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People need a way to store money. Sometimes, the government-approved ways of doing that have severe problems. Gold would be worth much less than it actually is
by hollerith 3y ago
People need a way to store money. Sometimes, the government-approved ways of doing that have severe problems.
Gold would be worth much less than it actually is if people weren't using it to store money. It is easier to store bitcoin than to store gold. (E.g., bitcoin is easier to hide from thieves than gold is.)
- hellojesus 3y agoI agree with both your statements. There is a tradeoff between friction of a nonapproved system and having your money in it. The US has tried to KYC as much as possible, and the psuedo anonymous addresses have mostly been linked to meatspace owners, so I have trouble completely believing that the currency is completely free of gov intervention. Any sufficiently large state actor can simply buy a zero day exploit to try and remotely get into a target computer and then steal the pk of the wallet. There are mitigation techniques such as multiparty signing and hardware based keys/wallets, but nothing is perfect. And the most secured active users of it are likely already on gov radar.
- hollerith 3y agoBitcoin doesn't seem particularly useful for evading government controls in the US or the EU, but it does in much of the rest of the world, where the governments are typically incapable of something like the US anti-money-laundering regime. A sensible reason for a US investor to invest in bitcoin would be to sell it in the future for more than he paid for it to some saver in some non-US non-EU country, and most US investors would have no particularly strong motive to hide such an investment from the US government.
- hellojesus 3y agoVery interesting perspective. Thank you.