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> What problem does Bitcoin, solve? Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's har

by azth 5y ago

> What problem does Bitcoin, solve? Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard. Of course, things are very volatile now, but hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes.

erehweb 5y ago
We already have gold, though.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  But not a gold standard. The powers that be have manipulated the price of gold such that its an open secret that it will never be worth anything.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Gold is heavy, needs to be physically sent, and where do you store loads of it? Crypto seems more practical to own and trade. Or do you mean owning a document that is backed by gold? Not the same is it?
  - foepys 5y ago
    You don't actually own cryto currencies either. You own the key, equivalent to the document you mentioned. If something happened to the blockchain, your key would be worthless. Much like a bank that got robbed. Storing crypto currencies is also very expensive, at least for all popular ones. Proof of Work requires to chrun out hashes to secure the network from external threats and in the car of Bitcoin it costs billions each year. Compared to the relatively low number of users it's very expensive and resource intensive.
    - keymone 5y ago
      this is just false. the document is just assignment of rights while they key is literal asset. trying to equate the two means you either don't understand or you have some agenda.
      - foepys 5y ago
        Why don't you explain why it isn't like this? Instead you accuse me of having an agenda, that is a very weak argument in a discussion. The fact is, you cannot touch crypto currency or take it home, you can just tell somebody else to move it to another vault. You cannot do it yourself unless you are lucky enough to mine the block with the transaction in it, which is futile unless you have a mining farm. It's closer to a document than a physical key to a safe deposit box at a bank.
        keymone 5y ago
        absolutely false and misses the entire point - with document you own nothing but the document. whatever that document says can become false in an instant. whatever gold you are promised by that document might not even be where it purports to be. with bitcoin key you own the bitcoin and you always know (can trivially verify) that your bitcoin is there.
        foepys 5y ago
        You don't own the Bitcoin. You own a private key. If somebody else got the private key, they could drain the funds. That far from owning something. There is a saying in the CC world: not your keys, not your coins. What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams. There have also been a plethora of scams in the crypto currency world. Making the distinction there is quite strange.
        keymone 5y ago
        > What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams yes, thanks, that's exactly what current financial and banking system is - a gigantic scam. all you own is bunch of documents pinky-promising that your assets are there, except they are not. and yes, if your private key is stolen - your asset is stolen, that's how real ownership of a digital asset works. strange is you trying to equate ownership of IOUs, that make you entirely dependent on some third party, in terms of accessing your assets, and ownership of a private key, which is the only way anybody can ever access your assets.
- silentsea90 5y ago
  Gold doesn't give you near instant finality and requires either transporting heavy gold for large txns or transact in IOUs which is like transacting in cash, since a centralized party handling your gold is to be trusted with the issued currency.
- bradwood 5y ago
  Gold can be confiscated by the state also as happened in the past. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
  - caf 5y ago
    It seems that bitcoin can be too. https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2020/febbitcoinauction/ https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2020/febbitcoinauction/
    - bradwood 5y ago
      Not if I use a brain wallet. Short of torture they cannot take your bitcoin without your keys.
brazzy 5y ago
> Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard. That is Bitcoin creating a problem, not solving one. Inflation does not "devalue everyone's hard work", deflation does, by pumping up the value of debt relative to labor, i.e. making the rich richer and the poor poorer. > hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes. Given that their price is 100% based on speculation: not bloody likely.
- throwaway248329 5y ago
  The rich does not hoard fiat, they own assets which go up in price as the money supply increases. Meanwhile the poor has its savings eroded, their paychecks have less and less buying power and they are forced to negotiate to get a raise to simply stop becoming poorer.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    If you have substantial savings, you are not poor. "The poor" generally is in debt. As are states. And that debt in turn forms part of the assets held by the rich.
    - throwaway248329 5y ago
      The rich are also in debt, because the debt is cheap, especially if you're already rich. So inflation benefits the rich not only by increasing the value of their assets but also by wiping out their debt.
- 127 5y ago
  Government flooding the market with cheap money has so far gone mostly to inflating asset prices. Who owns the assets? The rich. Who does not? The poor.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Note that I did not mention assets, I mentioned debt. Who is in debt? The poor. Who owns that debt as creditors? The rich.
rapsey 5y ago
> to something closer to the gold standard. So you prefer the great depression style of economic crisis as opposed to inflationary periods? Also people here greatly benefited from vast liquidity flowing into startups. You think that is possible in an inelastic currency? Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete.
- throwaway248329 5y ago
  > Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete. About half of the world's population lives in an authoritarian regime. Having a savings account that is not tied to your ID, is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    > is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important. So refugees who have the knowledge, internet and banking such that would allow them to purchase crypto.
    - throwaway248329 5y ago
      You don't need to have a bank account to buy Bitcoin. P2P trading is huge in Nigeria.
xenadu02 5y ago
I have some news for you: Gold has been both deflationary and inflationary over historical time... because its supply varies based on how much miners can dig out of the ground. That quantity may or may not relate whatsoever to the amount of value the economy created over the same time period. Instead of being at the mercy of a central bank you're at the mercy of the mining industry and how many gold deposits have been found. When the Spanish brought their stolen Gold back from the Americas it more or less ruined their economy by flooding it with cheap money (tons of Gold chasing too few things of value). A similar crash in Silver happened when the Comstock Lode was found. If you imagine that a precious metal standard would make the economy more stable you are absolutely wrong and history proves that. Gold is only preferable when the monetary authority has lost so much credibility they can't control the value of the currency anymore. Pegging one's currency to the US dollar is a modern equivalent of that idea. Of course now your entire economy is at the mercy of (US Dollar/Gold/Silver). If things go really well and you produce 25% more widgets... well congrats, prices across the economy must fall because there is a fixed amount of gold available to circulate or be stored. Of course that's not really possible so the distortions happen in lots of other ways and people inevitably turn to privately issued paper or bartering just to make life possible. Bitcoin has many of the same problems (inability to adjust money supply to economic activity) but it is slightly better than gold: we know it is deflationary (the supply of new coins decreases over time) so in theory all BT loans can have negative interest rates to account for that (deflation "cancelling out" part of the negative rate).
scatters 5y ago
Even taking for the sake of argument that inflation is a bad thing, what's to stop a government forking the blockchain to expand the money supply?

