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Three highly speculative predictions: 1. The courts are more likely than not to rule that many crypto-assets -- but not all -- should be regulated as investmen

by cs702 3y ago

Three highly speculative predictions: 1. The courts are more likely than not to rule that many crypto-assets -- but not all -- should be regulated as investments. It won't be fun for a lot of crypto traders. 2. Over time, the usual giant financial institutions are bound to become the dominant market makers in crypto-assets. In all likelihood, one of them will end up buying Coinbase. Those giant financial institutions already know how to comply with regulatory bureaucracies worldwide, efficiently, at scale. Rinky-dink exchanges lacking the machinery for large-scale efficient compliance will not be able to compete and go out of business. 3. Bitcoin, which the SEC considers a commodity (it's explicitly excluded from the lawsuits), is bound to become even more dominant in terms of market capitalization. The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ . We sure live in interesting times!

misnome 3y ago
3 - The “value” is higher, but can you actually do more with it now than you could five years ago? Hasn’t the entire community given up on buying things such that they know pretend that was never the goal? Without any real way to convert back and forth into real money, what reassurance is there that the price even means anything when every single holder is incentivised to lie and transact with themselves just to keep the numbers up? How can a global system capable of five transactions a second ever be integrated into “the world’s financial fabric”? Side-chains seem to just be a great way to centralise around more unknown entities who may or may not run off with your cash.
- cs702 3y ago
  > ...can you actually do more with it [I assume you mean Bitcoin] now than you could five years ago? Not really. To date, Bitcoin has been used successfully only as an alternate store of value -- one which, like gold, doesn't depend on the financial credibility of a particular government or country. Bitcoin's continued existence depends only on the integrity of its distributed consensus algorithm, which so far has withstood all attempts at hacking it. The "alternate store of value" opportunity is not small. Gold alone has a current market capitalization of $12.9 trillion.[a] --- [a] https://companiesmarketcap.com/gold/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/gold/marketcap/
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It's incredibly volatile.
    - cs702 3y ago
      Gold is pretty volatile too. Its price has gone up and down between 5x and 10x a few times in just the past century: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... -- no one sane would call it stable. And yet, despite its volatility, gold has been used as a store of value for millennia.
      - mminer237 3y ago
        In the last 5 fives, gold's highest price was 60% higher than its lowest point. That is indeed pretty volatile. Let's see if Bitcoin is comparably volatile… Oh, it's highest point was only 1920% higher than its lowest point. That's definitely the exact same as gold. /s Also, that ignores that gold has been a store of value for millennia. It's almost synonymous with wealth. In a total financial collapse, if all modern technology dies, you can be sure gold will still have value. 99.9% of people have no idea what Bitcoin is besides funny computer money.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        Even if people WANTED bitcoin in a total financial collapse, what scenario collapses all normal fiat currencies and doesn't touch a system that requires cheap power and niche hardware and internet connections?
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        XorNot 3y ago
        Gold has a perception of wealth but history makes clear what it actually is. For example, the hordes of gold the Spanish plundered from the Americas directly contributed to the bankruptcy of the monarchy.[1] Because they hadn't actually seized/mined "wealth" - they'd simply inflated their currency away without any commensurate expansion in productivity. People who believe that it would be "easy" to trade gold for other goods have also clearly never tried - since the entire modern banking system came into existence on the basis of the sheer difficulty of directly trading gold for other goods. No one knows how to value gold, they don't know what it's worth other then a brick is probably a lot. If they could, then the fake jewellery scam wouldn't be as successful as it is[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution [2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-gold-jewelry-scammers-target-people-near-i-5-again/AYEVLPGKPVARFLCKBQUEXGXVHA/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-...
otoburb 3y ago
>>If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back as the 1970s (!!).[1] The Lindy effect[2] works until it doesn't. Taleb popularized the theory in pop-culture with his books, but the problem is that it's seemingly impossible to know when/if something will collapse/fail to the point that this "effect" doesn't seem all that useful as a predictive indicator. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- cs702 3y ago
