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> an unstable society or one facing high inflation What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and e
by jmcqk6 6y ago
> an unstable society or one facing high inflation
What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?
- temp8964 6y agoI don't think cactus2093 meant US / western world.
- jmcqk6 6y agoI get that I said USD, but the fundamental premise doesn't get that altered. Bitcoin is heavily resource intensive. In an environment that is already resource pressed either due to political instability/natural disaster/inflation/whatever, what are the chances that the resources are going to be found that can actually operate bitcoin, and won't be better utilizied elsewhere?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- malaya_zemlya 6y agoYou don't need to do mining in the disaster affected area. You need _someone_ to mine and to confirm transactions, but that can happen anywhere the world.
- pvarangot 6y agoWhat about usable but inconvenient? Most of the world is like that, Africa, China, India, for large transactions gold or the USD is inconvenient and dangerous. Venezuela, Argentina, are other examples closer to the US.
- thinkmassive 6y agoLike yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-reserve-nationwide-outage-impacts-us-banking-system/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...
- 542458 6y agoThat didn’t affect 99.9+% of people, and is a far cry from the USD being “unusable”.
- thinkmassive 6y agoCongratulations on not needing to send a wire transfer or ACH during the outage. For anyone who was expecting to do that, it was literally unusable. Your take is like claiming a major AWS outage didn’t happen because you personally didn’t get on the Internet that day.
- tdeck 6y agoMost ACH transactions take 3+ business days to settle anyway since it's a batch processing system.
- RussianCow 6y agoThe original comment was talking about USD not being usable, not ACH. Having to delay money transfers for a day does not make a currency unusable.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoHow many people would have noticed, if not for the headlines?
- thinkmassive 6y agoAnyone trying to send money using ACH. Maybe that doesn’t include you, but many regular people use it on an everyday basis.
- RestlessMind 6y agoIn my lifetime, if I were to compare 3 numbers - no. of hours there was no electricity (X), no. of hours there was no mobile data coverage so that I could continue doing transactions without electricity (Y) and no. of hours Fedwie/ACH was down (Z) which prevented me from bank transfers, I'd say X and Y and at least 2 orders of magnitude bigger than Z. If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.
- kristiandupont 6y agoIt might be available, but you might not be able to open a bank account for it. You can store cash of course, but that has a different set of problems.
- lambda 6y agoArgentina?
- thebean11 6y ago> What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable? The post you replied to said unstable or high inflation, not unusable. An unstable dollar will not instantly bring about the apocalypse, there are plenty of real life examples of unstable, high inflation currencies. The currencies took years to fully fail. Not to mention, a few years of hyper-inflation don't even imply that the currency will fail.
- iso1631 6y agoIn the 80s and 90s, Greek inflation was in the 15-20% range. Italy dropped to 5% more quickly but at the start of the 80s was in the 20% range. In the 70s UK inflation was 10-20%. that type of inflation is clearly bad for keeping cash, but not going to cause the collapse of civilisation. From about 73 - 80 US inflation was in the region of 10% per year.
- csomar 6y agoBitcoin can actually be quite resilient to that. Also the USD failing, doesn't necessarily mean a global world war. The US can go the way of the Soviet Union or the British Empire.
- pjc50 6y agoI think we're more likely to see a Texas scenario in the US: the electricity becomes unreliable, but the money remains stable. Users of USD or EUR worried about inflation and getting into Bitcoin are really worrying about the wrong kind of tail risk. Users of other non-hard currencies have more of a point.