Thinking CBDCs are “safe” is extremely naive. They’re a dystopian nightmare. They’re every dictators wet dream. This is why Bitcoin matters. Bitcoin = freedom.
An economy run on Bitcoin is an absolute dystopia. You reluinquish monetary control to a deflationary coin, being in the whim of Bitcoin whales. People who advocate for it, either are whales or they are stupid.
Ask south europe how well it worked for them having no power over their monetary policy.
The USD and Euro are managed by central banks much better at monetary policy than random rich people trying to manipulate an asset market (like those for cryptocurrencies) because they have an untreated gambling addiction. The idea that US Dollars are less stable and reliable in terms of price trends over the long term than cryptocurrencies is just ridiculous. Small amounts of inflation is good for the economy. It incentivizes people to put their money stashes back into productive use, instead of just keeping it sealed in a box.
Bitcoin != cryptocurrencies. You might as well be comparing dollars and beanie babies. Define "much better" and for who because they're very clearly, very bad at monetary policy.
If we define "theft" this broadly then employment is theft, taxes are theft, interest on loans is theft, etc. Meanwhile deflation favours early adopters forever, and while you could chide me for "missing the boat" that doesn't really work, morally, for people not yet born.
> Meanwhile deflation favours early adopters forever, and while you could chide me for "missing the boat" that doesn't really work, morally, for people not yet born.
The deflationary model favors savers over consumers, giving benefit back to people who are willing be patient by forgoing immediate consumption.
You seem concerned that early adopters stand to gain disproportionately from mass adoption. Well, what outcome would you prefer and how would we get there?
This is myopic beyond reason. Inflation is now a thing so you care about it. The real problem lies in things that most western countries never had to deal with. What do you do when your country is not good at creating high-value products and services that you can sell to a premium to the rest of the world? What China did, you make cheap stuff. How do you make cheap stuff? You print more money and you devalue your currency. Inflation will make sure you make what you can in-house cheap enough. Now you can export it cheap as well.
This can't work with bitcoin. If your country can't export things in a premium you are F'ed. You can't print money to stimulate demand for local goods, your only option is to violently reduce the average quality of life enough that you will be wiling to work for less. Printing money creates inflation but it can also kick a positive spiral of demand/supply. While "austerity" has been shown to just make the problem worse by gutting demand in general
If Bitcoin had a history of stability your point would have more weight, but as it stands I don’t know how people can present it as a viable alternative with a straight face. Banks are having a crisis—-Bitcoin seems to have at least one every year.
If Bitcoin were the default currency, the value would not fluctuate, it would just slowly rise. Responsible savers would be rewarded. Irresponsible risk takers would generally be punished.
Undeniably, in the beginning, yes. Eventually it would be distributed more evenly as those people spend or die. We already have billionaires and the difference is that, with the current system, their money will not become distributed. They fail and then the government prints more to rescue them or they just print it and give it to them directly to "prime the economy". i.e. The Cantillion effect.
The people should control the money and that's only possible with Bitcoin.
> Undeniably, in the beginning, yes. Eventually it would be distributed more evenly as those people spend or die. We already have billionaires and the difference is that, with the current system, their money will not become distributed.
Why would a bitcoin billionaire's money be distributed more than a traditional billionaire's? At least a traditional billionaire will invest his fortune in assets like stocks and thus help fund some innovative companies to protect his fortune from inflation. The bitcoin billionaire can just hold his fortune in bitcoin forever since it's deflationary.
Every time I see a bitcoin backer talk about finance, the things said fly in the face of Econ 101 and basic common sense. I guess I "just don't get it".
Econ 101 seems to have a failing end game. Bitcoin gets distributed because, since you can't make more, you don't get anything for free. You spend it and it goes somewhere else. Maybe you get it back if you add value, but you don't get it back just because you're part of a ruling class that gets free money printed by the government and handed to you because "you will add value to the world". That last assertion is demonstrably untrue in many cases. They fail, we bail them out. Again.
Edit: Modern economics seems to require more mental gymnastics than a Bitcoin standard. We invent things no one really understands until the rug gets pulled one day and the scam become clear. Then we move on to the next scam. Financial instruments seem to be designed to fool the common man into believing we need these complications while what's really happening is that someone is simply stealing money until something breaks and we bail them out.
Couldn't you sub cash for Bitcoin here and have it make just as much sense? Also, isn't bitcoin highly traceable, especially for a sophisticated state actor?
> the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact.
I've read a few of those and it's extreme copium. For example, many of them point out that the Bitcoin network can use renewable energy. Yeah sure, except for one problem: So can everything else. If Bitcoin uses some amount of renewable energy, that's less renewable energy to go around. This basically only matters in places that are powered entirely by renewables...
The most ridiculous point I've seen by far is the idea that actually, energy is not "wasted", because it's actually generating heat. It is true that computers are 100% efficient space heaters, but that's not the point.
The point is that if you scale the Bitcoin network up, it would put tremendous strain on the energy grid. That's not FUD at all!
Haha. True: you definitely don't have to worry about Bitcoin consuming all of the world's energy, though it's not for reasons that make your case better...
