8 ms·

The Meaning of Bitcoin

58 points by maraoz 2y ago

paulbecker1919 2y ago
[dead]
momentmaker 2y ago
[flagged]
giraffe_lady 2y ago
A more complete answer here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...
- theoperagoer 2y ago
  A bigtime crypto hater.
imabotbeep2937 2y ago
"I've seen people get rich off crypto" and I've seen hundreds of gambling addicts lose their house and put their family on the street when the bet didn't go right. Even when you're talking about serious coins, ignoring the rug pulls. That money comes from somewhere. Who's holding the bag? Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.
- ric2b 2y ago
  That quote, or anything similar, is not present in the article.
- lxgr 2y ago
  “F** you I’ll get mine any day now” can be even stronger. Inconsistent rewards foster addictive patterns like nothing else.
- earnesti 2y ago
  There are many venues to gamble your money. You could also go for meme/penny stocks. I personally have only Bitcoin and some small amount of ETH. I don't consider myself a gambler and think that these smaller cryptocurrencies are very far away from Bitcoin, which is very stable and safe these days as the toolset is quite developed.
- HermanMartinus 2y ago
  Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created. In this way crypto is actually a less than zero sum game since some money is always lost to the machine through sending to abandoned wallets, lost private keys, etc. So on average everyone loses.
  - ric2b 2y ago
    By that logic stocks of companies that don't issue dividends are the same.
    - grugagag 2y ago
      Maybe but in theory those stocks are ‘usually’ tied to some other econmical activity other than mere speculation that the price will go up. In practice though, a lot of stocks have no fundamental value tied to their prices…
    - lxgr 2y ago
      No for-profit company doesn’t either pay dividends or buy back shares forever.
  - PartiallyTyped 2y ago
    The counter argument is that such cases contribute to scarcity, which reduces supply and therefore those who sell can demand more. I don’t know though how sound this argument really is as I don’t see what value bitcoin has outside its monetary worth. Can you really use this stuff? Not really. At best is a difficult to scale — if at all — database for transactions. Though similar things could be said about paper money as well — that it is nothing but the agreed upon value — but at least that can exchange hands far more easily in a much more scalable and flexible manner.
  - MuffinFlavored 2y ago
    for every buyer that is a seller if the seller is happy at the price they are selling at and the buyer is happy at the price they are buying at, where does the "someone had to lose a dollar" come from? if the seller sold to the buyer, then it went up, the only "dollars lost" would be hypothetical opportunity cost had the seller decided to hold instead. am i missing something?
- maraoz 2y ago
  Did you read the post? making money is not even mentioned... sigh
  - eterpstra 2y ago
    Sir, this is the internet. Nobody reads past the headline before spouting their opinion.
- grugagag 2y ago
  > Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f* you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs. That comes from the hope of recovering their loss one day and dumping the bags on somebody else.
- eterpstra 2y ago
  It's unfortunate that the loudest advocates of crypto in the US and Europe are screeching libertarians and grifters/scammers. They drown out the everyday users in far off places like Argentina and Nigeria that nobody (in the US and Europe) seem to care about.
  - CodeMage 2y ago
    That's because it's harder to see the forest for the trees when you're out in the woods. Just like the author of this blog post, users in Argentina and Nigeria aren't going to stop and think about the far-reaching problems with crypto if that crypto is helping them with their day-to-day lives.
yaybitcoin 2y ago
Argentina may have serious monetary problems, but does the USD? Do we really need financial innovation to move at the "pace of programmers?" Is "bitcoin" really money when you can't use it to buy anything without converting it to money first?
- eterpstra 2y ago
  No. If you're happy with USD, then use USD. If you are Argentinian (or Venezuelan, or Iraqi, or Zimbabwean) and your currency is getting devalued to nothing and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option. The attitude I see a lot (mostly by Americans and Western Europeans) is that "Crypto is not useful to me, therefor it is not useful to anyone" - forgetting that it's a global network open to everyone and anyone. And that other countries exist that are difficult places to live at times.
  - realusername 2y ago
    > and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option. If your government is going as far to prevent you to own USD, they aren't going to view cryptocurrencies any more favorably anyways.
    - ric2b 2y ago
      The article talks about one such example, Argentina, and how it was harder to own USD than Bitcoin there.
    - eterpstra 2y ago
      Exactly, but the value proposition of crypto is that it's *very* difficult to disrupt. See Nigeria for a current example of a national government trying and failing to get its population to give up on crypto.
      - realusername 2y ago
abetusk 2y ago
This is a very welcome counterpoint to a lot of the cryptocurrency hate that tends to be promoted. I think this is more along the lines of a "strong man" argument for cryptocurrency.
