20 ms·

Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

95 points by pshaw 10y ago

edblarney 10y ago
I don't see anything 'safe' about bitcoin ownership, it's quite volatile and risky, and not backed by any asset. So, not really safe in any classical sense.
- kinghajj 10y ago
  Bitcoin is its own asset, just as gold, or any other commodity, are assets.
- mdpopescu 10y ago
  You mean unlike rupees? :)
- kobeya 10y ago
  What asset backs dollars?
  - edblarney 10y ago
    "What asset backs dollars?" USD are mostly backed by T-Bills, i.e. government bonds, i.e. the faith you have in the US government (i.e. people of the US) to pay you back. Oddly - they are priced in dollars creating a really odd circular dependency. If the US government paid off all of it's debt today, most currency would be sucked out of the market! :) Since 2008 - some of USD is backed by crappy real-estate. Euros are backed by 'strong assets' for the most part: real estate, high grade bonds (I think) etc.. The reason the Euro is a very strong currency is because none of the European countries trust each other to not print money willy nilly. So if a bank wants Euros, they have to put up good collateral. This is how Germans know their Euros are not going to devalued by Italians at the printing press. RMB is backed by nothing really, just faith in the Chinese government, which is why people don't want to hold them. If China wants to become a real player they have to have transparency, which means they cant print money willy nilly, which means they lose some crazy monetary control they have today. But they think they need that super money power to 'centrally manage' the economy. You can't have both. They either need to have a currency with more integrity - which other nations will 'buy into' - or - they can keep their currency kind of a fiction, but which allows them to turn their economy on a dime if they need to. (Question is, will they turn it in the right direction?). If Bitcoin were used broadly in some areas - say across a bunch of S. American countries that don't trust their governments, and it was widely used by the citizens, then it might actually have more integrity than say the RMB. Bitcoins cannot be arbitrarily devalued, whereas RMBs are quite often. The big risk with Bitcoin is that people stop needing/wanting them and they become worthless. Remember that humans are susceptible to up and down 'manias'. All it takes is one rumour and selloff to wipe out Bitcoin for good. If there is a really bad report about US economy, the dollar might go down - but there is 'underlying support' for the USD - people still need them to do commerce, pay taxes. With bitcoins ... a single downturn would wipe them all out for good. They'd have no reason to come back.
    - lhl 10y ago
      The bigger problem with Bitcoin today is that it can't be used for regular transactions. Due to the 1MB blocksize cap (that people having being trying and failing to fix for 2 years), Bitcoin has been limited to ~3tps, has permanent backlogs in the mempool in the thousands (and climbing to tens of thousands during busy times) and tx fees have risen to 10-20 cents (or more) for regular transactions, making it useless for day-to-day payments. ETH has pushed up to 100tps in prod, but realistically, higher transaction rates will need to wait for Casper (sharded PoS). Monero has a flexcap blocksize, although I don't know if it's ever been stress-tested in practice. I think that whatever alt gets a good light wallet that supports seamless transactions (contactless/touchid) for mobile devices might get some serious traction...
      - runeks 10y ago
        If by "regular" transactions you mean consumer-to-merchant transactions, then this is solved by off-chain clearing, much like VISA solves it for our current monetary system whose lowest level transfer protocol (SWIFT) is also too slow/expensive for consumer transactions. With Bitcoin, consumers can connect to clearing intermediaries via payment channels, allowing them to be in full control of their funds while having them ready for instant transfer. If merchants are willing to accept a week of credit risk -- which, I would argue, VISA proves that they are -- then thousands of off-chain transactions can be cleared into a single Bitcoin transaction, making the performance of the underlying blockchain less important.
        lhl 10y ago
