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> A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Ignoring the week-long

> A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Ignoring the week-long wire detail (which deserves an explanation because that doesn't resonate with my experience), depending on when you sent that transaction, your wire could've lost a decent amount of value due to the price instability of bitcoin. Losing 5% in a matter of minutes because everyone is panicking is not a good deal.

meltyness 4y ago
You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability. It's silly to try and compare software to what is essentially a government-financial-corporate feedback loop and it's behaviors. Every country could severely limit mining, and the supply would continue its steady velocity, whereas sometimes executive behavior spurs financial institutions to simply make the federal banks buy everything. Fractional reserve banking is an inherently unstable system. True federation is not. Ethereum crossed a similar threshold at the merge reducing the calculus, but it's not clear to me if there are any more "difficulty bombs" built in where executive control can be expressed, say in the consensus layer where unilateral control can be expressed over supply.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability. No, I'm talking about the exchange rate. I don't care what bitcoin means internally or how it functions, I care about what it's worth on the market today and tomorrow, because there's no to way live in the purely crypto world. That's the whole point of a currency, that you and I agree that some instrument of value will stay consistent enough to transact with. Crypto is just not there because the ecosystem is full of scams. You could design a perfectly federated system that's worthless because bad actors abuse the platform. If you build a system that assumes everyone is a criminal, then that's what you wind up building, a system in which everyone is a criminal.
mhluongo 4y ago
We have stable coins that can get you both.
- abakker 4y ago
  Both the loss of capital and the inconvenience of an exchange rate?

meltyness 4y ago

You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability. It's silly to try and compare software to what is essentially a government-financial-corporate feedback loop and it's behaviors. Every country could severely limit mining, and the supply would continue its steady velocity, whereas sometimes executive behavior spurs financial institutions to simply make the federal banks buy everything. Fractional reserve banking is an inherently unstable system. True federation is not. Ethereum crossed a similar threshold at the merge reducing the calculus, but it's not clear to me if there are any more "difficulty bombs" built in where executive control can be expressed, say in the consensus layer where unilateral control can be expressed over supply.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability. No, I'm talking about the exchange rate. I don't care what bitcoin means internally or how it functions, I care about what it's worth on the market today and tomorrow, because there's no to way live in the purely crypto world. That's the whole point of a currency, that you and I agree that some instrument of value will stay consistent enough to transact with. Crypto is just not there because the ecosystem is full of scams. You could design a perfectly federated system that's worthless because bad actors abuse the platform. If you build a system that assumes everyone is a criminal, then that's what you wind up building, a system in which everyone is a criminal.

mhluongo 4y ago

We have stable coins that can get you both.

abakker 4y ago
Both the loss of capital and the inconvenience of an exchange rate?