  The comparison to Madoff is not apt. Madoff hid losses by committing accounting fraud, whereas every single transaction in the Bitcoin network is visible to everyone and, moreover, cryptographically verifiable by everyone. As long as the distributed consensus algorithm continues to function, Bitcoin will continue to exist. Period. (Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gold.) Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning.
  - thworp 3y ago
    No, this is an absolutely ass-backwards argument. To be a currency or a store of value or money (read: to be of any use) it has to be exchangeable for goods and services. Now we can see transactions on the blockchain but we have no idea what that transaction was for. *Nobody* can tell you what a bitcoins worth of wheat is without resorting to exchange rates of bitcoin to actual currencies. But because the entire exchange ecosystem is so illiquid, intransparent, unaudited and rife with fraud there is no way to know how many bushels of wheat you could get for something like 13 BTC.
    - nwiswell 3y ago
thworp 3y ago
Oh please, again with the "store of value" BS. I made an effort to look at the actual volume of bitcoin being traded in and out of the system (aka actual entries and exits, not just fraud-prone exchange swaps) in 2020 and I concluded that it's probably worse than most scam penny stocks in terms of liquidity. It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was just a gigantic scam.
- sacrosancty 3y ago
  [dead]
- tasuki 3y ago
  > It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was just a gigantic scam. Interesting! If I couldn't find reliable data, I'd have concluded that I didn't know.
derbOac 3y ago
Bitcoin is puzzling to me, in that a commodity usually has some value outside of a trading market per se. That is, it is usually consumable in some abstract sense. I'm not sure what you would "do" with Bitcoin other than as some form of currency. In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computation, other than "just" as a currency. I'm not disputing what you're saying about the SEC position regarding Bitcoin, it just seems to highlight for me something a bit off about the SEC position, even if it is favorable in certain ways toward Bitcoin. I come away from all of this feeling a little like neither the SEC nor the crypto community at large are quite being honest or accurate about what's going on with crypto or how it should be regulated.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  My inner conspiracy theorist would say that given the crypto market situation and state of ETH and Bitcoin as platforms SEC actions indicate that Bitcoin might have something in its design that US government wants vs ETH.
  - anaganisk 3y ago
    Market dominance?
  - politician 3y ago
    I'll bite: Bitcoin transaction networks are fully transparent to analysis.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      So do ETH. It must be more obscure than that.
- jfengel 3y ago
  In theory, you could think of bitcoin as electricity that has already been consumed. To replace it, you would have to burn more electricity. The bitcoin concept is to manifest that burned electricity as a tradeable value. That is the sense in which it's commodity-like. It's the underlying electricity which is consumed. It's far from clear that this is really valid, but that's the sense of it.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > as a store of value Bitcoin failed as a store of value, it's up some 20,000% since 2010 and basically infinty since the day of its first trade (back when the first bitcoin was traded for some trivial amount of electricity) Store of value is a very specific term
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong: You're arguing that because Bitcoin hasn't met its demise, it will therefore be widely adopted as a "store of value"? As if there are only two possible outcomes: Complete failure or complete dominance as a store of value. This is where your argument doesn't make any sense. I suspect we'll discover that all of these altcoins and weird financial instruments didn't actually detract from Bitcoin at all. Rather, they contributed to its rise by juicing demand and pumping huge amounts of leverage and pseudo-liquidity into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. If crypto becomes boring, I don't think the natural conclusion is that adoption will increase.
- cs702 3y ago
  The longer Bitcoin's network continues to function, the more people will become aware of its resiliency. Governments may topple; banks may fail; exchanges may go bust; Bitcoin keeps on ticking. Difficult-to-forge assets that can survive the failures of governments, banks, exchanges, etc. tend to gain adoption as stores of value. There aren't a lot of assets like that. Gold is one. Bitcoin appears to be one too.
codegeek 3y ago
"The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric," How long do we need to give Bitcoin a chance to gain mainstream adoption as its been 15 years already ? So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part.
- icedchai 3y ago
  They follow it on CNBC and have for a while. It's as mainstream as any stock.
  - clymbidia 3y ago
