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> The other day I walked up to a newsstand and asked the newsguy if he wanted to buy US$100 We are talking about the liquidity of an asset, $100 is change mone

> The other day I walked up to a newsstand and asked the newsguy if he wanted to buy US$100 We are talking about the liquidity of an asset, $100 is change money. Now try doing the same for $100k or $500k, without an exchange your options are very limited and the process is going to be very tedious (obviously you're not going to leave the guy to pee after moving a full bitcoin to their wallet without very strong guarantees that you will end up with the money in the end), and comparable to selling real estate. So of course it's not exactly equivalent to real estate because it's fungible and very small amount of bitcoin have some higher liquidity, it's still a very illiquid asset without an exchange compared to pretty much any other financial assets. > The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine a block No, you just need to signal you'd mine on top of any block containing the transaction you want to block, and then no further block will ever be mined with the said transaction as other miner will follow suit. You just don't understand bitcoin except superficially and it shows. > Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15 years; it's outright illegal in many countries It doesn't matter if shithole countries with no leverage pretend to pressure bitcoin miners (yes it's all about pretending, as long as you don't see targeted assassinations in foreign country, you know the country doesn't really care). In the meantime, bitcoin and other crypto have been subsidized by governments in the Western world for years (through all the fiscal vehicles subsidizing start-up investment). You can be sure that the day a mining pool becomes the target of US sanctions (or has its staff abducted by some intelligence service) the landscape changes dramatically (it won't happen though, as they would cave without a fight). > Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion dollars tied up in Bitcoin And they are absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, the ability for the US government to censor transactions is the least of their concerns.

kragen 1y ago
I appreciate you engaging in good faith and explaining what you meant, since wqaatwt thought you were engaging in "obvious hyperbole" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 and I was suspecting you of trolling. It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't had the opportunity to sell US$100k of Bitcoin, but I expect it would be closely comparable to US$100k of US$100 bills, except that I can't zap those across to fixedfloat.com to change to a different cryptocoin or a friend on another continent in 30 seconds. Maybe it wouldn't be prudent to entrust all US$100k to fixedfloat.com in one transaction; maybe you'd want to use a series of smaller transactions of different sizes to reduce the counterparty risk. But this doesn't seem like an issue of Bitcoin being particularly illiquid. Rather, it seems like exchanges make commodities more liquid, an assertion I don't think is controversial. But most other assets, such as real estate, shares, and even precious metals, are vastly less liquid than Bitcoin in the absence of an exchange. Finding someone on the street willing to buy Bitcoin is enormously easier than finding someone on the street willing to buy your MSFT shares. I appreciate you explaining your speculations about 51% attacks in more detail. I think the course of action you're outlining would still be very likely to cause chain forks as big exchanges decided whether or not they were going to accept blocks from the compromised mining pools. The world's investor class many be absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, but they're very interested in mitigating political risks that threaten permanent loss of their capital. I do not think your description of the People's Republic of China is a "shithole countr[y] with no leverage" or that it was "pretend[ing] to pressure bitcoin miners". The majority of Bitcoin mining was happening there, the majority of the world's coal was and is burned there, the vast majority of the world's solar panels are made there, the vast majority of the world's other electronics are manufactured there, and virtually all Bitcoin mining hardware is still designed there. But when they prohibited mining, most of the world's Bitcoin mining activity stopped within a few weeks.

kragen 1y ago

I appreciate you engaging in good faith and explaining what you meant, since wqaatwt thought you were engaging in "obvious hyperbole" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 and I was suspecting you of trolling. It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't had the opportunity to sell US$100k of Bitcoin, but I expect it would be closely comparable to US$100k of US$100 bills, except that I can't zap those across to fixedfloat.com to change to a different cryptocoin or a friend on another continent in 30 seconds. Maybe it wouldn't be prudent to entrust all US$100k to fixedfloat.com in one transaction; maybe you'd want to use a series of smaller transactions of different sizes to reduce the counterparty risk. But this doesn't seem like an issue of Bitcoin being particularly illiquid. Rather, it seems like exchanges make commodities more liquid, an assertion I don't think is controversial. But most other assets, such as real estate, shares, and even precious metals, are vastly less liquid than Bitcoin in the absence of an exchange. Finding someone on the street willing to buy Bitcoin is enormously easier than finding someone on the street willing to buy your MSFT shares. I appreciate you explaining your speculations about 51% attacks in more detail. I think the course of action you're outlining would still be very likely to cause chain forks as big exchanges decided whether or not they were going to accept blocks from the compromised mining pools. The world's investor class many be absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, but they're very interested in mitigating political risks that threaten permanent loss of their capital. I do not think your description of the People's Republic of China is a "shithole countr[y] with no leverage" or that it was "pretend[ing] to pressure bitcoin miners". The majority of Bitcoin mining was happening there, the majority of the world's coal was and is burned there, the vast majority of the world's solar panels are made there, the vast majority of the world's other electronics are manufactured there, and virtually all Bitcoin mining hardware is still designed there. But when they prohibited mining, most of the world's Bitcoin mining activity stopped within a few weeks.