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As much as the elitist HR folk like to showcase the shortcomings of bitcoin, fact is that bitcoin is so much better than gold and fiat, which can be mass printe

by down 9y ago

As much as the elitist HR folk like to showcase the shortcomings of bitcoin, fact is that bitcoin is so much better than gold and fiat, which can be mass printed, or have you money blocked in the bank, how it happened in argentina and Greece, Cyprus, where people got a 40% haircut on their deposits over 100k, (check the inflation now in Turkey 13%) the money in the bank, you don't own them, bitcoin is at core a movement against banks, the whole argument against bitcoin is like the people were saying cars are so much worse than horses, because there are no paved roads, you need gas, maintenance, are noisy, can't scale, etc.

dsacco 9y ago
> fact is that bitcoin is so much better than gold and fiat, which can be mass printed, or have you money blocked in the bank, how it happened in argentina and Greece, Cyprus, where people got a 40% haircut on their deposits over 100k, (check the inflation now in Turkey 13%) the money in the bank, you don't own them, bitcoin is at core a movement against banks, So many claims in one sentence! Here are a few questions for you, so I can understand your thesis better: 1. How do cryptocurrencies specifically improve upon fiat currencies’ inflation when they are prone to systemic volatility? Bitcoin experienced a 40% swing in price in one day, and frequently moves out of boundaries the CME has stated would cause them to shut down trading on their futures. 2. How do you propose to get a cryptocurrency to a place of price stability without a centralized authority? I’m not saying I don’t think it’s possible, I want to hear your prediction. 3. Implicit in your thesis is the idea that money should not have been mass printed - do you think the government was ignorant of the economic ramifications or made a calculated bet that didn’t work out? How do you expect a given decentralized blockchain to do better based only on the valuation consensus of the market? 4. As it stands, most cryptocurrencies are actually traded in centralized exchanges, where the person doesn’t technically have control or autonomy over their money. How is this meaningfully better than a bank? What do you propose to improve this other than, “people shouldn’t do that?” > whole argument against bitcoin is like the people were saying cars are so much worse than horses, because there are no paved roads, you need gas, maintenance, are noisy, can't scale, etc. 5. It’s easy in hindsight to say that cars are better than horses for mass transportation. This is because the “revolutions” that don’t work out are forgotten. For every example of horses and cars, people actually did know what they want, and it wasn’t the newfangled new thing, which turned out to be a solution looking for a problem. In other words, citing this example without further justification for your point is meaningless. 6. As a matter of fact, no, Bitcoin can’t scale. There are people reporting it can. There are people investigating it seriously. Look into the research - there are cryptocurrencies and blockchains that can scale, but they mostly do not use proof of work consensus systems, and they make trade-offs in Bitcoin’s original goals of decentralization and fault tolerance.
- down 9y ago
  Are prone now to such swings, 40%, I didn't heard of, that , recently, we are talking in 20 years, gold was as volatile when was decoupled from dollar. Do you know Fed is a private institution, it has as much authority as it has coca cola, atm 10 old white guys are deciding for you, but price will stabilize when there is a balance between in and out and a big enough market. If Guverments are not ignorant how come 2008 happened, I lost my job then and lots of hardships, people I know lost their houses, etc. The Guverment is not your friend. It can scale, lighting network + bigger blocks as the internet get better, other layers, servers get cheaper, the change from gold/silver coins to banknotes lasted 400 years you want in 7 years to be perfect.
- justrobert 9y ago
  The funny thing is a state level actor can spend <0.01% of their defense budget to take control of >51% of the network. That isn't even accounting for the fact they can knock others off the bitcoin network easily. If you have 10,000TH/s but cannot communicate with the network, that hash rate means nothing. DDoS or bad BGP routes, doesn't matter when the nodes have no way to talk.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    The US has largest defense budget by far, and .01% would be less than $100 million, right? Could you really create enough mining capacity for that to take over the network? Better question: by the time Bitcoin gets to the point that a government feels threatened enough to do this, will they be able to? And how will other governments respond? Will they start mining too so that no one government controls the network?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
spookthesunset 9y ago
> bitcoin is at core a movement against banks I think what you actually mean is bitcoin is at its core just a bunch of hype and hot air driven by internet televangelists who are very good at targeting a specific brand of libertarian an-cap. It is true though, at its core Bitcoin was a great way to purchase drugs, launder ill-gotten funds, hire a hitman, or collect ransomware money. But now days, there are better cryptocoins for that...
- down 9y ago