        Payment channels, besides being alpha/never used in production, are also dependent on a transaction malleability fix. Since SegWit was rolled into this soft-fork disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying it will never reach 95% and activate (there are almost as much BU/BCl support as BCo/SW support at this point), so a non-starter honestly. I'm not against PCs in principle, I just don't understand why the block size wasn't increased and then a fully tested version of LN being rolled out afterwards - instead we've 2 years where the blocksize cap has been looming, a year where Bitcoin functionality has actually been crippled (Bitcoin is the only "successful" technology I know of where it's getting more expensive and performing worse as time has been going on), and of course there's been a combination community and developer civil war/purge (and subsequent deadlock) that could have easily been avoided. This whole mess has been extremely counterproductive. Note, even in Poon and Dryja's original paper, they outline that LN still requires bigger blocks: "If we presume that a decentralized payment network exists and one person will make 3 blockchain transactions per year on average, Bitcoin will be able to support over 35 million users with 1MB blocks in ideal circumstances (assuming 2000 transactions per MB). This is quite limited, and an increase of the block size may be necessary to support everyone in the world using Bitcoin." It's worth pointing out that Bitcoin currently has just under 52K unconfirmed transactions in the backlog (this will take hours if not days to clear) and that PCs still have risks/failure modes from that as well (failure of breach remedy transactions can actually break down the counterparty trust system from my understanding, making rollbacks and even double spends possible).
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    The tax-collecting power of the US federal government, backed by the world's largest military.
    - monort 10y ago
      Russian ruble was backed by a tax-collecting power and a large military too, but they still had a hyperinflation period during 90s. It's easy to mismanage a currency for the precise reason, that it is not backed by anything.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      That's not an asset.
Animats 10y ago
Bitcoin is basically a way to get money out of China. 97% of the trading is in yuan, as the article points out. All other uses are down in the noise.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Also I suspect why mining equipment is seemingly always a net-loss: if your goal is to escape capital controls, you're willing to take a loss vis-a-vis someone who is just trying to make more of the same currency. (USD->BTC->USD)
  - Animats 10y ago
    Because mining is "exporting", miners get breaks on power and loans. After those, it's probably not a net loss.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  Those numbers are fairly misleading.The Chinese exchanges volumes are somewhat fabricated. Check out the data on bitcoinity.org [1], which reports that 9.3 million BTC, or 98% of worldwide volume, were traded on Chinese exchanges in the past 24 hours. That would be 58% of all bitcoins currently in existence, traded on Chinese exchanges, in a single day. Clearly, that is not what is happening. My understanding is that these numbers are the result of zero fees, enabling self-trading (same person on both sides) to create false market signals, as well as rapid fire back and forth trading strategies. There is also some speculation that some Chinese exchanges directly manipulate the volume data in one way or another. I'm not sure exactly what the story is. And China may still very well be leading this current price wave. However, those volume numbers are very suspicious and should be taken with a large grain of salt. [1] http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=bar http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=b... Update: In the past 15 minutes, while I finished writing this post, an additional 200k BTC were supposedly traded on Chinese exchanges. That would be approximately $250 million of trades at current prices, which is ridiculous.
- beaner 10y ago
