It’s clear you are a BTC zealot which is why you ignored the question. You literally said you think it will last longer than 200 years…. The onus is on YOU to convince of us your reverse funnel scheme.
@Space Ghost did not say BTC would fix those institutions. Putting words into people's mouths and moving goal posts around are not a good look.
@DonnyMost first off, I appreciate your patience and participation in this thread. Had to get that out because decorum is going downhill here among members I generally like reading elsewhere. That said, you have the Evangelist hat on, and I definitely have the Skeptic hat, though it's more like greedy skeptic and I am generally curious about btc's post-mining endgame. Like how do you run transactions without that greed incentive by miners? If it becomes less profitable to mine, then the number of machines shrinks or consolidates over time and becomes more or less like a regional utility, and then... That boggles my mind on how that would work with a global currency. 10 years ago you could buy 2 pizzas with a 1/10 of a bitcoin. Obviously now, it's far far less, yet early adopters get rewarded if digital Jesus decides to cut 10 loaves to feed 1000 more people? So if it's divisible, Joe Blow might not mind, but his kids will not if Joe Blow blew all his sats on lottery tickets and failed stable coin derivatives. The division solution is definitely regressive against the younger/newer groups over time. Announcing ad hoc divisions could create symptoms of the Cantillon Effect that Space Ghost mentioned earlier. Whether btc is a hard currency is debatable. You can guess what side I'm on...I'm fine with describe it as digital gold, but to transmogrify BTC with gold's qualities is one step too far for me. If facebook libra or Apple Pay became international tender, I wouldn't call it hard currency either. I can't sleep in it or let my feetless Zuckerberg avatar sleep in it either. Rather the analogy I'm fitting it in is a speculative asset class that makes the larger coin holders richer by the quantity of poorer "tenants" like the good people of El Salvador and Central African Republic. Some background info from my internet bestie When people refer to "whales" influencing the low float of bitcoin, they are talking about how large holders of bitcoin can potentially manipulate the price due to the concentrated supply and limited liquidity. Here's a more detailed explanation: Whales are individuals or entities that hold large amounts of bitcoin. For example, whales may control 1000+ bitcoins each. The float refers to the number of bitcoins actually available to trade. It excludes coins that are lost or being held long-term. Bitcoin's float is low because a large portion of mined coins are being held rather than actively traded. Estimates suggest only ~4M BTC are in circulation. With such a low float, bitcoin's price can be more easily pushed around by large holders dumping or acquiring coins. If a whale coordinates with other large holders, they can flood the market with bitcoins, exceeding buy orders and crashing the price. Alternatively, whales can pump the price by restricting supply and conducting successive buy orders. Since the market is shallow, these coordinated actions by whales can trigger massive price swings and volatility. Smaller traders have limited ability to counteract or absorb the moves perpetrated by bitcoin whales. So in essence, the concentrated ownership, illiquidity, and limited float mean bitcoin whales have outsized power to manipulate the market through their trading actions and weight of money. This contributes significantly to bitcoin's price volatility. When you have hedge funds using btc as collateral to for leverage through dark pools or unregulated exchanges, that influences the system in unseen ways much like what happened in commodities in the 60s-90s. You're likely not a fan of centralized exchanges or "crypto banks", but the run-down from the last 18 months hasn't been pretty for bitcoin or crypto in general. This is an important problem if you're a true believer. I'm fine with screwing around until the halvening, but what happens 3-5 years afterwards is interests me from a greed and tech/social perspective. It does matter from an economic and national policy standpoint. CoL in Alabama is different than in DC or LA, yet a dollar is a dollar. This is all thanks to regional Fed Banks coordinating together. In the Eurozone, the ECB doesn't have the flexibility to smooth out Germany's industrial output vs Greece's poorer tourism dominated economy. That's why the Eurozone is always in a crisis every 3-5 years. When PIIGS was heavily in debt, they couldn't regulate their currency to make changes in the economy to pay it off. It doesn't matter if BTC is a superior currency. In the end, a solution could be nations pegging their currency to BTC. You'd still have rot from central banks, but no one is going to buy into that outside investors who hold more than 5-10 BTC. It sounds more reasonable than pretending BTC will be used like Apple Pay or Ali Pay in the distant future where we have fusion to generate the medium sized country power requirements of 7.5B people and the number of transactions they make along with magical unforseen tech that fixes the trilemma to make BTC reinvent the wheel to become as convenient as swiping a card or your phone to buy some steak and eggs. So if it's a perfect currency and not a speculative asset, then maybe those folks are having too much fun staying poor?