  cash is much better for that, and they catched those slik road guys because they were using bitcoin, if you look at what bitcoin does manly, it cuts off the banks, that's why are so scared, in Bulgaria they stopped all transfer to and from crypto exchanges, so you really think you own your money in bank?
  - mirimir 9y ago
    > ... they catched those slik road guys because they were using bitcoin ... No, that caught them because they were careless. Ross linked Silk Road to his meatspace email address in posts to Bitcoin Forum. And misconfigured Apache to leak Silk Road error messages via clearnet. And kept personal information about his staff on a laptop (albeit LUKS-encrypted) that he used in a coffee shop, and at at public library. Also chat logs, and a comprehensive diary. Not Bitcoin!
UncleMeat 9y ago
It is so odd to me that all of the evangelists seem to come from well-off high-tech backgrounds in countries without any of these problems, yet point to Venezuela and Greece over and over as a justification for using BTC over anything else. Surely the demand for BTC isn't being driven exclusively by people in nations with high inflation, right? This is especially true given that the large majority of people, would BTC really take over the world, would still hold their money in "banks". If BTC is a "store of value", then it is orthogonal to the banking industry and simply provides another investment vehicle like bonds to defend against keeping all of your wealth in currency.
- thatcat 9y ago
  Here is an alternative line of reasoning for developed nations using btc. The US has been borderline deflationary for the recent past. When people buy gov bonds to hedge their bets against instable currency they deflate the currency by removing it from circulation. If that money was moved into a different asset, it does not deflate the original currency since it was not purchased from the gov. If you store your money in housing or land or any other asset everyone needs for products like precious metals you deprive others of that asset by inflating the costs beyond the actual demand for that asset. BTC seems useful as a value store with real returns that does not effect other parts the currency economy.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    Bonds don't remove money from circulation. The government gets the cash and immediately spends it. The whole point of selling bonds is to obtain cash needed now to pay for things.
    - spookthesunset 9y ago
      You are kinda right. Bond's don't directly increase / decrease the money supply but they can be used as a tool to indirectly do so. In the US the Federal Reserve Bank buys and sells bonds (US Treasury Bills to be exact) as a way to increase / decrease the supply of money. It doesn't actually issue any bonds -- it just trades already issued US Treasury Bills. At a high level, When the Fed wants to increase the money supply, it will buy bonds on the open market with money it creates out of thin air. To decrease the money supply, it sells bonds on the open market instead and pockets the cash--removing it from circulation. Quantitative Easing is basically the same idea, only instead of short-term government bonds, the Fed purchases large-scale assets (like mortgage backed securities) instead. Why? Because if the economy is shitty enough and the interest rates are almost at zero, the conventional methods of stimulating the economy stop working... Macro-economics is pretty cool, actually.
thisisit 9y ago
> you money blocked in the bank, how it happened in argentina and Greece, Cyprus, where people got a 40% haircut on their deposits over 100k Ok, how does bitcoin solve a scenario where, bear with me, a country starts blocking the internet? Something which happened during Egypt revolution: https://www.accessnow.org/five-years-later-the-internet-shutdown-that-rocked-egypt/ https://www.accessnow.org/five-years-later-the-internet-shut...
- eof 9y ago
  to be fair basically all of our non-cash money would fail to work in that scenario
- down 9y ago
  bitcoin can work over satelite too, and sms even.
- avar 9y ago
  You'll still have 100% of your money instead of 60% in this example, and even if the entire local internet infrastructure was destroyed you could just take a flight out of the country with your bitcoin wallet on a USB stick.
  - nickrivadeneira 9y ago
    How are you paying for that flight?
    - avar 9y ago
      With local currency, literally nobody has significant BTC holdings such that they'd be impacted by a measure only targeting >$100K account balances, and not enough local cash to buy a plane ticket.
- stale2002 9y ago
  It is not good enough for a single country to block the internet. You need to shut off the ENTIRE internet, in order to stop bitcoin. In your egypt example, a person could simply call up a trusted party, perhaps a family member, over the PHONE, and send their bitcoin that way. And even if they don't have that, well they only have lost access to their bitcoin for the short period of time that the internet was shut down. Come back and talk to me about how shutting down the internet is an "attack vector" once ANY country at all has shut it down for a decade, without massive holes forming in there "shutdown". And seriously, if the world governments have done a complete shutdown of the world wide web, we have bigger problems. That is revolution time.
QML 9y ago
A movement against banks... and yet the latest increase in price is due to spectulation about how investment banks will start selling Bitcoin futures — how ironic.