    A presence on CNBC is very obviously not the "mainstream adoption" that was meant. Adoption as in, I can spend this token in legitimate and common means, not just to buy a battery operated car for a short while or on small subset of non-nefarious online market places.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    It's mainstream for trading. It's not mainstream for conducting transactions.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      Do you typically conduct transactions using gold and silver? Bitcoin is closer to a commodity than a currency.
- sacrosancty 3y ago
  [dead]
- cs702 3y ago
  > How long do we need to give Bitcoin a chance to gain mainstream adoption as its been 15 years already? "We" don't need to give it a chance. Time is giving it a chance, every new day, indefinitely. For all I know, it could take decades, not years, for Bitcoin to gain as much credibility as, say, gold, which has been around since the advent of ancient human civilizations. I don't know. Maybe it will happen much faster, like everything else online? > So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part. The biggest use of Bitcoin today is as an alternate store of value, by a large mass of "HODLers" who, as their name suggests, will hold on to it for dear life. Bitcoin is not the main asset used for speculation, extortion, scams, ransoms, drug deals, etc., today. The main asset used for illegal activities today, worldwide, is the US dollar. It's not a coincidence that the briefcase full of $100 bills is a prop in so many movies/TV series depicting illegal shenanigans. I suspect that more money is stolen in USD via hacked bank accounts, hacked credit cards, hacked online accounts, hacked SIMs, etc. than in BTC via difficult-and-dangerous-to-execute online ransoms.
staunton 3y ago
> The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. > We sure live in interesting times! I'm not really sure it's that interesting, or new at least. Since ancient times people have valued things as a store of value that have have been valued by other people as a store of value for a long time. Some of the best material examples are gold, silver, natural gemstones and works of art. These things are overpriced by orders of magnitude compared to their material economic value. Bitcoin just takes it to the extreme in having negative objective physical value, i.e., in being immaterial and physically completely worthless, while taking up resources to even exist as a concept or meme. So sure, it very well might be here to stay as a store of value for a long time. If history is any guide on these matters, it will be a store of value (and a profitable area of speculation) for the rich and big powerful institutions while the enduring and persistent meme in the heads of the common people keeps its value alive.
peteradio 3y ago
Why would anyone adopt Bitcoin into the financial fabric? That would be paying for something you can spin up for free.
progrus 3y ago
It’s bigger than the US. People are starting to get it.
__loam 3y ago
> as a store of value Bitcoin is fundamentally a terrible store of value thanks to how fuckin volatile it is.
discodave 3y ago
1. Agree 2. Err, I can't see any big banks or other entities touching COIN, and the CRIMINAL proceedings that it will likely be embroiled in with a 10-ft pole! 3. Maybe BTC will come to 'dominate' the 'crypto' space, but that space will be a smaller and smaller part of the US (and global) economy. Although it never got very big to start with. BTC is used for approximately 0.0% of US transactions right now (rounded to nearest decimal place).
Waterluvian 3y ago
I have no idea about bitcoin’s demise, but I don’t understand how anyone can call it a store of value with a straight face. Or do they mean conceptually it is, even if it’s a terribly volatile one?
anon-3988 3y ago
> 3. Bitcoin, which the SEC considers a commodity (it's explicitly excluded from the lawsuits), is bound to become even more dominant in terms of market capitalization. The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ . I have not seen a single of use Bitcoin within 50km of me _and_ online outside of uses in degenerate countries and trading them for the sole purpose of trading them. This feels like flat-earth theory, which will never go away, but their "science" if you call it that, is so flawed that they can't be used for anything outside of small terrestrial physics. Similarly, Bitcoin itself will never go away. But there is no way the average folk will be able to wield them given how many times they have been scammed out of their fortune.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Maybe. I don't see people using gold for finances within 50km of me, but it's going to be around forever.
  - anon-3988 3y ago
    And? I am not advocating for gold either. Gold hinges on the fact that its yellow and nice to look at or whatever. It is entirely feasible for the world to be possessed by zeitgeist such that gold or anything yellow doesn't mean particularly much. This could happen, for example, if gold and diamonds can be manufactured artificially. What then?
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Then it wouldn't be worth as much and its 10,000+ year run would be over. PS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper
    - TacticalCoder 3y ago