  "Trading" doesn't mean "buying". In fact every trade is a buy and a sell simultaneously. Volume doesn't tell you if the price trend is up or down. You can buy and sell the same bitcoin back and forth a billion times and your volume will be astronomical. And this is possible on many Chinese exchanges because they don't charge trading fees. (Some apply fees on withdrawals from the exchange instead.) So when you hear "98% of all bitcoin is traded in China," it's literally almost meaningless.
kapitza 10y ago
"Escapist" might be a good name for the emerging nihilist-libertarian ideology behind Bitcoin. Escapists aren't Republicans or Democrats. They don't have any strong opinions on whether the bus should turn right or left. They would just like it to stop so they can get off...
rock57 10y ago
Quoting from http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-january-4-2017-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-january-4-2017-... Bitcoin's gains have been buoyed by renewed interest from China, where money is rushing out of the country as its currency, the yuan, continues to weaken... According to a recent Business Insider Intelligence briefing, citing data from Cryptocompare: "In the first 24 hours of the new year, over 5 million bitcoins were bought in Chinese yuan, equating to $3.8 billion. In contrast, just 53,000 bitcoins were bought in US dollars."
- elastic_church 10y ago
  1/3rd of the entire bitcoin supply changed hands in China in a 24 hour time period? Come on that doesn't even make sense. Perhaps a notional value of 5 million bitcoin by volume were traded, but some phrases make more sense than others.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Which isn't surprising at all, because many of the Chinese exchanges have no trading fees. So of course you have massive volumes.
beedogs 10y ago
Contrast that with this utterly terrible FT article (login required, but you can search for the title on Google and bypass it): https://www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-d1b3-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0 https://www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-d1b3-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b...
liquidise 10y ago
Notable is that Ethereum is experiencing a lagging, but similar, increase in value. According to Coinbase [1], it has gone from 8.30 -> 11.42 (37%) since the 1st. 1. https://www.coinbase.com/charts https://www.coinbase.com/charts
- lhl 10y ago
  Not just ETH, but most of the top alts have hit ATHs today. XMR is up over 50% this week, and DASH is up 66%.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Given enough jargon, most discussions sound like sports coverage. :)
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Anyone have a source for cross-country Bitcoin flows? I am curious if it is getting gentler treatment, in the U.S. and Europe, on account of it siphoning wealth from South America, China and Russia into the former's economies.
MarcusBrutus 10y ago
Bitcoin fails to satisfactorily answer von Mises' regression theorem. It also has no scarcity since it can face competition by an infinite number of similar conceivable algorithms / block-chains / virtual currencies that offer much the same features, regardless of how hard its own mining gets. Not to mention that once it is perceived as more than just a nuisance by some major government it will be shut down in a heartbeat. Future generations will laugh at our incredulity just like we make fun of the Tulip mania (which had more substance to boot). There is real, almost insatiable global demand for a currency with intrinsic value and scarcity that cannot be inflated by fiat. But given that such a currency will antagonize major governments it will likely not be a crypto-currency but rather a currency backed by some sufficiently powerful country. I am actually expecting the Russians or Chinese to launch a 100% gold-backed currency within the next 5 years. Failing that, when the EU breaks up the new Deutsche mark will be a good alternative. Any of these developments will pop Bitcoin's bubble.
- FellowTraveler 10y ago
  > once it is perceived as more than just a nuisance by some major government it will be shut down in a heartbeat Actually, the unique feature that makes Bitcoin special is specifically its censorship-resistance. That's why people value it -- because it cannot be shut down.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - orblivion 10y ago
