Bitcoin and Crypto Thread

scorpion said:
- China especially cannot be trusted in this regard) they will likely settle on an international settlement currency similar to the bancor, which is backed by a basket of the most valued commodities (i.e. each bancor would be composed of 10% of a barrel of oil, 10% a ton of copper, 10% an ounce of gold, 10% a bushel of wheat, etc...). This is why I say Bitcoin has no long term future - because to the extent that its useful at all (as a trustless digital commodity) it could easily be replaced by a purpose-built solution, whose adoption and use could be mandated by the combined power of the BRICS+ governments. And to the extent that Bitcoin is useful in the present, it is entirely as a vehicle of financial speculation fueled by naked greed and unbacked stablecoins. It just doesn't have much of a purpose, despite what its promoters want to believe.
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So all BRRICS countries will have warehouses of moldy wheat that Bancors can be converted to?

Why would countries want a purpose built digital money? So they can control it, censor it, and print more when they want…making it by definition less useful, less scarce, and less desirable as money than Bitcoin, which already exists.

As far as mandating this new currency to be used…people choose what money they use, not governments. The government of Venezuela mandates bolivars, but it’s own people are choosing to use dollars, or cinder blocks, over bolivars.

Chaining the exits to Bitcoin by shutting down exchanges does not kill Bitcoin. You can still convert energy to bitcoin. You can still trade your labor or goods for bitcoin. People were getting Bitcoin long before exchanges ever existed.
 
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chance vought said:
So all BRRICS countries will have warehouses of moldy wheat that Bancors can be converted to?
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I think you're being deliberately obtuse on this point. Such a currency would obviously function like a futures contract, where price is derived from the underlying commodity but where physical delivery is usually not taken, but could be when demanded. Also similar to the old gold standard, where paper money could be redeemed for gold on demand. Tying the currency to actual physical commodities is the important part here. No warehouses of moldy wheat required - just the expectation that a train car full of wheat would be promptly delivered if called upon. In other words, the backing of such a currency is not really the commodities themselves, but the economies that are able to produce such commodities on demand. Now we're getting into the realm of what wealth actually means.
chance vought said:
Why would countries want a purpose built digital money? So they can control it, censor it, and print more when they want…making it by definition less useful, less scarce, and less desirable as money than Bitcoin, which already exists.
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"Why would countries want more control of anything?" The question answers itself. Also, as I previously noted, Bitcoin is already entangled with the Western financial system at this point. If the BRICS seek to chart a new course, they will doubtlessly seek a clean break with the West and all its baggage, which now includes Bitcoin.
chance vought said:
As far as mandating this new currency to be used…people choose what money they use, not governments.
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When did you make the choice to pay your taxes in USD? Do Chinese and Russian citizens have the choice to pay their taxes in anything but yuan and rubles? More fantastic libertarian delusion on your part.
chance vought said:
The government of Venezuela mandates bolivars, but it’s own people are choosing to use dollars, or cinder blocks, over bolivars.
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Russia and China are not grossly mismanaged third-world shitholes like Venezuela. Bitcoin is wide open for business in El Salvador, as you guys love to point out, and pretty much no one has any interest in using it.
 
scorpion said:
When did you make the choice to pay your taxes in USD? Do Chinese and Russian citizens have the choice to pay their taxes in anything but yuan and rubles? More fantastic libertarian delusion on your part.
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Many people in many countries don't pay taxes. They freely exchange their labor, with no government theft in the middle. If I was self employed, I wouldn't either.
scorpion said:
Russia and China are not grossly mismanaged third-world shitholes like Venezuela. Bitcoin is wide open for business in El Salvador, as you guys love to point out, and pretty much no one has any interest in using it.
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People who are too poor to have the time to become educated, early adopters on bitcoin. They will use it eventually, by default, the same way 3 billion people use email, without understanding how it works.

Your view is bitcoin is at the end of its life, and we are the bag holders of a scam.

My view is we are still in the early adopter phase, and the people who are living hand to mouth are not going to be early adopters. People with wealth, time, and enough education to understand at least some of the technical aspects of bitcoin, will be the first users.
 
scorpion said:
This is cope. As I've pointed out many times, they don't have to actually kill Bitcoin, just isolate its on and off ramps.
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Again, that's only time limited, and you always ignore game theory. One thing we don't have to worry about is fiat dying, since it always does. Another thing we can count on is money printing that is on tap right now.
scorpion said:
Rather, if there is a compelling need for a type of trustless digital asset to back international trade and settlement, it will be custom built and deployed by the BRICS+ alliance for this specific purpose.
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Not only is this redundant, it's incredibly naive. It's not needed when a better form of trustless money with a network already exists. You say things that don't make any sense just to act like you are countering a point.
scorpion said:
This is why I say Bitcoin has no long term future - because to the extent that its useful at all (as a trustless digital commodity) it could easily be replaced by a purpose-built solution, whose adoption and use could be mandated by the combined power of the BRICS+ governments.
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You can already do this with BTC. Someone is going to re-invent the wheel? You still don't understand what BTC, since the trustless part has been found, by definition it can't be replicated. None of the parties would ever choose anything over the thing that already doesn't require trust or permission.