- lxgr 2y ago
  You’re making it sound like there’s a uniform blob of unreflected hate, when it’s really specific criticisms for many different aspects. I feel like a steelman argument for Bitcoin specifically is somewhat easier to make than one for NFTs or quasi-investment share tokens, in that it’s at least not a transparent Ponzi scheme by its issuers (one might argue it is one by its current holders, though). The problems of Bitcoin are largely different to those of stablecoins, NFTs etc.
  - cantSpellSober 2y ago
    A decentralized "Ponzi scheme?" Do you understand what Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff did?
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Yeah, Ponzi sold quasi-currency issued by somebody other than him to people for a promise of large profits! Why do you ask?
      - cantSpellSober 2y ago
        That's incorrect. > one might argue [bitcoin] is [a Ponzi scheme] by its current holders Going on Twitter and saying "buy BTC!" isn't a Ponzi scheme... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
  - abetusk 2y ago
    There's a large cohort of people who want to hate on anything related to cryptocurrency, whether it's a specific currency like Bitcoin, NFTs, web3 or related technology. You may be right that cryptocurrency proper is easier to defend against but the default position I see by most people is to criticize carbon emissions, energy usage, attack the legitimacy or the utility. One of the first comments here to this article was a comment specifically asking why Bitcoin was needed at all (in the US). I agree that problems of Bitcoin are different from other neighboring technologies, people lump them into one and tend to use the same arguments (energy usage, scams, ponzi schemes, illegitimate, crime only use case, etc.). This article at least starts to make the argument of why something like Bitcoin is needed and how it solves real world problems.
mjburgess 2y ago
Hmm.. the government effectively owns the network, the land, and the police force. The idea that the government cannot stop a monetary transaction is woefully naive; the only reason they haven't in the case of BTC is that it isnt money. If it came anywhere close to rivalling a state-backed currency, you'd be undermining the monetary and financial ability of a democratically elected government to exercise its economic policies. You'd be thrown in prison. Aside from the obvious ease with which a government can undermine the network, it's participants, and so on -- there is also the lack of incentive for anyone not ideologically committed to interpreting a blockchain as currency, to do so. A database, of any type, is just a set of numbers. The meaning of those numbers is a social and institutional practice. Contracts enforcing that meaning is a legal and political one. This article displays the same extraordinary naivety of tech libertarians that I'd assumed had now past. Money is a social institution. Social institutions will not be replaced by anyone's preferred system of rules. This is a common flaw in all utopian thinking, that necessarily and forever, all people will have more incentive to listen to them and follow their rules, than to ignore them or kill them. There is no evidence for the former, and daily mountains of evidence of the latter. The final incentive to accept the dollar is the threat to your life, and all people you'd conspire with, to undermine it. This is the only known solution to forming stable contracts and society-wide reliable institutions.
- XorNot 2y ago
  You're thinking too far ahead: governments define the currency that can be used to extinguish debts, particularly to the state (taxes). You can't pay your taxes in Bitcoin: you can only use Bitcoin to buy enough local currency to pay your taxes from someone else who has some. Which they get from the state. While the endpoint of this is jail and the monopoly on violence of government, it's also just regular economic reality: you can't buy something if you don't have anything the seller will accept. And the government doesn't accept Bitcoin.
  - floundy 2y ago
    Somewhere in the rabbit hole of delusion that is "buying in" to crypto is the idea that: 1. "Bitcoin is inevitable" and governments will be forced to buy it as "digital gold" to prevent a collapse of the world financial system. 2. Governments are already sneakily stockpiling BTC as insurance against a collapse of the world financial system.
throwaway22032 2y ago
The author describes precisely my reason for being interested in Bitcoin. Things which other people seem to readily accept, such as ATM's having limits, the nature of card payments being inherently asymmetric, the middlemen, "know your customer", etc. All of that stuff just seems insane to me. It's as if someone were standing at my door, telling me that I can't take more than seven items out of my house per day, asking me why I'm moving furniture around, etc. If you're happy with that stuff, great, stick with it. I'm not. It is not and never was about "getting rich". That's the side effect of the utility of the system.
- righthand 2y ago
  How does crypto solve any of that if its future is just more regulation pressing it into the molds of already established systems? I can’t pay my moving guy in crypto, I have to convert it to cash and all that “protection” is easily surmountable.
  - eterpstra 2y ago
