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Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That's it really, everything else is noise. I can sympathize with btc (I w
by jokethrowaway 6y ago
Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point:
Governments can't print more of it.
That's it really, everything else is noise.
I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits.
On top of this, governments could ban btc.
- raziel2701 6y agoI mean, the 21 million cap is just a line of code no? No reason why if enough people agree to it they could just print more. Or they could fork and print more no? I find it strange that people speak of bitcoin's scarcity as if it were a physical thing.
- ve55 6y agoGetting most people to agree to such a fork is likely impossible
- mindcandy 6y agoAgreed. There have been 21 million forks of Bitcoin with all manner of modifications. You don't hear about them because practically no one agrees with them enough to mine/trade/use them. You could make your own fork in an afternoon. The hard part is convincing anyone else to care.
- guidovranken 6y agoIt has happened before. Ethereum Classic is the "original" version of Ethereum, but it's a nondescript altcoin, while the one that reversed transactions is the number #2 in the world. I don't see why that can't happen to Bitcoin if the network participants (ideally normal users but practically the miners) and major stakeholders can benefit from it.
- scotty79 6y agoThey won't benefit because that will tank the price like nothing else.
- ve55 6y agoThat's a good point and example, but I just don't imagine them thinking they would benefit from it is all. The future holds many mysteries, so it's at least possible, but I definitely would not bet on it, knowing what I do now.
- sunshinerag 6y agoIt isn't as simple as that. Not only have you got to change that line of code, you need to convince all users of bitcoin to run that version of the code including miners. Otherwise you have forked the coin and you might be the only user of it (your version is incompatible with the rest).
- glitchc 6y agoYou don’t need most to agree. Just the basic majority (50%+). And of course that’s exactly what the major mining consortiums will do: Collude to increase the limit when it’s reached. After all, the rewards are in the mining, not the transaction fee.
- latchkey 6y agoThe transaction fees are extremely relevant to miners, it is currently the icing on the cake, but will become more relevant over time.
- yunesj 6y ago> You don’t need most to agree. Just the basic majority (50%+). And of course that’s exactly what the major mining consortiums will do You don't need anyone else to agree to start mining your own fork / altcoin. However, even if most of the miners change the protocol, it doesn't mean that the users will.
- glitchc 6y agoSure, but my coin isn’t worth $20,000. Or even $2.
- gruez 6y agoThe miners aren't the only ones enforcing the limit, so is every other bitcoin node out there. Just because you have 51% of the mining capacity doesn't mean everyone else (merchants, users, exchanges)[1] will agree. If they decide to unilaterally change the block reward all that would do is cause them to mine worthless blocks. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority
- rjurney 6y agoIsn’t this what Bitcoin Cash is? I’m really asking, but I thought so.
- mindcandy 6y agoBitcoin Cash is about trying to make transactions faster and cheaper by increasing the block size (and rate?). Upside: Might be able to use it directly to buy coffee with a reasonable UX. Downside: would likely lead to a small number of huge machines managing the world's blockchain. The Bitcoin Core group really wants people in poor nations to be able to run their own Bitcoin nodes on their cell phones eventually. They value decentralization above UX.
- almostdigital 6y agoNo, they want Bitcoin to be a "store of value", whatever that means. Poor people being able to run a full node on a low-end phone is pointless when a transaction fee due to the artificial block size limit is more than a months wages.
- gruez 6y ago>Poor people being able to run a full node on a low-end phone is pointless when a transaction fee due to the artificial block size limit is more than a months wages. or just wait for a lull in the transaction volume and pay pennies per tx? eg https://blockstream.info/tx/3b9ce26a827b014e5f6cda461f5fa11260b020d214c67ab54f8300f0f3e3a143 https://blockstream.info/tx/3b9ce26a827b014e5f6cda461f5fa112... from last block only paid 14 cents.
- dane-pgp 6y agoI'm not sure why every user needs to run a full node. Satoshi himself said that SPV clients would be enough for most users: "Simplified Payment Verification is for lightweight client-only users who only do transactions and don't generate and don't participate in the node network. They wouldn't need to download blocks, just the hash chain, which is currently about 2MB and very quick to verify (less than a second to verify the whole chain)."[0] It's not clear what benefit the user or the currency gains from having 90% of users running full nodes instead of, say, 50% or 10% doing so. In any case, when people in poor nations have phones that can manage uninterrupted 24/7 connections to the bitcoin network, they'll probably also be able to afford 2 TB of storage (currently costing about $50) which would be enough to store 10 years of 4 MB blocks. [0] https://blockchain.news/wiki/satoshi-quote-on-trust https://blockchain.news/wiki/satoshi-quote-on-trust
- deadbunny 6y agoSure it's a line of code but if you fork and change that line of code you need to find consensus on the network to accept your fork as the "true" Bitcoin. See Bitcoin cash for an example.