I know you weren't replying to be but I thought I'd like to throw in a few tidbits - Hard Currency (I would like to refer to this as a hard asset) - When I tend to think about this term, I think of something that can't be ****ed with by a centralized entity. This is Bitcoins strong point compared to other assets. Property is another example; We can't create property out of thin air or deem it so. The Seattle government can't simply create a couple extra square miles and insert it right in the middle of King county. Gold to an extend is currently a hard asset, but that can change once humans start mining different space bodies. Its certainly not a problem now ofc. Anything that can be created by a centralized group is not a hard asset, like Libra or any of currency or **** coin. Bitcoin whales & speculative asset - If Bitcoin can not get a foothold into investment portfolios(ETF's, bonds, central banks, ect..), it will always remain a speculative asset and will eventually become a failure. Its very fair to criticize Bitcoin for being a speculative asset, but that can be said of anything speculative. Bitcoiners are speculating Bitcoin will go from a 0 to a 1. If it ever hits a 1, modern money and money game theory will completely change. Its better to split the discussion into two ideas; Too often I see proponents and opponents constantly shore up their position by jumping back and forth between the two, which leads to the 'chicken or the egg' discussions. 1) Can Bitcoin ever became a 1 2) Once it becomes a 1, how does the theory play out. Thoughts most of us can agree on: -The US is the most powerful country and will remain a very powerful country for at least the remainder of our lifetime and our childrens lifetime -The US holds the world reserve currency. The US currency will be around indefinitely -US debt-to-GDP is in excess of 100%. This will unlikely go below 100% in our life time. How does the US continue to hold the world reserve currency when its debt-to-gdp continues to rise indefinitely? Who is buying JGB's? Who is going to buy T-bonds once US entitlements exceed 100% of debt-to-gdp? What/Who takes its place?
Thanks. I appreciate your posts as well. It's obvious you are an honest actor, well-intentioned, and genuinely curious. Others here could learn a lesson from you. My understanding is that as the mining rewards shrink, the transaction fees will naturally take their place. In a post-mining world where all 21 million BTC are accounted for, there will be a natural, evergreen equilibrium in the reward and cost of running nodes to facilitate the transactions. The more nodes that are running, the smaller the profit, the less nodes running, the greater the profit, etc. So there will always be a baseline incentive that is self-regulated. How what would work? The divisibility? What would happen is a 2nd layer technology is created that can divide and account for increments of a Satoshi. Call it a Donny. I create a new protocol that sits on top of BTC where 1 Satoshi is equal to 1 hundred million Donnys. And on and on as needed. It's not that wild, the US could issue a new coin that is a fraction of a penny if it wanted to (although that would be dumb since inflation has rendered almost every unit beneath a dollar pointless lol). You're confusing division with inflation/deflation. Early adopters don't get 'rewarded' by further dividing up BTC, that's incidental. If BTC needs to be divided it means that adoption has increased significantly which in turn increases the value of BTC, etc. You have to ask yourself what makes money 'hard'. The answer is two things: scarcity and durability. BTC has absolute scarcity. There will never be any more of it created/issued beyond what is scoped in the original whitepaper/protocol (21MM). The ability and method to create/obtain it is unchangeable as well. This has never been the case for any asset in the history of the world. Even raw real estate and precious metals, given a long enough time horizon, will eventually change in supply and issuance. BTC is also as close to immortal as any man-made thing will ever be. Bitcoin and its network are effectively a monetary version of the internet. Whatever it would take to kill and erase the internet is the same thing it would take to kill and erase bitcoin. I'm not sure what you mean by this. There will always be whales and krill in any monetary ecosystem. One thing I do know is that the ratio over time is naturally reaching more balance (as would be expected). Again, we're very early. Volatility is high, I'll be the first to tell you this, but it is trending down and I believe will eventually hit zero (as one would expect a completely hard asset to do). The run-down? You mean the price drop and/or the malfeasance by third party operators? I'm unconcerned. As I've said before, your time horizon needs to be large enough to block out the day to day noise. That necessary time horizon is shrinking every day, slowly but surely. This needs to be addressed. It's not 'magical unforeseen tech'. It's here right now with things like Lightning and other advancements are actively being worked on all the time. Betting against BTC getting faster and more efficient is like betting against Moore's Law. Not a good idea. Perfect is loaded term, so allow me an edit... it's the best currency on offer at scale. Kind of like how I can build a car, but if there are no roads, nowhere to repair it, and nowhere to refuel it, it's going to not seem so great, right? I'd probably even get called an idiot for building this 'perfect car' by folks who love their horse and buggies. I can engineer the TCP/IP protocol, but if there are no computers to connect to, no third parties services to leverage, and no electricity to power it, it's probably not going to draw a lot of praise at first. Just like the features and efficiency of the network, adoption is increasing all the time. These are the railways and service stations of the monetary vehicle that BTC is.
I don't know, you guys started going on about religion and anti-institutional sentiment. Maybe ask @Space Ghost ? Hard currency does solve inflation (as far as currency's role in inflation is concerned). Deflation is solved by infinite divisibility. You said I 'ignored the question', which I asked 'what question?' and this is your response? You are very hard to take seriously right now.