    If it becomes enough of a hassle it probably could be shut down. It would have to cost the government so much that it's worth the political hit to them to alter the Internet. So, best that it remain not too high a nuisance for now.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - learc83 10y ago
    It can be pretty effectively shut down by devaluing it to the point of uselessness. Governments could make it illegal to conduct trade using bit coins, and they could make it very difficult to convert by going after people doing the conversion. I think that would pretty effectively tank the value. They could also buy or confiscate a large percentage of all existing bitcoin pretty easily, and then use that to manipulate the market.
Girlang 10y ago
"but it's still extremely challenging to use it as a principle currency, wherever you live" That's "principal currency," Bloomberg.
nikolay 10y ago
Bitcoin is the Chinese corrupt Commies and Red Mafia safe haven! It didn't get any real world adoption and the blockhain is the only thing that would survive after China stops the outflow of stolen money!
tlrobinson 10y ago
"whatever danger you fear, Bitcoin has no direct exposure to it" Hah.
cdevs 10y ago
That was the most optimistic article ever. I don't think Richard Simmons is as excited about exercising as this guy is about bitcoin.
latchkey 10y ago
Don't forget India! http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/15/india-rupee-restriction-boost-bitcoin-digital-currency.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/15/india-rupee-restriction-boost...
zanny 10y ago
> Its decentralized nature means it's not part of any system That... isn't true. The bitcoin blockchain is distributed, but the last two years have functionally proven that bitcoin core IS bitcoin, and that implementation (most of whoms developers are employed by Blockstream) is centralized control by a corporate entity. They can change what they want about bitcoin, and even after they force controversial tech already in tree like RBF or proposals like Segwit there has never been even close - by an order of magnitude - close to enough consensus to transition away from bitcoin core by replacing it as the majority client, and thus the implementation that controls the blockchain - the implementation that controls the protocol. That is where I lost faith in the bitcoin dream. It started out as a project of idealists but has turned in large part into a for profit venture to create a large exploitable fee machine for black market trading sites. Its replacement will require the diligence of its idealists to stay in charge and to not give the keys over to those whose objectives just involve profit.
- wyager 10y ago
  The reason no one has countermanded the changes implemented in Bitcoin Core is that none of the changes have been unreasonable.
  - pmorici 10y ago
    The most recent so called "segwit" change set that core pushed out recently looks to have strong enough opposition to it that it will never activate and the Bitcoin Ultimate implementation has strong support among a vocal and growing group of users. I would be surprised if core holds the control it currently does in a year or two.
    - xiphias 10y ago
      The important thing is on the ,,vocal'' part. For a lot of us Bitcoin is working wonderfully, and we trust and respect the current leadership of Bitcoin Core a lot. Still, we have other things to do in our lives, so don't have time to argue with the vocal people who have one resource that we don't: time.
nzjrs 10y ago
I always considered bitcoin a social network for a certain type of nerd. That it can occasionally be used to buy things is a bonus.
nameisu 10y ago
cant believe its over 1k again
parceltape 10y ago
"The virtual currency's value rests, in the final analysis, on nothing but the faith of the community that supports it. The faith can be relatively easy to undermine, of course. In 2013, bitcoin plummeted from its high because of a December move by the People's Bank of China, which banned mainland banks from dealing in the cryptocurrency." Is this not a contradiction? Clearly it shows the value of Bitcoin responds to political events in the same way as any currency does.
- runeks 10y ago
  It's a recursive definition, at least. They say the value rests on the faith of the community, and that this faith can be undermined by a change in value/price. But I guess this is an accurate description of the value of money: it's worth something because it's worth something.