by cs702 3y ago

misnome 3y ago

3 - The “value” is higher, but can you actually do more with it now than you could five years ago? Hasn’t the entire community given up on buying things such that they know pretend that was never the goal? Without any real way to convert back and forth into real money, what reassurance is there that the price even means anything when every single holder is incentivised to lie and transact with themselves just to keep the numbers up? How can a global system capable of five transactions a second ever be integrated into “the world’s financial fabric”? Side-chains seem to just be a great way to centralise around more unknown entities who may or may not run off with your cash.

cs702 3y ago
> ...can you actually do more with it [I assume you mean Bitcoin] now than you could five years ago? Not really. To date, Bitcoin has been used successfully only as an alternate store of value -- one which, like gold, doesn't depend on the financial credibility of a particular government or country. Bitcoin's continued existence depends only on the integrity of its distributed consensus algorithm, which so far has withstood all attempts at hacking it. The "alternate store of value" opportunity is not small. Gold alone has a current market capitalization of $12.9 trillion.[a] --- [a] https://companiesmarketcap.com/gold/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/gold/marketcap/
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It's incredibly volatile.
  - cs702 3y ago
    Gold is pretty volatile too. Its price has gone up and down between 5x and 10x a few times in just the past century: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... -- no one sane would call it stable. And yet, despite its volatility, gold has been used as a store of value for millennia.
    - mminer237 3y ago
      In the last 5 fives, gold's highest price was 60% higher than its lowest point. That is indeed pretty volatile. Let's see if Bitcoin is comparably volatile… Oh, it's highest point was only 1920% higher than its lowest point. That's definitely the exact same as gold. /s Also, that ignores that gold has been a store of value for millennia. It's almost synonymous with wealth. In a total financial collapse, if all modern technology dies, you can be sure gold will still have value. 99.9% of people have no idea what Bitcoin is besides funny computer money.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Even if people WANTED bitcoin in a total financial collapse, what scenario collapses all normal fiat currencies and doesn't touch a system that requires cheap power and niche hardware and internet connections?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - XorNot 3y ago
        Gold has a perception of wealth but history makes clear what it actually is. For example, the hordes of gold the Spanish plundered from the Americas directly contributed to the bankruptcy of the monarchy.[1] Because they hadn't actually seized/mined "wealth" - they'd simply inflated their currency away without any commensurate expansion in productivity. People who believe that it would be "easy" to trade gold for other goods have also clearly never tried - since the entire modern banking system came into existence on the basis of the sheer difficulty of directly trading gold for other goods. No one knows how to value gold, they don't know what it's worth other then a brick is probably a lot. If they could, then the fake jewellery scam wouldn't be as successful as it is[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution [2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-gold-jewelry-scammers-target-people-near-i-5-again/AYEVLPGKPVARFLCKBQUEXGXVHA/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-...

otoburb 3y ago

>>If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back as the 1970s (!!).[1] The Lindy effect[2] works until it doesn't. Taleb popularized the theory in pop-culture with his books, but the problem is that it's seemingly impossible to know when/if something will collapse/fail to the point that this "effect" doesn't seem all that useful as a predictive indicator. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

cs702 3y ago
The comparison to Madoff is not apt. Madoff hid losses by committing accounting fraud, whereas every single transaction in the Bitcoin network is visible to everyone and, moreover, cryptographically verifiable by everyone. As long as the distributed consensus algorithm continues to function, Bitcoin will continue to exist. Period. (Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gold.) Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning.
- thworp 3y ago
  No, this is an absolutely ass-backwards argument. To be a currency or a store of value or money (read: to be of any use) it has to be exchangeable for goods and services. Now we can see transactions on the blockchain but we have no idea what that transaction was for. *Nobody* can tell you what a bitcoins worth of wheat is without resorting to exchange rates of bitcoin to actual currencies. But because the entire exchange ecosystem is so illiquid, intransparent, unaudited and rife with fraud there is no way to know how many bushels of wheat you could get for something like 13 BTC.
  - nwiswell 3y ago