I disagree with this. I cannot see a path or way in which Bitcoin fails, and I have tried very hard to imagine one. I'd love to hear people's theories of how/why. I do agree, however, that Bitcoin is either going to be the primary unit of valuation for all of mankind or it's going to zero. My money is on the former, obviously. At this point I don't even see it as speculative. Volatile? Yes. Speculative? No. It's going to gain value and continue to eat market cap practically forever. The question isn't if, it's how fast.
I try to view ideas in probabilities, or entropy-minded. Humans are very irrational creatures. In my Bitcoin evangelism, I discovered the tried saying about Jesus, a prophet is rejected in his own country. Now that said, dump any further religious context as that is not what I am aiming for. People in the west simply do not understand the money system is broken. Again, the Cantillion effect - we are so close to the money supply so everything is fine for us. Most modern Americans simply can not understand rapid money debasement when they can simply chase the highest yielding bank product at the moment. And in America, if you're broke-ass, its not because the lack of opportunity, but the know how. If a person can't score a decent paycheck (sans a few legit cases) because they don't know how to work the system, they certainly will not understand Bitcoin outside of the speculative asset side. THIS is why I do not Bitcoin evangelize anymore and why I now completely understand when Satoshi said 'if you dont understand, then I don't have the time to tell you' ... or whatever the exact context was. I hope to find commonality in this thought: Bitcoin is speculative until it becomes a common unit of account. I suspect we are quibbling over the definition of 'speculation'. Bitcoin IMO has a low probability of failure. It won't be something that will limp along behind a superior asset (like silver to gold). It will either be a 0 (dies) or goes full on (1). That said, I do think the concept is so revolutionary that we as a species might not be able to utilize it properly. Everyone in my life who has mocked me about Bitcoin has bought it and lost money, even after I told them not to buy it if they can't hold it for 4 years. Now I don't recommend it at all unless a person has a strong concept of maco economics.
I did.... go check the answer. Because so far the pattern has been anti fed / anti-institution with the folks that keep pushing it. Again your words: ^^^^^ That's just crazy and completely unproveable. It is religion when you have that much faith that something will last longer than 200 years. This is more hopes and dreams. Then how useful is it then? Your hated USD has attributes that allow it to deal with the "non-currency role of inflation" which is actually very important. BTC is just the opposite in that respect and comes with the opposite problems of USD. BTC will create more boom and busts cycles due to its inflexible nature, as it did with gold and other hard specie throughout time. Hasn't happened yet, so pretty theoretical at this point..... It's like the whole "halving" thing.... It only works in a vacuum. The real world is so much more complicated and there are major reasons to have a flexible currency. When is BTC going to actually do the things you say it will.....? Right now it is an asset class (not a store of value if you bought at the peak) and a means to circumvent federal and international laws and sanctions.
Based on what? All the energy usage and all that electronic waste from the graphic cards and where are we exactly? It's not doing anything really useful unless your goal is to make money..... other assets can do that. Where's the QOL improvement for the average man?
Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't really care about people's attitudes towards institutions. Well no ****. If it was provable it wouldn't be a prediction now would it? It's not so crazy when you understand just what would have to happen to have Bitcoin go away. I encourage you to post your theories as to what might bring about such an outcome. You keep throwing around words like 'ideology, religion, and zealot' thinking it's some massive own. It's the equivalent of me calling you a poopyhead. It means nothing and cannot be substantiated. Gold lasted for what, 5000 years as a monetary standard? Fiat has had a couple thousand years now. American fiat has only been around a few hundred, and non-gold backed for only a few decades. By the metrics, those are all pretty crappy monetary systems compared to BTC and they made it at least 200 years. Again, how do you figure BTC goes away? Very. I view this as a bug and not a feature. In totality, there is no circumstance for me where a soft currency is preferable to a hard one. Quite the opposite, it will eliminate the boom/bust cycles which are a direct result of centralized finance. No. It's already been done. We just don't need it yet, so it hasn't been adopted. When the time comes, a critical mass of the BTC network will agree to the new protocol and we'll have it in practice. The halving has already happened three times and has gone off with predictable, reliable outcomes and zero problems. Number four will take place this Spring, as planned. I've never seen a compelling argument or example showing how a truly hard currency would cause problems. You're going to have to be more specific than "the things you say it will do". I'm quite clear eyed and vocal about what BTC can do and is doing right now, what it will eventually do, and what it will never do. What I'm not really into is predicting when things will happen. That's anybody's guess and I don't think any amount of research I can do will make my opinion on that worth more than anyone else's.
Based on... not having your wealth deteriorate? I guess you don't see value in that? The average man who puts his savings into BTC will beat every other savings vehicle over the span of 5 years (with that window shrinking daily). Not talking lambos here, just sheer wealth preservation. If you zoom out even further, you start to see the exponential growth curve, but for the sake of avoiding that rabbit hole and why BTC will appreciate so much we can skip that part. And since we're talking about the 'average man' here, let's not fail to consider that the average person on Earth is likely living in a place that either has an unstable political or financial infrastructure, so the safety and security of BTC is not to be understated from a QOL perspective.