by down 9y ago

dsacco 9y ago

> fact is that bitcoin is so much better than gold and fiat, which can be mass printed, or have you money blocked in the bank, how it happened in argentina and Greece, Cyprus, where people got a 40% haircut on their deposits over 100k, (check the inflation now in Turkey 13%) the money in the bank, you don't own them, bitcoin is at core a movement against banks, So many claims in one sentence! Here are a few questions for you, so I can understand your thesis better: 1. How do cryptocurrencies specifically improve upon fiat currencies’ inflation when they are prone to systemic volatility? Bitcoin experienced a 40% swing in price in one day, and frequently moves out of boundaries the CME has stated would cause them to shut down trading on their futures. 2. How do you propose to get a cryptocurrency to a place of price stability without a centralized authority? I’m not saying I don’t think it’s possible, I want to hear your prediction. 3. Implicit in your thesis is the idea that money should not have been mass printed - do you think the government was ignorant of the economic ramifications or made a calculated bet that didn’t work out? How do you expect a given decentralized blockchain to do better based only on the valuation consensus of the market? 4. As it stands, most cryptocurrencies are actually traded in centralized exchanges, where the person doesn’t technically have control or autonomy over their money. How is this meaningfully better than a bank? What do you propose to improve this other than, “people shouldn’t do that?” > whole argument against bitcoin is like the people were saying cars are so much worse than horses, because there are no paved roads, you need gas, maintenance, are noisy, can't scale, etc. 5. It’s easy in hindsight to say that cars are better than horses for mass transportation. This is because the “revolutions” that don’t work out are forgotten. For every example of horses and cars, people actually did know what they want, and it wasn’t the newfangled new thing, which turned out to be a solution looking for a problem. In other words, citing this example without further justification for your point is meaningless. 6. As a matter of fact, no, Bitcoin can’t scale. There are people reporting it can. There are people investigating it seriously. Look into the research - there are cryptocurrencies and blockchains that can scale, but they mostly do not use proof of work consensus systems, and they make trade-offs in Bitcoin’s original goals of decentralization and fault tolerance.

down 9y ago
Are prone now to such swings, 40%, I didn't heard of, that , recently, we are talking in 20 years, gold was as volatile when was decoupled from dollar. Do you know Fed is a private institution, it has as much authority as it has coca cola, atm 10 old white guys are deciding for you, but price will stabilize when there is a balance between in and out and a big enough market. If Guverments are not ignorant how come 2008 happened, I lost my job then and lots of hardships, people I know lost their houses, etc. The Guverment is not your friend. It can scale, lighting network + bigger blocks as the internet get better, other layers, servers get cheaper, the change from gold/silver coins to banknotes lasted 400 years you want in 7 years to be perfect.
justrobert 9y ago
The funny thing is a state level actor can spend <0.01% of their defense budget to take control of >51% of the network. That isn't even accounting for the fact they can knock others off the bitcoin network easily. If you have 10,000TH/s but cannot communicate with the network, that hash rate means nothing. DDoS or bad BGP routes, doesn't matter when the nodes have no way to talk.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  The US has largest defense budget by far, and .01% would be less than $100 million, right? Could you really create enough mining capacity for that to take over the network? Better question: by the time Bitcoin gets to the point that a government feels threatened enough to do this, will they be able to? And how will other governments respond? Will they start mining too so that no one government controls the network?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

spookthesunset 9y ago

> bitcoin is at core a movement against banks I think what you actually mean is bitcoin is at its core just a bunch of hype and hot air driven by internet televangelists who are very good at targeting a specific brand of libertarian an-cap. It is true though, at its core Bitcoin was a great way to purchase drugs, launder ill-gotten funds, hire a hitman, or collect ransomware money. But now days, there are better cryptocoins for that...

down 9y ago
cash is much better for that, and they catched those slik road guys because they were using bitcoin, if you look at what bitcoin does manly, it cuts off the banks, that's why are so scared, in Bulgaria they stopped all transfer to and from crypto exchanges, so you really think you own your money in bank?
- mirimir 9y ago
  > ... they catched those slik road guys because they were using bitcoin ... No, that caught them because they were careless. Ross linked Silk Road to his meatspace email address in posts to Bitcoin Forum. And misconfigured Apache to leak Silk Road error messages via clearnet. And kept personal information about his staff on a laptop (albeit LUKS-encrypted) that he used in a coffee shop, and at at public library. Also chat logs, and a comprehensive diary. Not Bitcoin!

