Bitcoin is a disaster

In order to truly prevent people from making bitcoin to transactions, a government would have to enact absolute authoritarian control over every single bit of information that goes into and out of the country.

If I could even send a text message to someone outside the country, then I can send my bitcoin. Governments are not going to shut down all methods of ever sending text information to everyone permanently.

> let you Google for examples.

There are no examples of governments having absolute authoritarian perfect control over the internet, for any extended lengths of time.

In every example of countries that have internet restrictions, there are many people who are still able to get information into and out of the country, through numerous methods.

The original statement was "What's nearly impossible to stop?". And I maintained that it absolutely is nearly impossible for a government to enact perfect authoritarian control over every single person in a country. That is just obviously false.

So no, governments cannot "simply shut down the internet to stop Bitcoin". Because no government in existence today, has enacted perfect authoritarian control, over the internet, or shut down their internet permanently and stopped every single VPN, satellite phone, ect.

> it's not worth the effort for governments to shut down Bitcoin

It will never be worth it for governments to permanently shut down all of the internet now and forever, as well as stop all of the vpns, satellite phone, ect.

This kind of a permanent shutdown is something that no government has ever done. Every single example of governments trying to control the internet, still has many ways of getting information in and out of the country.

I said $9 because the average transaction was $9, the median was over $5. If someone is paying $300 under those circumstances it is because they have a large, complex transaction. Transaction sizes vary, transactions costs aren't as random as you are implying.

> someone could have paid $1.50 for a transaction in the same block as your $9 transaction, depending on its size and how quickly the sender needed to have it confirmed.

That's not how it works. Most transactions are small, you can't somehow cut them down to a fraction of the size it takes for a basic transaction from one address to another.

> Someone also paid $.50 to be in that block

What transaction is what block are you talking about? I didn't mention a specific block, some have had even higher average transaction costs. Where did you see that?

> but they were okay with waiting for an hour before it would be confirmed.

Again, that isn't how it works. If you put a transaction fee that is too low, you wait until there are no higher value transactions for yours to be included into a block.

What commodities ceased being traded during the Great Depression?

> Are we talking about store of value or medium of exchange?

Mostly store of value for now, both when adoption improves and LN support is more widespread. Eventually the base layer will also need some capacity bumps.

> Soros' comments on gold are helpful.

A multi millennium bubble? Can't get more unprecedented than that.

US numbers are missing on how many enter aftercare; when someone contracts COVID-19 then is eventually discharged from acute care to rehabilitation, as far as I have been able to tell, they disappear from the statistical models, lumped into an unhelpful puddle called "Recovered". Only the insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid have those numbers for their individual policy holders. That's why I think only a hedge fund would have the funding and clout to call up and cajole those kinds of numbers out from each of those entities to assemble a data mosaic.

Because of this, there is just no telling how widespread this issue is at this time. It is widespread enough that some medical specialists like pulmonologists and cardiologists are noting very abnormal (worst in their professional experience) rates of complications requiring extensive and sometimes life-long rehabilitation. Not widespread enough (yet?) to tax the available rehabilitation resources. We have rough ideas of available rehabilitation resources in the US, but to make a speculative bet on this ahead of the crowd, you'd need this information before it gets to that point. One microsecond after the headline "US Rehab Units Full from COVID Patients" hits the Reuters news wire, all the good bets are already placed.

A common narrative going around is with the anticipated failure of US politicians to enact sufficient financial relief for working and middle class members, there will be a lot of foreclosures on that dynamic alone, and residential rental will see lots of demand. Lots of long bets have already been placed on residential multi-family rental ventures (wish I knew of an exclusively US MFH residential REIT, but my EFT screening yielded none such, lots of them are over-salted with extensive commercial properties holdings, but I'm only using public data sources).

Backing in from your 4M figure, if the US hits a 20% (and declining, as the number of infected keeps rising) rate of long-term aftercare complications, then it starts to seriously toy with the possibility of a medical bankruptcy-induced foreclosure wave just as big as the 2007-10 recession. This is on top of the pain from economic disruption, which lowers the threshold when medical bankruptcy would be declared; I'm pretty sure that data of general versus medical DTI before bankruptcy is declared could be teased out of historical bankruptcy data at various banks and then assembled into risk tranches along various categories of profiling, pretty straightforward ML work. The US political and financial establishment will probably try to amortize the pain out as much as possible through piling up medical social benefits debt and various kinds of staged mortgage note relief for the capital holders (I see insufficient political power on all sides to directly assist citizens sufficiently to have the same effect, and the decision makers are probably tunnel visioned into the systemic damage done if the capital underwriters of the notes zero out without noticing they get a two-fer by transiting the stimulus funds through those who took out mortgages first). So whether the US enters another credit crisis comes down to some mix of political, monetary, and currency exchange factors.

> Unlike last time though, the housing supply currently seems fairly tight in many areas, so a large pricing collapse downward seems not nearly as likely.

I suspect this is more due to the large amounts of monetary stimulus that makes its way into investment venture fundings than organic demand shaping.

But yes, I believe for partly the reason you cite, and mostly the reason I gave, that the pressure to hold up residential (and to some extent commercial) real estate asset pricing is immense, and likely to continue. The US is walking straight into the 80's Tokyo Trap: real estate asset pricing levitated by so much hot money flows that it mostly disconnected from its original utility to function as a natural world good. Kind of ironic, natural persons using natural world goods usurped by corporate persons using financial world goods. But this levitation continues for much longer than most people expect (Keynes' “markets...irrational longer than you...solvent” quip), and I suspect this continues until the US Congress' spending is reined in by the forex markets (which might be in a kind of a regulatory capture of their own peculiar kind).

Use every year the US political establishment kicks the can down the road to put away your larder. It's going to be a bumpy ride if the levees break the way I fear they will in about 3-4 years.