    Different countries have different regulations and differing levels of permeation within society. Nobody in the US will take crypto as payment (other than a few niche retailers), but it's a pretty popular payment option in places like Argentina, Estonia, El Salvador, Vietnam, India, Singapore, and Nigeria. So popular in Nigeria, in fact, that it's displacing the local currency and the government is (unsuccessfully) trying to ban p2p transactions.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      I’ve been to Estonia a lot, and have never seen any retail business that would accept crypto. I’m sure there’s a niche somewhere. But when you say “pretty popular payment option”, it sounds like it’s a rival to Visa and Mastercard, and that prices would be listed in crypto instead of euro. That’s absolutely not true. Re: Nigeria, anecdotally my few friends from the country tell me that the crypto boom is primarily about local influencers promoting their own coins as investments, not actual payments.
  - deleted 2y ago
floundy 2y ago
Yet another useless Bitcoin puff piece from some random tech bro that doesn't understand economics. "Bitcoin is awesome!" article concluded by, "my friends in Argentina save in stablecoins". Wait, why don't they use Bitcoin if it's so great? >Lucky for them, bitcoin will always be there, waiting with open arms… immutable, unwavering, eternal, unbiased, welcoming, and untamed. It will be hilarious when they see what happens to transaction fees and/or network hash distribution as mining rewards dry up. Or maybe they ignore that because the vast majority of Bitcoin changes hands off-chain through exchanges. Which makes: >To really get crypto, you have to have been fucked by some third party with power over your money. Be it a government, a bank, a business, or an ex-employer, it will come. Quite ironic because most activity in crypto is being facilitated through 3rd parties, and even if one uses an offline wallet the vast majority are using exchanges to cash in/out as needed. I'd wager a bet that more people have been screwed over by some crypto entity than their government or banks. But yeah, Bitcoin/crypto is great as long as the wash trading, price-pumping sham can continue and "number goes up." Good thing all the cryptobros price things in their local currencies and not BTC! Hmm something about inflation again...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hristov 2y ago
Ok i do not want to get into the whole argument of usefulness of bitcoin, but I have to repeat something that I have been repeating for many years on this site, on other sites and in real life, and it still does not catch on. Bitcoin is not anonymous! True, the government may need to do some work to find your wallet number, but once they do they will know all transactions you have ever done with that wallet in all of time. In fact bitcoin allows for surveillance possibilities that governments could only dream of before. It also provides surveillance opportunities for people that are not the lawful government and do not have the power to issue warrants. Anytime you engage in any transaction using bitcoin, the other party must necessarily know your wallet number. Then the other party can easily check every single transaction made with that wallet for the history of bitcoin, and can do additional checks in the future. Of course you can get a new wallet, but moving the money from the old wallet to the new wallet will also appear for everyone to see. Thus any government agent, creditor or ordinary stalker can figure out a way to sell you something or buy something from you using bitcoin, and voila they have your entire financial history. The writer of the original article is being dangerously misleading when he implies bitcoin is anonymous. There are people languishing in jails right now because they thought bitcoin was anonymous.
- Geee 2y ago
  The author didn't imply that Bitcoin is anonymous.
- maraoz 2y ago
  where did I imply bitcoin is anonymous?
  - hristov 2y ago
    “ Literally no human, corporation, or government could have stopped what I had just done.” “ A world where no government or politician can change the rules one random day. A world where financial innovation moves at the pace of programmers, not legislators.”
    - wyldfire 2y ago
SonjaHinton 2y ago
[dead]
uwagar 2y ago
wonder why HN feels so anti-bitcoin?
- psychoslave 2y ago
  HN in this sense is a community, there are people pro- and anti- whatever, I guess. There are topics where a clear consensus will raises, but probably few that will gather unanimity. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised that some people in HN would find that making cannibalism illegal is an outrageous restriction of their holy personal freedom. I would find it surprising that it would not shape a clear anti-cannibalism consensus. Now of course cryptocurrency is nothing close to cannibalism, of course.
pwndByDeath 2y ago
It is amusing that the author was burned by a corrupt third party holding their wallet. I appreciate the growth to understanding the point is for you to be your own bank. The killer app will be the day Putin offers oil for BTC. When nations conduct business on crypto, then sanctions mean next to nothing and will cost real blood and treasure to enforce.
Finneyfamily 2y ago
Why is this post flagged?
orangea 2y ago
> Another bought a laptop by taking out a stablecoin loan on a DeFi platform when no bank would lend to him. Could someone explain this to me — I thought that loans on cryptocurrency platforms had to be collateralized by cryptocurrency? How could someone buy a house with a crypto loan if they didn’t already have enough to buy one in the first place?