thworp 3y ago

Oh please, again with the "store of value" BS. I made an effort to look at the actual volume of bitcoin being traded in and out of the system (aka actual entries and exits, not just fraud-prone exchange swaps) in 2020 and I concluded that it's probably worse than most scam penny stocks in terms of liquidity. It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was just a gigantic scam.

sacrosancty 3y ago
[dead]
tasuki 3y ago
> It's really hard to find any kind of reliable data though, but in the absence of that I had to conclude it was just a gigantic scam. Interesting! If I couldn't find reliable data, I'd have concluded that I didn't know.

derbOac 3y ago

Bitcoin is puzzling to me, in that a commodity usually has some value outside of a trading market per se. That is, it is usually consumable in some abstract sense. I'm not sure what you would "do" with Bitcoin other than as some form of currency. In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computation, other than "just" as a currency. I'm not disputing what you're saying about the SEC position regarding Bitcoin, it just seems to highlight for me something a bit off about the SEC position, even if it is favorable in certain ways toward Bitcoin. I come away from all of this feeling a little like neither the SEC nor the crypto community at large are quite being honest or accurate about what's going on with crypto or how it should be regulated.

lostmsu 3y ago
My inner conspiracy theorist would say that given the crypto market situation and state of ETH and Bitcoin as platforms SEC actions indicate that Bitcoin might have something in its design that US government wants vs ETH.
- anaganisk 3y ago
  Market dominance?
- politician 3y ago
  I'll bite: Bitcoin transaction networks are fully transparent to analysis.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    So do ETH. It must be more obscure than that.
jfengel 3y ago
In theory, you could think of bitcoin as electricity that has already been consumed. To replace it, you would have to burn more electricity. The bitcoin concept is to manifest that burned electricity as a tradeable value. That is the sense in which it's commodity-like. It's the underlying electricity which is consumed. It's far from clear that this is really valid, but that's the sense of it.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > as a store of value Bitcoin failed as a store of value, it's up some 20,000% since 2010 and basically infinty since the day of its first trade (back when the first bitcoin was traded for some trivial amount of electricity) Store of value is a very specific term

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong: You're arguing that because Bitcoin hasn't met its demise, it will therefore be widely adopted as a "store of value"? As if there are only two possible outcomes: Complete failure or complete dominance as a store of value. This is where your argument doesn't make any sense. I suspect we'll discover that all of these altcoins and weird financial instruments didn't actually detract from Bitcoin at all. Rather, they contributed to its rise by juicing demand and pumping huge amounts of leverage and pseudo-liquidity into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. If crypto becomes boring, I don't think the natural conclusion is that adoption will increase.

cs702 3y ago
The longer Bitcoin's network continues to function, the more people will become aware of its resiliency. Governments may topple; banks may fail; exchanges may go bust; Bitcoin keeps on ticking. Difficult-to-forge assets that can survive the failures of governments, banks, exchanges, etc. tend to gain adoption as stores of value. There aren't a lot of assets like that. Gold is one. Bitcoin appears to be one too.

codegeek 3y ago

"The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric," How long do we need to give Bitcoin a chance to gain mainstream adoption as its been 15 years already ? So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part.

