was just an analogy. The incentives are to defer purchases, if possible, which lower economic activity overall.
Sure, my point was that there are many reasons someone might spend money today that might be better off saved for the future, however much it may increase in value.