58 points by maraoz 2y ago

paulbecker1919 2y ago

[dead]

momentmaker 2y ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady 2y ago

A more complete answer here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-of-bitcoin https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...

theoperagoer 2y ago
A bigtime crypto hater.

imabotbeep2937 2y ago

"I've seen people get rich off crypto" and I've seen hundreds of gambling addicts lose their house and put their family on the street when the bet didn't go right. Even when you're talking about serious coins, ignoring the rug pulls. That money comes from somewhere. Who's holding the bag? Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.

ric2b 2y ago
That quote, or anything similar, is not present in the article.
lxgr 2y ago
“F** you I’ll get mine any day now” can be even stronger. Inconsistent rewards foster addictive patterns like nothing else.
earnesti 2y ago
There are many venues to gamble your money. You could also go for meme/penny stocks. I personally have only Bitcoin and some small amount of ETH. I don't consider myself a gambler and think that these smaller cryptocurrencies are very far away from Bitcoin, which is very stable and safe these days as the toolset is quite developed.
HermanMartinus 2y ago
Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created. In this way crypto is actually a less than zero sum game since some money is always lost to the machine through sending to abandoned wallets, lost private keys, etc. So on average everyone loses.
- ric2b 2y ago
  By that logic stocks of companies that don't issue dividends are the same.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    Maybe but in theory those stocks are ‘usually’ tied to some other econmical activity other than mere speculation that the price will go up. In practice though, a lot of stocks have no fundamental value tied to their prices…
  - lxgr 2y ago
    No for-profit company doesn’t either pay dividends or buy back shares forever.
- PartiallyTyped 2y ago
  The counter argument is that such cases contribute to scarcity, which reduces supply and therefore those who sell can demand more. I don’t know though how sound this argument really is as I don’t see what value bitcoin has outside its monetary worth. Can you really use this stuff? Not really. At best is a difficult to scale — if at all — database for transactions. Though similar things could be said about paper money as well — that it is nothing but the agreed upon value — but at least that can exchange hands far more easily in a much more scalable and flexible manner.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  for every buyer that is a seller if the seller is happy at the price they are selling at and the buyer is happy at the price they are buying at, where does the "someone had to lose a dollar" come from? if the seller sold to the buyer, then it went up, the only "dollars lost" would be hypothetical opportunity cost had the seller decided to hold instead. am i missing something?
maraoz 2y ago
Did you read the post? making money is not even mentioned... sigh
- eterpstra 2y ago
  Sir, this is the internet. Nobody reads past the headline before spouting their opinion.
grugagag 2y ago
> Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f* you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs. That comes from the hope of recovering their loss one day and dumping the bags on somebody else.
eterpstra 2y ago
It's unfortunate that the loudest advocates of crypto in the US and Europe are screeching libertarians and grifters/scammers. They drown out the everyday users in far off places like Argentina and Nigeria that nobody (in the US and Europe) seem to care about.
- CodeMage 2y ago
  That's because it's harder to see the forest for the trees when you're out in the woods. Just like the author of this blog post, users in Argentina and Nigeria aren't going to stop and think about the far-reaching problems with crypto if that crypto is helping them with their day-to-day lives.