by azth 5y ago

erehweb 5y ago

We already have gold, though.

oceanghost 5y ago
But not a gold standard. The powers that be have manipulated the price of gold such that its an open secret that it will never be worth anything.
koonsolo 5y ago
Gold is heavy, needs to be physically sent, and where do you store loads of it? Crypto seems more practical to own and trade. Or do you mean owning a document that is backed by gold? Not the same is it?
- foepys 5y ago
  You don't actually own cryto currencies either. You own the key, equivalent to the document you mentioned. If something happened to the blockchain, your key would be worthless. Much like a bank that got robbed. Storing crypto currencies is also very expensive, at least for all popular ones. Proof of Work requires to chrun out hashes to secure the network from external threats and in the car of Bitcoin it costs billions each year. Compared to the relatively low number of users it's very expensive and resource intensive.
  - keymone 5y ago
    this is just false. the document is just assignment of rights while they key is literal asset. trying to equate the two means you either don't understand or you have some agenda.
    - foepys 5y ago
      Why don't you explain why it isn't like this? Instead you accuse me of having an agenda, that is a very weak argument in a discussion. The fact is, you cannot touch crypto currency or take it home, you can just tell somebody else to move it to another vault. You cannot do it yourself unless you are lucky enough to mine the block with the transaction in it, which is futile unless you have a mining farm. It's closer to a document than a physical key to a safe deposit box at a bank.
      - keymone 5y ago
        absolutely false and misses the entire point - with document you own nothing but the document. whatever that document says can become false in an instant. whatever gold you are promised by that document might not even be where it purports to be. with bitcoin key you own the bitcoin and you always know (can trivially verify) that your bitcoin is there.
        foepys 5y ago
        You don't own the Bitcoin. You own a private key. If somebody else got the private key, they could drain the funds. That far from owning something. There is a saying in the CC world: not your keys, not your coins. What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams. There have also been a plethora of scams in the crypto currency world. Making the distinction there is quite strange.
        keymone 5y ago
        > What you are talking about in regards to documents are scams yes, thanks, that's exactly what current financial and banking system is - a gigantic scam. all you own is bunch of documents pinky-promising that your assets are there, except they are not. and yes, if your private key is stolen - your asset is stolen, that's how real ownership of a digital asset works. strange is you trying to equate ownership of IOUs, that make you entirely dependent on some third party, in terms of accessing your assets, and ownership of a private key, which is the only way anybody can ever access your assets.
silentsea90 5y ago
Gold doesn't give you near instant finality and requires either transporting heavy gold for large txns or transact in IOUs which is like transacting in cash, since a centralized party handling your gold is to be trusted with the issued currency.
bradwood 5y ago
Gold can be confiscated by the state also as happened in the past. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
- caf 5y ago
  It seems that bitcoin can be too. https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2020/febbitcoinauction/ https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2020/febbitcoinauction/
  - bradwood 5y ago
    Not if I use a brain wallet. Short of torture they cannot take your bitcoin without your keys.