icedchai 3y ago
They follow it on CNBC and have for a while. It's as mainstream as any stock.
- clymbidia 3y ago
  A presence on CNBC is very obviously not the "mainstream adoption" that was meant. Adoption as in, I can spend this token in legitimate and common means, not just to buy a battery operated car for a short while or on small subset of non-nefarious online market places.
- jfengel 3y ago
  It's mainstream for trading. It's not mainstream for conducting transactions.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Do you typically conduct transactions using gold and silver? Bitcoin is closer to a commodity than a currency.
sacrosancty 3y ago
[dead]
cs702 3y ago
> How long do we need to give Bitcoin a chance to gain mainstream adoption as its been 15 years already? "We" don't need to give it a chance. Time is giving it a chance, every new day, indefinitely. For all I know, it could take decades, not years, for Bitcoin to gain as much credibility as, say, gold, which has been around since the advent of ancient human civilizations. I don't know. Maybe it will happen much faster, like everything else online? > So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part. The biggest use of Bitcoin today is as an alternate store of value, by a large mass of "HODLers" who, as their name suggests, will hold on to it for dear life. Bitcoin is not the main asset used for speculation, extortion, scams, ransoms, drug deals, etc., today. The main asset used for illegal activities today, worldwide, is the US dollar. It's not a coincidence that the briefcase full of $100 bills is a prop in so many movies/TV series depicting illegal shenanigans. I suspect that more money is stolen in USD via hacked bank accounts, hacked credit cards, hacked online accounts, hacked SIMs, etc. than in BTC via difficult-and-dangerous-to-execute online ransoms.

staunton 3y ago

> The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. > We sure live in interesting times! I'm not really sure it's that interesting, or new at least. Since ancient times people have valued things as a store of value that have have been valued by other people as a store of value for a long time. Some of the best material examples are gold, silver, natural gemstones and works of art. These things are overpriced by orders of magnitude compared to their material economic value. Bitcoin just takes it to the extreme in having negative objective physical value, i.e., in being immaterial and physically completely worthless, while taking up resources to even exist as a concept or meme. So sure, it very well might be here to stay as a store of value for a long time. If history is any guide on these matters, it will be a store of value (and a profitable area of speculation) for the rich and big powerful institutions while the enduring and persistent meme in the heads of the common people keeps its value alive.

peteradio 3y ago

Why would anyone adopt Bitcoin into the financial fabric? That would be paying for something you can spin up for free.

progrus 3y ago

It’s bigger than the US. People are starting to get it.

__loam 3y ago

> as a store of value Bitcoin is fundamentally a terrible store of value thanks to how fuckin volatile it is.

discodave 3y ago

1. Agree 2. Err, I can't see any big banks or other entities touching COIN, and the CRIMINAL proceedings that it will likely be embroiled in with a 10-ft pole! 3. Maybe BTC will come to 'dominate' the 'crypto' space, but that space will be a smaller and smaller part of the US (and global) economy. Although it never got very big to start with. BTC is used for approximately 0.0% of US transactions right now (rounded to nearest decimal place).

Waterluvian 3y ago

I have no idea about bitcoin’s demise, but I don’t understand how anyone can call it a store of value with a straight face. Or do they mean conceptually it is, even if it’s a terribly volatile one?

anon-3988 3y ago

> 3. Bitcoin, which the SEC considers a commodity (it's explicitly excluded from the lawsuits), is bound to become even more dominant in terms of market capitalization. The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ . I have not seen a single of use Bitcoin within 50km of me _and_ online outside of uses in degenerate countries and trading them for the sole purpose of trading them. This feels like flat-earth theory, which will never go away, but their "science" if you call it that, is so flawed that they can't be used for anything outside of small terrestrial physics. Similarly, Bitcoin itself will never go away. But there is no way the average folk will be able to wield them given how many times they have been scammed out of their fortune.

paulddraper 3y ago
Maybe. I don't see people using gold for finances within 50km of me, but it's going to be around forever.
- anon-3988 3y ago
  And? I am not advocating for gold either. Gold hinges on the fact that its yellow and nice to look at or whatever. It is entirely feasible for the world to be possessed by zeitgeist such that gold or anything yellow doesn't mean particularly much. This could happen, for example, if gold and diamonds can be manufactured artificially. What then?
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Then it wouldn't be worth as much and its 10,000+ year run would be over. PS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper
  - TacticalCoder 3y ago