yaybitcoin 2y ago

Argentina may have serious monetary problems, but does the USD? Do we really need financial innovation to move at the "pace of programmers?" Is "bitcoin" really money when you can't use it to buy anything without converting it to money first?

eterpstra 2y ago
No. If you're happy with USD, then use USD. If you are Argentinian (or Venezuelan, or Iraqi, or Zimbabwean) and your currency is getting devalued to nothing and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option. The attitude I see a lot (mostly by Americans and Western Europeans) is that "Crypto is not useful to me, therefor it is not useful to anyone" - forgetting that it's a global network open to everyone and anyone. And that other countries exist that are difficult places to live at times.
- realusername 2y ago
  > and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option. If your government is going as far to prevent you to own USD, they aren't going to view cryptocurrencies any more favorably anyways.
  - ric2b 2y ago
    The article talks about one such example, Argentina, and how it was harder to own USD than Bitcoin there.
  - eterpstra 2y ago
    Exactly, but the value proposition of crypto is that it's *very* difficult to disrupt. See Nigeria for a current example of a national government trying and failing to get its population to give up on crypto.
    - realusername 2y ago

abetusk 2y ago

This is a very welcome counterpoint to a lot of the cryptocurrency hate that tends to be promoted. I think this is more along the lines of a "strong man" argument for cryptocurrency.

lxgr 2y ago
You’re making it sound like there’s a uniform blob of unreflected hate, when it’s really specific criticisms for many different aspects. I feel like a steelman argument for Bitcoin specifically is somewhat easier to make than one for NFTs or quasi-investment share tokens, in that it’s at least not a transparent Ponzi scheme by its issuers (one might argue it is one by its current holders, though). The problems of Bitcoin are largely different to those of stablecoins, NFTs etc.
- cantSpellSober 2y ago
  A decentralized "Ponzi scheme?" Do you understand what Charles Ponzi or Bernie Madoff did?
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Yeah, Ponzi sold quasi-currency issued by somebody other than him to people for a promise of large profits! Why do you ask?
    - cantSpellSober 2y ago
      That's incorrect. > one might argue [bitcoin] is [a Ponzi scheme] by its current holders Going on Twitter and saying "buy BTC!" isn't a Ponzi scheme... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
- abetusk 2y ago
  There's a large cohort of people who want to hate on anything related to cryptocurrency, whether it's a specific currency like Bitcoin, NFTs, web3 or related technology. You may be right that cryptocurrency proper is easier to defend against but the default position I see by most people is to criticize carbon emissions, energy usage, attack the legitimacy or the utility. One of the first comments here to this article was a comment specifically asking why Bitcoin was needed at all (in the US). I agree that problems of Bitcoin are different from other neighboring technologies, people lump them into one and tend to use the same arguments (energy usage, scams, ponzi schemes, illegitimate, crime only use case, etc.). This article at least starts to make the argument of why something like Bitcoin is needed and how it solves real world problems.