brazzy 5y ago

> Moving away from an inflationary currency that the government is able to keep printing more of and devaluing everyone's hard work, to something closer to the gold standard. That is Bitcoin creating a problem, not solving one. Inflation does not "devalue everyone's hard work", deflation does, by pumping up the value of debt relative to labor, i.e. making the rich richer and the poor poorer. > hopefully in the future the price of the major crypto currencies stabilizes. Given that their price is 100% based on speculation: not bloody likely.

throwaway248329 5y ago
The rich does not hoard fiat, they own assets which go up in price as the money supply increases. Meanwhile the poor has its savings eroded, their paychecks have less and less buying power and they are forced to negotiate to get a raise to simply stop becoming poorer.
- brazzy 5y ago
  If you have substantial savings, you are not poor. "The poor" generally is in debt. As are states. And that debt in turn forms part of the assets held by the rich.
  - throwaway248329 5y ago
    The rich are also in debt, because the debt is cheap, especially if you're already rich. So inflation benefits the rich not only by increasing the value of their assets but also by wiping out their debt.
127 5y ago
Government flooding the market with cheap money has so far gone mostly to inflating asset prices. Who owns the assets? The rich. Who does not? The poor.
- brazzy 5y ago
  Note that I did not mention assets, I mentioned debt. Who is in debt? The poor. Who owns that debt as creditors? The rich.

rapsey 5y ago

> to something closer to the gold standard. So you prefer the great depression style of economic crisis as opposed to inflationary periods? Also people here greatly benefited from vast liquidity flowing into startups. You think that is possible in an inelastic currency? Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete.

throwaway248329 5y ago
> Crypto solves problems very few people have. The enthusiasm relies on uneducated naivete. About half of the world's population lives in an authoritarian regime. Having a savings account that is not tied to your ID, is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important.
- rapsey 5y ago
  > is not seizable by the State and that can be easily transferred if you have to flee the country is important. So refugees who have the knowledge, internet and banking such that would allow them to purchase crypto.
  - throwaway248329 5y ago
    You don't need to have a bank account to buy Bitcoin. P2P trading is huge in Nigeria.

xenadu02 5y ago

I have some news for you: Gold has been both deflationary and inflationary over historical time... because its supply varies based on how much miners can dig out of the ground. That quantity may or may not relate whatsoever to the amount of value the economy created over the same time period. Instead of being at the mercy of a central bank you're at the mercy of the mining industry and how many gold deposits have been found. When the Spanish brought their stolen Gold back from the Americas it more or less ruined their economy by flooding it with cheap money (tons of Gold chasing too few things of value). A similar crash in Silver happened when the Comstock Lode was found. If you imagine that a precious metal standard would make the economy more stable you are absolutely wrong and history proves that. Gold is only preferable when the monetary authority has lost so much credibility they can't control the value of the currency anymore. Pegging one's currency to the US dollar is a modern equivalent of that idea. Of course now your entire economy is at the mercy of (US Dollar/Gold/Silver). If things go really well and you produce 25% more widgets... well congrats, prices across the economy must fall because there is a fixed amount of gold available to circulate or be stored. Of course that's not really possible so the distortions happen in lots of other ways and people inevitably turn to privately issued paper or bartering just to make life possible. Bitcoin has many of the same problems (inability to adjust money supply to economic activity) but it is slightly better than gold: we know it is deflationary (the supply of new coins decreases over time) so in theory all BT loans can have negative interest rates to account for that (deflation "cancelling out" part of the negative rate).

scatters 5y ago

Even taking for the sake of argument that inflation is a bad thing, what's to stop a government forking the blockchain to expand the money supply?