UncleMeat 9y ago

It is so odd to me that all of the evangelists seem to come from well-off high-tech backgrounds in countries without any of these problems, yet point to Venezuela and Greece over and over as a justification for using BTC over anything else. Surely the demand for BTC isn't being driven exclusively by people in nations with high inflation, right? This is especially true given that the large majority of people, would BTC really take over the world, would still hold their money in "banks". If BTC is a "store of value", then it is orthogonal to the banking industry and simply provides another investment vehicle like bonds to defend against keeping all of your wealth in currency.

thatcat 9y ago
Here is an alternative line of reasoning for developed nations using btc. The US has been borderline deflationary for the recent past. When people buy gov bonds to hedge their bets against instable currency they deflate the currency by removing it from circulation. If that money was moved into a different asset, it does not deflate the original currency since it was not purchased from the gov. If you store your money in housing or land or any other asset everyone needs for products like precious metals you deprive others of that asset by inflating the costs beyond the actual demand for that asset. BTC seems useful as a value store with real returns that does not effect other parts the currency economy.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Bonds don't remove money from circulation. The government gets the cash and immediately spends it. The whole point of selling bonds is to obtain cash needed now to pay for things.
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    You are kinda right. Bond's don't directly increase / decrease the money supply but they can be used as a tool to indirectly do so. In the US the Federal Reserve Bank buys and sells bonds (US Treasury Bills to be exact) as a way to increase / decrease the supply of money. It doesn't actually issue any bonds -- it just trades already issued US Treasury Bills. At a high level, When the Fed wants to increase the money supply, it will buy bonds on the open market with money it creates out of thin air. To decrease the money supply, it sells bonds on the open market instead and pockets the cash--removing it from circulation. Quantitative Easing is basically the same idea, only instead of short-term government bonds, the Fed purchases large-scale assets (like mortgage backed securities) instead. Why? Because if the economy is shitty enough and the interest rates are almost at zero, the conventional methods of stimulating the economy stop working... Macro-economics is pretty cool, actually.

thisisit 9y ago

> you money blocked in the bank, how it happened in argentina and Greece, Cyprus, where people got a 40% haircut on their deposits over 100k Ok, how does bitcoin solve a scenario where, bear with me, a country starts blocking the internet? Something which happened during Egypt revolution: https://www.accessnow.org/five-years-later-the-internet-shutdown-that-rocked-egypt/ https://www.accessnow.org/five-years-later-the-internet-shut...

eof 9y ago
to be fair basically all of our non-cash money would fail to work in that scenario
down 9y ago
bitcoin can work over satelite too, and sms even.
avar 9y ago
You'll still have 100% of your money instead of 60% in this example, and even if the entire local internet infrastructure was destroyed you could just take a flight out of the country with your bitcoin wallet on a USB stick.
- nickrivadeneira 9y ago
  How are you paying for that flight?
  - avar 9y ago
    With local currency, literally nobody has significant BTC holdings such that they'd be impacted by a measure only targeting >$100K account balances, and not enough local cash to buy a plane ticket.
stale2002 9y ago
It is not good enough for a single country to block the internet. You need to shut off the ENTIRE internet, in order to stop bitcoin. In your egypt example, a person could simply call up a trusted party, perhaps a family member, over the PHONE, and send their bitcoin that way. And even if they don't have that, well they only have lost access to their bitcoin for the short period of time that the internet was shut down. Come back and talk to me about how shutting down the internet is an "attack vector" once ANY country at all has shut it down for a decade, without massive holes forming in there "shutdown". And seriously, if the world governments have done a complete shutdown of the world wide web, we have bigger problems. That is revolution time.

QML 9y ago

A movement against banks... and yet the latest increase in price is due to spectulation about how investment banks will start selling Bitcoin futures — how ironic.