mjburgess 2y ago

Hmm.. the government effectively owns the network, the land, and the police force. The idea that the government cannot stop a monetary transaction is woefully naive; the only reason they haven't in the case of BTC is that it isnt money. If it came anywhere close to rivalling a state-backed currency, you'd be undermining the monetary and financial ability of a democratically elected government to exercise its economic policies. You'd be thrown in prison. Aside from the obvious ease with which a government can undermine the network, it's participants, and so on -- there is also the lack of incentive for anyone not ideologically committed to interpreting a blockchain as currency, to do so. A database, of any type, is just a set of numbers. The meaning of those numbers is a social and institutional practice. Contracts enforcing that meaning is a legal and political one. This article displays the same extraordinary naivety of tech libertarians that I'd assumed had now past. Money is a social institution. Social institutions will not be replaced by anyone's preferred system of rules. This is a common flaw in all utopian thinking, that necessarily and forever, all people will have more incentive to listen to them and follow their rules, than to ignore them or kill them. There is no evidence for the former, and daily mountains of evidence of the latter. The final incentive to accept the dollar is the threat to your life, and all people you'd conspire with, to undermine it. This is the only known solution to forming stable contracts and society-wide reliable institutions.

XorNot 2y ago
You're thinking too far ahead: governments define the currency that can be used to extinguish debts, particularly to the state (taxes). You can't pay your taxes in Bitcoin: you can only use Bitcoin to buy enough local currency to pay your taxes from someone else who has some. Which they get from the state. While the endpoint of this is jail and the monopoly on violence of government, it's also just regular economic reality: you can't buy something if you don't have anything the seller will accept. And the government doesn't accept Bitcoin.
- floundy 2y ago
  Somewhere in the rabbit hole of delusion that is "buying in" to crypto is the idea that: 1. "Bitcoin is inevitable" and governments will be forced to buy it as "digital gold" to prevent a collapse of the world financial system. 2. Governments are already sneakily stockpiling BTC as insurance against a collapse of the world financial system.

throwaway22032 2y ago

The author describes precisely my reason for being interested in Bitcoin. Things which other people seem to readily accept, such as ATM's having limits, the nature of card payments being inherently asymmetric, the middlemen, "know your customer", etc. All of that stuff just seems insane to me. It's as if someone were standing at my door, telling me that I can't take more than seven items out of my house per day, asking me why I'm moving furniture around, etc. If you're happy with that stuff, great, stick with it. I'm not. It is not and never was about "getting rich". That's the side effect of the utility of the system.

righthand 2y ago
How does crypto solve any of that if its future is just more regulation pressing it into the molds of already established systems? I can’t pay my moving guy in crypto, I have to convert it to cash and all that “protection” is easily surmountable.
- eterpstra 2y ago
  Different countries have different regulations and differing levels of permeation within society. Nobody in the US will take crypto as payment (other than a few niche retailers), but it's a pretty popular payment option in places like Argentina, Estonia, El Salvador, Vietnam, India, Singapore, and Nigeria. So popular in Nigeria, in fact, that it's displacing the local currency and the government is (unsuccessfully) trying to ban p2p transactions.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    I’ve been to Estonia a lot, and have never seen any retail business that would accept crypto. I’m sure there’s a niche somewhere. But when you say “pretty popular payment option”, it sounds like it’s a rival to Visa and Mastercard, and that prices would be listed in crypto instead of euro. That’s absolutely not true. Re: Nigeria, anecdotally my few friends from the country tell me that the crypto boom is primarily about local influencers promoting their own coins as investments, not actual payments.
- deleted 2y ago