95 points by pshaw 10y ago

I don't see anything 'safe' about bitcoin ownership, it's quite volatile and risky, and not backed by any asset. So, not really safe in any classical sense.

kinghajj 10y ago
Bitcoin is its own asset, just as gold, or any other commodity, are assets.
mdpopescu 10y ago
You mean unlike rupees? :)
kobeya 10y ago
What asset backs dollars?
- edblarney 10y ago
  "What asset backs dollars?" USD are mostly backed by T-Bills, i.e. government bonds, i.e. the faith you have in the US government (i.e. people of the US) to pay you back. Oddly - they are priced in dollars creating a really odd circular dependency. If the US government paid off all of it's debt today, most currency would be sucked out of the market! :) Since 2008 - some of USD is backed by crappy real-estate. Euros are backed by 'strong assets' for the most part: real estate, high grade bonds (I think) etc.. The reason the Euro is a very strong currency is because none of the European countries trust each other to not print money willy nilly. So if a bank wants Euros, they have to put up good collateral. This is how Germans know their Euros are not going to devalued by Italians at the printing press. RMB is backed by nothing really, just faith in the Chinese government, which is why people don't want to hold them. If China wants to become a real player they have to have transparency, which means they cant print money willy nilly, which means they lose some crazy monetary control they have today. But they think they need that super money power to 'centrally manage' the economy. You can't have both. They either need to have a currency with more integrity - which other nations will 'buy into' - or - they can keep their currency kind of a fiction, but which allows them to turn their economy on a dime if they need to. (Question is, will they turn it in the right direction?). If Bitcoin were used broadly in some areas - say across a bunch of S. American countries that don't trust their governments, and it was widely used by the citizens, then it might actually have more integrity than say the RMB. Bitcoins cannot be arbitrarily devalued, whereas RMBs are quite often. The big risk with Bitcoin is that people stop needing/wanting them and they become worthless. Remember that humans are susceptible to up and down 'manias'. All it takes is one rumour and selloff to wipe out Bitcoin for good. If there is a really bad report about US economy, the dollar might go down - but there is 'underlying support' for the USD - people still need them to do commerce, pay taxes. With bitcoins ... a single downturn would wipe them all out for good. They'd have no reason to come back.
  - lhl 10y ago
    The bigger problem with Bitcoin today is that it can't be used for regular transactions. Due to the 1MB blocksize cap (that people having being trying and failing to fix for 2 years), Bitcoin has been limited to ~3tps, has permanent backlogs in the mempool in the thousands (and climbing to tens of thousands during busy times) and tx fees have risen to 10-20 cents (or more) for regular transactions, making it useless for day-to-day payments. ETH has pushed up to 100tps in prod, but realistically, higher transaction rates will need to wait for Casper (sharded PoS). Monero has a flexcap blocksize, although I don't know if it's ever been stress-tested in practice. I think that whatever alt gets a good light wallet that supports seamless transactions (contactless/touchid) for mobile devices might get some serious traction...
    - runeks 10y ago
      If by "regular" transactions you mean consumer-to-merchant transactions, then this is solved by off-chain clearing, much like VISA solves it for our current monetary system whose lowest level transfer protocol (SWIFT) is also too slow/expensive for consumer transactions. With Bitcoin, consumers can connect to clearing intermediaries via payment channels, allowing them to be in full control of their funds while having them ready for instant transfer. If merchants are willing to accept a week of credit risk -- which, I would argue, VISA proves that they are -- then thousands of off-chain transactions can be cleared into a single Bitcoin transaction, making the performance of the underlying blockchain less important.
      - lhl 10y ago
        Payment channels, besides being alpha/never used in production, are also dependent on a transaction malleability fix. Since SegWit was rolled into this soft-fork disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying it will never reach 95% and activate (there are almost as much BU/BCl support as BCo/SW support at this point), so a non-starter honestly. I'm not against PCs in principle, I just don't understand why the block size wasn't increased and then a fully tested version of LN being rolled out afterwards - instead we've 2 years where the blocksize cap has been looming, a year where Bitcoin functionality has actually been crippled (Bitcoin is the only "successful" technology I know of where it's getting more expensive and performing worse as time has been going on), and of course there's been a combination community and developer civil war/purge (and subsequent deadlock) that could have easily been avoided. This whole mess has been extremely counterproductive. Note, even in Poon and Dryja's original paper, they outline that LN still requires bigger blocks: "If we presume that a decentralized payment network exists and one person will make 3 blockchain transactions per year on average, Bitcoin will be able to support over 35 million users with 1MB blocks in ideal circumstances (assuming 2000 transactions per MB). This is quite limited, and an increase of the block size may be necessary to support everyone in the world using Bitcoin." It's worth pointing out that Bitcoin currently has just under 52K unconfirmed transactions in the backlog (this will take hours if not days to clear) and that PCs still have risks/failure modes from that as well (failure of breach remedy transactions can actually break down the counterparty trust system from my understanding, making rollbacks and even double spends possible).
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  The tax-collecting power of the US federal government, backed by the world's largest military.
  - monort 10y ago
    Russian ruble was backed by a tax-collecting power and a large military too, but they still had a hyperinflation period during 90s. It's easy to mismanage a currency for the precise reason, that it is not backed by anything.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    That's not an asset.

Animats 10y ago

Bitcoin is basically a way to get money out of China. 97% of the trading is in yuan, as the article points out. All other uses are down in the noise.

