Bitcoin does not have Turing-complete scripting. It's impossible to build complex applications on top of Bitcoin, and no, sidechains don't count (they don't inherit Bitcoin's security). It's great that there's 21M supply cap. Fantastic for a gold-like digital asset. But absolutely useless for software engineers to build financial primitives on top of.
Feature not a bug. Base layer that will serve as foundation for entire global economy should be as simple as possible to make it as reliable as possible. Like all complex systems, functionality is added in layers. Things like lightning network and fedimints are examples of such layers.
> It's great that there's 21M supply cap.
Fixed supply is an essential requirement for the entire system to have any merit whatsoever. If supply can change at direction of core group of insiders it's just the same thing as the existing fiat banking system and the real value of the tokens will be diluted in perpetuity.
> But absolutely useless for software engineers to build financial primitives on top of.
No. See comment above about layers.
-
Bitcoin is a commodity, ETH & all of crypto is just (unregistered) securities lying/pretending to be commodities.
> Bitcoin is a commodity, ETH & all of crypto is just (unregistered) securities lying/pretending to be commodities.
Here's the problem with this:
Bitcoin doesn't exist below a society - its not independent of a functioning system made up of economic agents. Wheat and salt will continue to exist without human action.
And you've got it backwards: securities are just government and institution approved tokens existing on a consensus network. Some of us believe this consensus network is corrupt and should be rebuilt into something a bit more open source.
It doesn't matter. Governments decide what you do on the roads. It doesn't matter much if the you inspect the open source bricks making up the road, if the government can stop you from driving there.
Bitcoin is pretty much orthogonal to government control. Especially bitcoin with its completely open transaction history.
land also has a fixed supply and lots of people have argued that because it's a fixed supply it should be managed/regulated differently than things that have unlimited supply like say labor or produce
the gold standard was abolished to due it's volitile nature, compared to stability of a fiat like the USD. Bitcoin being a volitile commodity itself, it will not be able to run the global economy on-top of it.
This is incorrect. The gold standard was abolished in the US because it was too hard for the US to control macroeconomic policy [1] (especially import/export rates) through gold. The US already had elaborate ways to manage reserves to help in keeping the dollar steady. It was also a matter of dwindling gold reserves for the US.
Whatever your thoughts are about the gold standard, it was not instability that did it in.
Down 66% in 1 year after the whole world knows about it. Any day now. Wasn't it supposed to be an inflation hedge? Fiat sure retained value much better this year...
