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> That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it". > > SBF, Do Kwon, the Bitmex guys, how's that worked out for everyone? Well

> That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it". > > SBF, Do Kwon, the Bitmex guys, how's that worked out for everyone? Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. So in that sense they cannot control Bitcoin. Those you mentioned and the likes of Justin Sun (now charged for fraud), Mark Karpeles (from MtGox fame, who server prison time), the Quadriga guy, Crypsy, etc. have all one thing in common: they "exit scammed" / "rug pulled" / ponzi'ed and whatnots. The government collect taxes on realized gains honest people make selling cryptocurrencies they legally bought? The government send the likes of SBF to jail. As simple as that.

steveBK123 4y ago
If you do crime with it you go to jail. If you make profit in it you pay tax. So isn’t this just regular money with a bunch of extra steps? Sure the government can’t print bitcoin anymore than you or I can but.. the no devaluation angle is kind of meh in the face of its volatility and number of high profile frauds. No one should be sitting with a million dollars in the bank. Dollar denominated assets are a better inflation hedge than BTC. Some basket of bonds ETFs whatever.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  As we saw from the SVB weekend of tweets, none of the VCs who were going to reinvent the banking system with crypto actually understood how the existing one works, so...
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Right and the same VCs were also trying to reinvent every other system including our social interactions. You think they understand those?
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Do VCs understand social interaction? Again given my limited exposure to their twitter tantrums I’d have to say no, lol.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      And some of them control LLM AI.
kibwen 4y ago
> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both because the power draw makes them obvious to local grid operators and the immense waste heat makes them obvious to anyone with aerial surveillance imagery. Governments have plenty of funds to spend on ASICs and cruise missiles to hard-fork the network whenever they feel like it. At least the goldbugs are correct that there's only a finite amount of gold in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's limits, by comparison, are entirely arbitrary. (Of course, both of these ignore that fact that inflation is not solely caused by increases to the money supply, so it's unclear what trying to hard-cap the money supply actually achieves.)
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  That's definitely an aspect I never got. Cutting edge ASICs production, and their associated supply chains, are in fact even more centralized then the Federal Reserves + 9 next largest central banks. And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
- kinghajj 4y ago
  Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
    - x-complexity 4y ago

steveBK123 4y ago

If you do crime with it you go to jail. If you make profit in it you pay tax. So isn’t this just regular money with a bunch of extra steps? Sure the government can’t print bitcoin anymore than you or I can but.. the no devaluation angle is kind of meh in the face of its volatility and number of high profile frauds. No one should be sitting with a million dollars in the bank. Dollar denominated assets are a better inflation hedge than BTC. Some basket of bonds ETFs whatever.

steveBK123 4y ago
As we saw from the SVB weekend of tweets, none of the VCs who were going to reinvent the banking system with crypto actually understood how the existing one works, so...
- EGreg 4y ago
  Right and the same VCs were also trying to reinvent every other system including our social interactions. You think they understand those?
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Do VCs understand social interaction? Again given my limited exposure to their twitter tantrums I’d have to say no, lol.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    And some of them control LLM AI.

kibwen 4y ago

> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both because the power draw makes them obvious to local grid operators and the immense waste heat makes them obvious to anyone with aerial surveillance imagery. Governments have plenty of funds to spend on ASICs and cruise missiles to hard-fork the network whenever they feel like it. At least the goldbugs are correct that there's only a finite amount of gold in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's limits, by comparison, are entirely arbitrary. (Of course, both of these ignore that fact that inflation is not solely caused by increases to the money supply, so it's unclear what trying to hard-cap the money supply actually achieves.)

MichaelZuo 4y ago
That's definitely an aspect I never got. Cutting edge ASICs production, and their associated supply chains, are in fact even more centralized then the Federal Reserves + 9 next largest central banks. And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
kinghajj 4y ago
Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
  - x-complexity 4y ago