- steeve 6y agoWhy would they agree to that? Deflation is what guarantees the investment for most users.
- acjohnson55 6y ago> Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That only matters if Bitcoin has a monopoly for a given use case. Bitcoins chief advantage is its hash power, and therefore, its security. So far, the only use case I can think of that relies strongly on that is digital gold use case. For everything else, having a constrained money supply has side effects that are often pretty undesirable. Folks can simply mint new coins for those use cases.
- analog31 6y agoBut governments can subsidize the electricity to create new Bitcoins. Isn't that the same as printing money?
- jokethrowaway 6y agoThat would have an impact but you would still be constrained by the growing difficulty of the algorithm.
- thysultan 6y ago>Isn't that the same as printing money Yes, if electricity was FREE, at which point printing money is the best next logical step as you've achieved free energy with utopia just around the corner.
- rafaelero 6y agoNo. Blocks will always be mined with a 10 minutes interval between each other. It doesn't matter how much energy is being invested.
- rjurney 6y agoThe government finance system is run by finance executives who are investing in Bitcoin not so they can shut it down but to speculate and diversify.
- josalhor 6y ago> Governments can't print more of it. I never really understood that line of reasoning. Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country? Certainly, you could use Gold instead of Bitcoin as a similar investment tool, right?
- bconnorwhite 6y ago"Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?" What do you think happens to your currency when they print more of it? One problem with gold though is that we know where plenty of gold is, its just too expensive to mine. Once the price of gold rises, more gold becomes profitable to mine, supply increases, and the price goes back down.
- xapata 6y ago"They" print more every day. In the US, I think the economic stimulus has been a success this year. Trump should have spent his campaign talking about all the efforts to boost unemployment insurance benefits. He might have fared a bit better in the election.
- bconnorwhite 6y agoThe economic stimulus has certainly been a success for asset prices, in dollars...
- xapata 6y agoNot just asset prices. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-success https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-...
- everfree 6y ago> Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country? It might not be good for the people as a whole, but preventing your money from being inflated is very good for any given person taken individually.
- konjin 6y agoGovernment forks bitcoin, adds the ability for a trusted address to add more coins. Kills anyone who doesn't switch. Welcome to China, you just lost the majority of your mining pool.
- thysultan 6y agoAll governments would have to follow suit in lock step for that to work, at which point you have far bigger problems, i.e why not just nuke the internet all together, far easier.
- chii 6y agothat's just a normal bank with more steps. why even use bitcoin infrastructure when credit cards and digital banking is much easier/faster in this case?
- tekkk 6y agoI have been reading about people pining for gold standard but doesn't anyone anymore remember the Great Depression where the gold standard actually made the matters a lot worse when the governments couldn't print more money? I get the ideological pathos but gold standard doesn't seem very realistic to me anymore. Whenever a negative feedback loop happens in economy you want to have very robust means to stop it if necessary.
- ZguideZ 6y agoPerhaps the most powerful thing about Bitcoin is that the guy who created it is unknown (if Satoshi was a guy or a lone person at all) and that it mostly runs on autopilot and at this point is not governed by a single body. It can't be sued. The creator of it can't be sued. And yes, more of it can't be made and there is deflation built into it. Genius.
- leadingthenet 6y agoI think you mean deflation, the exact opposite of inflation, is built into Bitcoin.
- deegles 6y agoI mean... "can't" is a pretty strong word. Sure, they probably can't break SHA256 or elliptic cryptography, but you really think a government couldn't sanction every single [random crypto coin] developer, seize every obtainable asset, and generally strong-arm them into changing the rules? I think people are not being imaginative enough with the tools state entities have at their disposal to coerce whatever result they want.
- rafaelero 6y agoIt is next to impossible to seize bitcoin if you make it so. The government could try coerce custodial companies, but it will only be effective on the first time; next time, people will move their bitcoins to safer places where government intromission will be immensely costly.