floundy 2y ago

Yet another useless Bitcoin puff piece from some random tech bro that doesn't understand economics. "Bitcoin is awesome!" article concluded by, "my friends in Argentina save in stablecoins". Wait, why don't they use Bitcoin if it's so great? >Lucky for them, bitcoin will always be there, waiting with open arms… immutable, unwavering, eternal, unbiased, welcoming, and untamed. It will be hilarious when they see what happens to transaction fees and/or network hash distribution as mining rewards dry up. Or maybe they ignore that because the vast majority of Bitcoin changes hands off-chain through exchanges. Which makes: >To really get crypto, you have to have been fucked by some third party with power over your money. Be it a government, a bank, a business, or an ex-employer, it will come. Quite ironic because most activity in crypto is being facilitated through 3rd parties, and even if one uses an offline wallet the vast majority are using exchanges to cash in/out as needed. I'd wager a bet that more people have been screwed over by some crypto entity than their government or banks. But yeah, Bitcoin/crypto is great as long as the wash trading, price-pumping sham can continue and "number goes up." Good thing all the cryptobros price things in their local currencies and not BTC! Hmm something about inflation again...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hristov 2y ago

Ok i do not want to get into the whole argument of usefulness of bitcoin, but I have to repeat something that I have been repeating for many years on this site, on other sites and in real life, and it still does not catch on. Bitcoin is not anonymous! True, the government may need to do some work to find your wallet number, but once they do they will know all transactions you have ever done with that wallet in all of time. In fact bitcoin allows for surveillance possibilities that governments could only dream of before. It also provides surveillance opportunities for people that are not the lawful government and do not have the power to issue warrants. Anytime you engage in any transaction using bitcoin, the other party must necessarily know your wallet number. Then the other party can easily check every single transaction made with that wallet for the history of bitcoin, and can do additional checks in the future. Of course you can get a new wallet, but moving the money from the old wallet to the new wallet will also appear for everyone to see. Thus any government agent, creditor or ordinary stalker can figure out a way to sell you something or buy something from you using bitcoin, and voila they have your entire financial history. The writer of the original article is being dangerously misleading when he implies bitcoin is anonymous. There are people languishing in jails right now because they thought bitcoin was anonymous.

Geee 2y ago
The author didn't imply that Bitcoin is anonymous.
maraoz 2y ago
where did I imply bitcoin is anonymous?
- hristov 2y ago
  “ Literally no human, corporation, or government could have stopped what I had just done.” “ A world where no government or politician can change the rules one random day. A world where financial innovation moves at the pace of programmers, not legislators.”
  - wyldfire 2y ago

SonjaHinton 2y ago

[dead]

uwagar 2y ago

wonder why HN feels so anti-bitcoin?

psychoslave 2y ago
HN in this sense is a community, there are people pro- and anti- whatever, I guess. There are topics where a clear consensus will raises, but probably few that will gather unanimity. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised that some people in HN would find that making cannibalism illegal is an outrageous restriction of their holy personal freedom. I would find it surprising that it would not shape a clear anti-cannibalism consensus. Now of course cryptocurrency is nothing close to cannibalism, of course.

pwndByDeath 2y ago

It is amusing that the author was burned by a corrupt third party holding their wallet. I appreciate the growth to understanding the point is for you to be your own bank. The killer app will be the day Putin offers oil for BTC. When nations conduct business on crypto, then sanctions mean next to nothing and will cost real blood and treasure to enforce.

Finneyfamily 2y ago

Why is this post flagged?

orangea 2y ago

> Another bought a laptop by taking out a stablecoin loan on a DeFi platform when no bank would lend to him. Could someone explain this to me — I thought that loans on cryptocurrency platforms had to be collateralized by cryptocurrency? How could someone buy a house with a crypto loan if they didn’t already have enough to buy one in the first place?