You need to watch Jack Mallers debate with Schiff, where he says that the point of having money is that it isn't something you want to use otherwise (commodities) for obvious reasons. It's why gold and all the others fail over time, and are currently being demonetized, which is obvious.
 
scorpion said:
That's funny, because for all of fiat's flaws (which I've repeatedly agreed with you about), its ability to spur economic development is most assuredly NOT one of them. Indeed, the fact that fiat can quickly expand the money supply through credit to meet the demands of a growing economy is arguably its greatest strength. Fiat itself is not inherently evil. It's simply a tool like any other (i.e. an axe can chop some firewood or murder someone) and only becomes a problem when it is abused and mismanaged. But the reality is that every system man invents will ultimately be abused and perverted in one way or another, and this has more to do with the flaws of human nature itself rather than the flaws of any particular system. I can assure you that if your wildest dreams came true and Bitcoin somehow became the basis for the future world economy, dishonest men would inevitably find a way to subvert and abuse it.

Bitcoin is already de facto controlled via the exchanges, stablecoin issuers, the whales and now the ETFs. Your Bitcoin is priced in fiat and that price is easily manipulated by Tether printing. The exchanges themselves only exist at the pleasure of the U.S. government, and I suspect that Bitcoin's continued existence has a lot to do with nefarious Deep State money laundering activity (i.e. bribes to corrupt politicians and funding black/off-book operations). And to the extent that Bitcoin cannot be controlled (self-custody wallets and direct transactions to other addresses) it can be rendered largely useless by prohibiting conversion to fiat and the blacklisting of specific addresses. If the powers that be felt remotely threatened by Bitcoin, it would have been destroyed a decade or more ago. The case of e-gold is an instructive example here. This exact same type of prosecution could be used to shut down every major crypto exchange overnight.

Come on, this is nonsense. At best you can say it's the discovery of "digital scarcity" (which I think is a ridiculous concept, but you can at least argue this coherently). But money itself has obviously taken many forms prior to Bitcoin.

This literally reads like the script from an infomercial. :LOL:

0% of time wasted on investing or protecting wealth.

100% of time devoted to posting Bitcoin memes.

chuck-norris.gif
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Giving people credit / loans of fiat money thats not backed by gold is a problem, the banks are loaning money that they dont actually have and creating artificially low interest rates to encourage more people to take loans. It cant end well.
 
scorpion said:
This is cope. As I've pointed out many times, they don't have to actually kill Bitcoin, just isolate its on and off ramps. The reality is that very few people actually want to own Bitcoin for its own sake, they only want it because they believe its value measured in fiat will continue increasing. If that was no longer possible, the vast majority of buyers vanish.

You're savvy enough to know the difference between a federally insured bank and Tether. Obviously not a good comparison. No one is coming to bail out Tether when they inevitably implode.
Australia Sucks said:
The U.S. has been weaponizing the dollar for years and now the BRICS+ countries are gradually trying to dedollarize. You don't think that someday BRICS+ countries could own Bitcoin reserves as part of this process? No country really wants to own the CBDCs of another BRICS+ country. Gold is part of the solution and central banks are already buying but there is a limit to how much gold they can buy at any given time without sending the gold price to the moon so Bitcoin could act as an additional reserve asset for these countries in the future during this de-dollarization process.
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This stuff gets scary when you see what the US and NATO increasingly say, and what Putin and Russia or China say/do in response. The Blinkens of the world are very closely related to the central banking machine that is currently threatened. This doesn't look good ...
 
Blade Runner said:
This stuff gets scary when you see what the US and NATO increasingly say, and what Putin and Russia or China say/do in response. The Blinkens of the world are very closely related to the central banking machine that is currently threatened. This doesn't look good ...
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I also read somewhere that Saudi Arabia no longer wants to use the US dollar to trade in oil
 
scorpion said:
international settlement currency similar to the bancor, which is backed by a basket of the most valued commodities (i.e. each bancor would be composed of 10% of a barrel of oil, 10% a ton of copper, 10% an ounce of gold, 10% a bushel of wheat, etc...).
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The problem is stuff like that isn't completely trustless and carries substantial custodial risk. Just ask the German central bank when they asked to repatriate their gold back from Paris and New York back to Germany they were told it will take years (up to 7 years!) to receive the gold!
www.physicalgold.com

Gold Repatriation | When Germany Demanded Back Its Reserves

German investors have demanded a gold repatriation from American vaults just before the emergence of the Eurozone financial crisis.
www.physicalgold.com www.physicalgold.com

Now imagine stuff that you cannot store long term (e.g. wheat) which is based on futures and its an even more sketchy situation.
 