bdcravens 10y ago
Also I suspect why mining equipment is seemingly always a net-loss: if your goal is to escape capital controls, you're willing to take a loss vis-a-vis someone who is just trying to make more of the same currency. (USD->BTC->USD)
- Animats 10y ago
  Because mining is "exporting", miners get breaks on power and loans. After those, it's probably not a net loss.
dwaltrip 10y ago
Those numbers are fairly misleading.The Chinese exchanges volumes are somewhat fabricated. Check out the data on bitcoinity.org [1], which reports that 9.3 million BTC, or 98% of worldwide volume, were traded on Chinese exchanges in the past 24 hours. That would be 58% of all bitcoins currently in existence, traded on Chinese exchanges, in a single day. Clearly, that is not what is happening. My understanding is that these numbers are the result of zero fees, enabling self-trading (same person on both sides) to create false market signals, as well as rapid fire back and forth trading strategies. There is also some speculation that some Chinese exchanges directly manipulate the volume data in one way or another. I'm not sure exactly what the story is. And China may still very well be leading this current price wave. However, those volume numbers are very suspicious and should be taken with a large grain of salt. [1] http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=bar http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=b... Update: In the past 15 minutes, while I finished writing this post, an additional 200k BTC were supposedly traded on Chinese exchanges. That would be approximately $250 million of trades at current prices, which is ridiculous.
beaner 10y ago
"Trading" doesn't mean "buying". In fact every trade is a buy and a sell simultaneously. Volume doesn't tell you if the price trend is up or down. You can buy and sell the same bitcoin back and forth a billion times and your volume will be astronomical. And this is possible on many Chinese exchanges because they don't charge trading fees. (Some apply fees on withdrawals from the exchange instead.) So when you hear "98% of all bitcoin is traded in China," it's literally almost meaningless.

kapitza 10y ago

"Escapist" might be a good name for the emerging nihilist-libertarian ideology behind Bitcoin. Escapists aren't Republicans or Democrats. They don't have any strong opinions on whether the bus should turn right or left. They would just like it to stop so they can get off...

rock57 10y ago

Quoting from http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-january-4-2017-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-january-4-2017-... Bitcoin's gains have been buoyed by renewed interest from China, where money is rushing out of the country as its currency, the yuan, continues to weaken... According to a recent Business Insider Intelligence briefing, citing data from Cryptocompare: "In the first 24 hours of the new year, over 5 million bitcoins were bought in Chinese yuan, equating to $3.8 billion. In contrast, just 53,000 bitcoins were bought in US dollars."

elastic_church 10y ago
1/3rd of the entire bitcoin supply changed hands in China in a 24 hour time period? Come on that doesn't even make sense. Perhaps a notional value of 5 million bitcoin by volume were traded, but some phrases make more sense than others.
- kobeya 10y ago
  Which isn't surprising at all, because many of the Chinese exchanges have no trading fees. So of course you have massive volumes.

beedogs 10y ago

Contrast that with this utterly terrible FT article (login required, but you can search for the title on Google and bypass it): https://www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-d1b3-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0 https://www.ft.com/content/b5d66ed8-d1b3-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b...

liquidise 10y ago

Notable is that Ethereum is experiencing a lagging, but similar, increase in value. According to Coinbase [1], it has gone from 8.30 -> 11.42 (37%) since the 1st. 1. https://www.coinbase.com/charts https://www.coinbase.com/charts

lhl 10y ago
Not just ETH, but most of the top alts have hit ATHs today. XMR is up over 50% this week, and DASH is up 66%.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Given enough jargon, most discussions sound like sports coverage. :)

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Anyone have a source for cross-country Bitcoin flows? I am curious if it is getting gentler treatment, in the U.S. and Europe, on account of it siphoning wealth from South America, China and Russia into the former's economies.

MarcusBrutus 10y ago

Bitcoin fails to satisfactorily answer von Mises' regression theorem. It also has no scarcity since it can face competition by an infinite number of similar conceivable algorithms / block-chains / virtual currencies that offer much the same features, regardless of how hard its own mining gets. Not to mention that once it is perceived as more than just a nuisance by some major government it will be shut down in a heartbeat. Future generations will laugh at our incredulity just like we make fun of the Tulip mania (which had more substance to boot). There is real, almost insatiable global demand for a currency with intrinsic value and scarcity that cannot be inflated by fiat. But given that such a currency will antagonize major governments it will likely not be a crypto-currency but rather a currency backed by some sufficiently powerful country. I am actually expecting the Russians or Chinese to launch a 100% gold-backed currency within the next 5 years. Failing that, when the EU breaks up the new Deutsche mark will be a good alternative. Any of these developments will pop Bitcoin's bubble.