> unregistered securities lying/pretending to be commodities
Let's assume you're correct. Tell me why having globally distributed securities be registered with the United States Securities Exchange Commission is 1) practical for people outside the U.S. or even desirable for the other 95% of the world population and 2) beneficial to people within the U.S. who do not have access to $1M in capital to be considered "accredited investors".
I don't care about securities law or what the US government does towards crypto. My point is that these ARE securities and bitcoin IS a commodity. When people truly understand this they realize owning anything crypto is akin to buying penny stocks and Bitcoin is basically digital gold 2.0
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It was the first, every feature it has can be found in its forks (both chain and code forks) and competitors. The only thing bitcoin has over other cryptocurrencies is first mover advantage. That's it.
Bitcoin maxis are hilarious though "Bitcoin isn't crypto" is some of the funniest cope I've seen on the internet ever.
Ethereum is a foundation of sand. The protocol and the rules change at the whims of the senior insiders. It's not a stable platform and since we don't know what the rules will be in the future you can't plan for the future and build anything long term.
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.
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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...
I would say the only merit to that is one plan for Ethereum mainnet’s roadmap is to introduce pruning, deleting old data for real, specifically smart contract states and held variables
This seems like it would break many smart contracts sometime later this decade, this isn't currently fleshed out
That aside, no other EVM is planning to do that, all code is compatible on all of them, and it doesn’t matter what Ethereum’s blockchain does
Having a roadmap is no merit. A roadmap means the system is centralized because a core group of people can change the rules. If it's centralized it's not censorship resistant and the supply can't be guaranteed to not increase and dilute holders therefore it's garbage.
If it's centralized it's garbage and it doesn't matter whatever its roadmap is. Also ETH wont implement sharding because its breaks composability. It's just marketing.
This is rich. Bitcoin is literally controlled by a group called Bitcoin Core and yes they did change the rules when they refused to change the block size as Satoshi and the community intended. They neutered Bitcoin for life by making it top out at a useless 7 transactions per second forever.
I’ve read that from start to finish and it all seems a lot like hopes and prayers. I don’t see any convincing evidence that Bitcoin will continue to hold its position , and the overall assumption all over that essay is that Bitcoin is “prime real estate”.
It’s possible but I don’t see it. I’d say it’s an open question.
It's a fact that PoW involves quite a bit of waste, just like it's a fact that e.g. a coffee shop will waste quite a bit of coffee (by discarding it at close or when it gets too old). That the market dynamics all but require the coffee shop to do this doesn't somehow stop it from being waste.
The market can't disagree with definitions of words. What it can do, is encourage the waste.
> >In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port.
This is an idiotic statement. Bitcoin development has completely succumbed to corporate capture at this point by Blockstream and the likes.
I disagree. Bitcoin has never had a hard fork. There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules. Block stream and/or minors can’t force a hard fork like ETH devs can.
> There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules.
Yes, there literally is a Bitcoin Classic, and prior to that was a Bitcoin XT. There's also Bitcoin Cash, and many others.
Even excluding hard forks which were chain splits (so upgrade only), there have been several. There were two hard forks in 2010, one to add OP_NOP and one fixing a critical bug where anyone could spend any Bitcoin. There was a hard fork in 2013 (BIP-50) because a block broke a limit and at least one double spend occurred.
Why comment if you aren't educated on the topic? Or rather, why actively spread misinformation?
No, this was very different than ETH/ETC. Bitcoin cash was a minority of people forking away from the BTC chain to increase the blocksize. ETC was the original chain that was forked away from to reclaim stolen funds because of a smart contract hack.
Generally when people are talking about “hard forking” they are referring to the majority making a backwards incompatible change that leaves little activity or economic value on the original chain. Bitcoin never forks like this, because who would coordinate it?
Bitcoin core maintainers tried to fork it and were not successful (See bitcoinXT).
Miners and community leaders tried to fork it and were not successful (see bitcoin cash).
Bitcoin exchanges and businesses tried to fork it and were not successful (see segwit2x).
And many more will come, I imagine a PoS fork will inevitably come and not be successful.
Sure, but I would argue that blockstream and others control bitcoin not by forcing upgrades, but instead by preventing upgrades to the network and creating commercial solutions to easily fixable problems.
I'm not saying that blocksize, LN, etc are solved problems. But I am saying that the indecision and lack of community involvement is slowly killing bitcoin. It is succumbing to corporate capture. They continue to invent increasingly custodial methods of using bitcoin.
There is a fundamental difference of opinion here. There will always be people pro changes and against. Its conservatism against progressivism. So, while it's useless to even argue (you're either one or the other, and that probably won't change, ever), let me just say that if you want any kind of digital property to exist, it's pretty important for such property to remain constant in regards to it's features, or better say, both it's virtues or flaws. That's why Bitcoin maximalists, as they are called, are very conservative towards bitcoin development.
Because of all that, making a case that someone controls Bitcoin just because they are preventing changes is rather far-fetched. So, while your other points may be valid, this is certanly an invalid one.