Australia Sucks said:
The problem is stuff like that isn't completely trustless and carries substantial custodial risk. Just ask the German central bank when they asked to repatriate their gold back from Paris and New York back to Germany they were told it will take years (up to 7 years!) to receive the gold!
www.physicalgold.com

Gold Repatriation | When Germany Demanded Back Its Reserves

German investors have demanded a gold repatriation from American vaults just before the emergence of the Eurozone financial crisis.
www.physicalgold.com www.physicalgold.com

Now imagine stuff that you cannot store long term (e.g. wheat) which is based on futures and its an even more sketchy situation.
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For some reason he keeps stopping himself from understanding the point we've brought up ad nauseum, which is that centralization always comes with the problem of trust and permission. To recognize that, however, would be to admit that BTC is the discovery we say it is, so he can't bring himself to that. I don't know why, but I guess you could ask him.
 
To understand the pitfalls of trust and centralization, one must understand the history of money, gold, banking...which people think they already understand, so they don't bother further study, such as The Bitcoin Standard, or Broken Money, or The Price of Tomorrow, etc etc.
How's the Bitcoin standard coming, @GoodShepherd ?
 
chance vought said:
To understand the pitfalls of trust and centralization, one must understand the history of money, gold, banking...which people think they already understand, so they don't bother further study, such as The Bitcoin Standard, or Broken Money, or The Price of Tomorrow, etc etc.
How's the Bitcoin standard coming, @GoodShepherd ?
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Im really enjoying the book, there were some good graphs on there showing how people stopped saving as much when money was taken off the gold standard but places like Switzerland they continued saving because they were still on the gold standard but when they eventually followed the same destructive path they also stopped saving
 
Australia Sucks said:
The problem is stuff like that isn't completely trustless and carries substantial custodial risk.
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You guys seem to be trapped in this libertarian fantasy realm of economic thought that has nothing to do with the real world. There is no such thing as a "trustless" economy. You will never reach that degree of perfection. You go out to eat and order a hamburger and you trust that the restaurant didn't intentionally use expired beef to save a few bucks. Or do you do back into the kitchen and demand to examine the food as it's being cooked? No - I think you just trust that it's okay. You trust that the restaurant has an economic incentive to maintain a good reputation, avoid bad reviews and generate repeat customers. You also trust that the health department performs inspections to ensure that they're following the necessary hygiene and cleanliness practices.

Economies are ultimately built on trust because we don't want to have to live with the alternative, which would basically be some sort of wild west, every man for himself hellscape where 99% of your time is devoted to survival and making sure that no one else could possibly get over on you in some way. A trustless economy is a nightmare and an impossibility, as is a trustless currency. Whatever benefits Bitcoin possesses in terms of being trustless also come along with drawbacks that significantly outweigh them and make it functionally useless. Imagine widespread adoption of a currency with zero fraud protection? And which can only perform a comically small number of transactions per minute without hacked on layer 2 solutions? And which is extremely difficult for even seasoned users to use and store effectively with 100% security?

This is just not a practical solution. But it is possible that lessons will be learned from Bitcoin that can be deployed in a more usable future currency, one that would ideally also have some sort of backing by tangible commodities and which would probably be jointly developed and sponsored by a collection of powerful governments/economies.
Blade Runner said:
For some reason he keeps stopping himself from understanding the point we've brought up ad nauseum, which is that centralization always comes with the problem of trust and permission. To recognize that, however, would be to admit that BTC is the discovery we say it is, so he can't bring himself to that. I don't know why, but I guess you could ask him.
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The best you can say is that using blockchain technology as a form of currency is a discovery. But whatever value is created by this tool is obviously not limited to the Bitcoin network itself. If the BRICS countries decided they like the concept of Bitcoin and made their own version to use for trade settlement, they could easily do so. But this is what you need to understand: there is no scenario - literally none - in which the countries of the world decide in unison to adopt a Bitcoin standard and you become some wealthy oligarch because you've been HODLing for the past few years. This is pure delusional fantasy and it's doing you no favors. Your better judgment has been clouded if not totally captured by greed and wishful thinking. Everyone who will ever get rich off Bitcoin already has. Despite what you guys like to tell yourselves, you are massively late to this party. Guys who bought in when Bitcoin was under $100? They were early. You're just buying their bags.
 
scorpion said:
But this is what you need to understand: there is no scenario - literally none - in which the countries of the world decide in unison to adopt a Bitcoin standard and you become some wealthy oligarch because you've been HODLing for the past few years.
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The first paragraphs you wrote aren't even worth responding to, since they have nothing to do with trustless, permissionless transactions of value (money). But here you put forth something we don't say, which is that we think we'll be some "wealthy oligarch", or have ever even said some such thing. What happens exactly no one knows, but a few things I know that are certain: you don't understand BTC and therefore aren't a good barometer at all for valuing or evaluating it, and it's definitely not late. I can show you with mathematical certainty that it's not early. But forget even about that for a second, since you aren't interested or curious, you just want conclusions (which we've been futilely trying to correct for a while).

Do you think there is zero chance that a nation state adopts BTC as a reserve asset? I'm talking a G20 nation.
 
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