FellowTraveler 10y ago
> once it is perceived as more than just a nuisance by some major government it will be shut down in a heartbeat Actually, the unique feature that makes Bitcoin special is specifically its censorship-resistance. That's why people value it -- because it cannot be shut down.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- orblivion 10y ago
  If it becomes enough of a hassle it probably could be shut down. It would have to cost the government so much that it's worth the political hit to them to alter the Internet. So, best that it remain not too high a nuisance for now.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- learc83 10y ago
  It can be pretty effectively shut down by devaluing it to the point of uselessness. Governments could make it illegal to conduct trade using bit coins, and they could make it very difficult to convert by going after people doing the conversion. I think that would pretty effectively tank the value. They could also buy or confiscate a large percentage of all existing bitcoin pretty easily, and then use that to manipulate the market.

Girlang 10y ago

"but it's still extremely challenging to use it as a principle currency, wherever you live" That's "principal currency," Bloomberg.

nikolay 10y ago

Bitcoin is the Chinese corrupt Commies and Red Mafia safe haven! It didn't get any real world adoption and the blockhain is the only thing that would survive after China stops the outflow of stolen money!

tlrobinson 10y ago

"whatever danger you fear, Bitcoin has no direct exposure to it" Hah.

cdevs 10y ago

That was the most optimistic article ever. I don't think Richard Simmons is as excited about exercising as this guy is about bitcoin.

latchkey 10y ago

Don't forget India! http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/15/india-rupee-restriction-boost-bitcoin-digital-currency.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/15/india-rupee-restriction-boost...

zanny 10y ago

> Its decentralized nature means it's not part of any system That... isn't true. The bitcoin blockchain is distributed, but the last two years have functionally proven that bitcoin core IS bitcoin, and that implementation (most of whoms developers are employed by Blockstream) is centralized control by a corporate entity. They can change what they want about bitcoin, and even after they force controversial tech already in tree like RBF or proposals like Segwit there has never been even close - by an order of magnitude - close to enough consensus to transition away from bitcoin core by replacing it as the majority client, and thus the implementation that controls the blockchain - the implementation that controls the protocol. That is where I lost faith in the bitcoin dream. It started out as a project of idealists but has turned in large part into a for profit venture to create a large exploitable fee machine for black market trading sites. Its replacement will require the diligence of its idealists to stay in charge and to not give the keys over to those whose objectives just involve profit.

wyager 10y ago
The reason no one has countermanded the changes implemented in Bitcoin Core is that none of the changes have been unreasonable.
- pmorici 10y ago
  The most recent so called "segwit" change set that core pushed out recently looks to have strong enough opposition to it that it will never activate and the Bitcoin Ultimate implementation has strong support among a vocal and growing group of users. I would be surprised if core holds the control it currently does in a year or two.
  - xiphias 10y ago
    The important thing is on the ,,vocal'' part. For a lot of us Bitcoin is working wonderfully, and we trust and respect the current leadership of Bitcoin Core a lot. Still, we have other things to do in our lives, so don't have time to argue with the vocal people who have one resource that we don't: time.

nzjrs 10y ago

I always considered bitcoin a social network for a certain type of nerd. That it can occasionally be used to buy things is a bonus.

nameisu 10y ago

cant believe its over 1k again

parceltape 10y ago

"The virtual currency's value rests, in the final analysis, on nothing but the faith of the community that supports it. The faith can be relatively easy to undermine, of course. In 2013, bitcoin plummeted from its high because of a December move by the People's Bank of China, which banned mainland banks from dealing in the cryptocurrency." Is this not a contradiction? Clearly it shows the value of Bitcoin responds to political events in the same way as any currency does.

runeks 10y ago
It's a recursive definition, at least. They say the value rests on the faith of the community, and that this faith can be undermined by a change in value/price. But I guess this is an accurate description of the value of money: it's worth something because it's worth something.