Posts like these make it clear to me that the author does not really understand money, not Bitcoin. It's hard to reason about what Bitcoin's advantages are without first considering what the purpose of money is and the analysis from this article is mostly just sniping at the edges about some of the perceived flaws and not the actual usefulness which is the good part of the trade-off.
For a better understanding of money and why Bitcoin is a better money, I would recommend this article:
That article is interesting, but I have to ask about the conclusion:
> Beyond the financial case for Bitcoin, its rise as a non-sovereign store of value will have profound geopolitical consequences. A global, non-inflationary reserve currency will force nation-states to alter their primary funding mechanism from inflation to direct taxation, which is far less politically palatable.
Isn't this all backwards? In the past, when it was politically inconvenient not to be able to inflate money, governments abandoned gold-backed money and went to fiat. Wouldn't one assume then that the possibility of such profound geopolitical consequences is precisely the reason why governments will not let it become so important?
It makes sense to me about as much as the trade in ancient coins, stamps, and other collectibles. These are reasonable asset classes if you like gambling, with a somewhat fixed supply, not a lot of industrial applications, and wild price fluctuations based entirely on subjective appreciation. Bitcoin is more liquid but otherwise the price dynamic looks about the same...
I guess it depends on how you define "startup." If it specifically means VC backed tech firms, sure, almost tautologically so. If not, well, I've been aware of dodgy ads for precious metals and coins and suchlike in the backs of magazines for as long as I've known how to read.
Hardly. The finance bros came from traditional finance based on fiat. That's where the majority of bilking still goes on. All of us using it as a currency since the start are still here. Sure, it's nice that it's worth over 9000 now but what matters to me is being able to send and receive money myself. Besides physical cash there's nothing like it.
And unlike other currencies this one doesn't require the energy expenditures of a full standing army or the diplomatic trades to enter into protection with someone who has one. Seen through that lens bitcoin is absolutely green.
> Hardly. The finance bros came from traditional finance based on fiat. That's where the majority of bilking still goes on.
I don't think that's a substantiated claim, but even if it were true, the lack of regulation in the *coin sphere made a fertile breeding ground for scammers from wherever they originated.
> but what matters to me is being able to send and receive money myself.
Yourself and billions of computing hours that could be doing stuff like protein folding or climate modelling.
> And unlike other currencies this one doesn't require the energy expenditures of a full standing army or the diplomatic trades to enter into protection with someone who has one. Seen through that lens bitcoin is absolutely green.
Are you suggesting that if not for fiat money then there would be no need for standing armies? Like we'd all just join hands: Russia would hand back Crimea, Pakistan and India would grant Kashmir independence, Iran and Saudi Arabia would realise they practice essentially the same religion, and the former states of Yugoslavia would hold the world's largest pancake breakfast? If not, then you can not attribute the environmental impact of maintaining militaries to fiat.
I'm not sure if you're defending bitcoin or comparing people buying it to crazed beanie baby collectors. At least, nobody was talking about a beanie baby based financial system at the time - however adorable it may have been.
I don't think bitcoin should be entirely dismissed as a scam (its more complex than that), but if we're going to compare it to a scam (and there are definitely plenty of scammers in the bitcoin ecosystem), i think its important to remember that neither scams nor speculative bubbles are new to human history.
The important innovation of Bitcoin (and the like) was that it democratised the ability to scam. A band of techno-utopians created a technology (ideology?) that made it much easier and cheaper to empty the pockets of the gullible.
That's a pretty good comparison, because, like the energy and custom hardware thrown at bitcoin, beanie babies are also intrinsically useless at the scale they were sold.
Right. It's scaled up. I suppose that if people became suddenly interested in old stamps to the tune of billions of dollars, stamp-dealing would also start competing for resources with the rest of the economy.
bitcoin uses less resources than traditional banking. I think people should stop judging it in a vacuum and instead speak in relative terms. If energy use is a concern then fiat is the greater offender. https://bitcoinist.com/banks-consume-energy-bitcoin/
further crypto would be a much more flexible domain at working towards reducing carbon emission than deeply embedded and slow changing fiat systems
Why not? Do you think every financial service offered by traditional banks can't be coded and made more efficient using internet-native money (bitcoin)?
If so, what services can't? People already use BTC as collateral for loans/mortgages ...which are two of the riskiest activities traditional banks engage in.
I've walked into many semi-empty downtown brick and mortar banks with 5-10 idle employees, you want to continue paying that "innefficiency tax" in every transaction/loan/wire/credit-card/etc...?
I don't think people really think through the reason there is a 20% tax on financial activity that goes through traditional banking system.
To the people who really want to learn: you won't get quality advice here.
BTC has been hated on HN since it's creation. Even over 10 years later, the crypto luddites keep coming at it.
Learn by yourself instead of listening to the doomsayers: some people thought independently, like this person in 2011 who was ridiculed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596475
Then make your own judgement, as most of the people here won't learn. They refuse to - they are too emotionally invested in their past lapse of judgement, so they need to rationalize it and double down, in the hope that maybe it will crash and everybody will know they were right all along!
It's been going on for over 10 years, so follow their advice at your own risk.
This is super common on HN. Just look at threads on Tesla. Fortunately betting against someone with a closed mind is super profitable, because they'll always mis-price the risk/reward.
I don't want to profit from the ignorance over here. What for? I have enough. I'm done. I just find it sad so many bright people are still led to take the wrong decisions.
Someone else said, if god had wanted to help the geeks, it couldn't have been done better - anyone could mine, at the cost of $0 on a CPU back then.
I was bitten by the HN naysayers and didn't. Fortunately, I quickly realized my mistake and just worked in the field.
It's sad so many people want to double down and triple down on their past errors. As long as they can live with the consequences of their actions, I guess it's their problem, not mine. That doesn't make it any less sad.
The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it.
The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint
The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous criminals, all enabled with cryptocurrencies.
Unless equally sized positive effects would emerge, it creates a growing pressure on governments to regulate and potentially criminalize the usage of cryptocurrencies. If that happens, the monetary value will naturally fall down.
> The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous criminals, all enabled with cryptocurrencies.
For the vast majority of businesses/individuals, it is governments and banking cartels the ones stealing your money (via inflation and fractional reserve respectively) without recourse. Switching to a world in which, instead of all of us, but only a few, are stolen money, is a bit better.
> The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint
Re: Money transfer - it's not clear why money going to criminal organization is better than the government. Also, since most people actually have negligible savings, it's not clear that inflation actually "steals" money from the people.
Re: Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today. If you assume an efficient market, where the cost to compute Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to the energy cost, that's a crazy 80kWh in US energy cost for a single transaction (and probably more, since Bitcoin mining is done where energy cost is lower). The claim that a fraction of that comes from renewable is silly, this renewable energy could go to other means.
> it's not clear why money going to criminal organization is better than the government.
Don't put words in my mouth that I didn't say (or rather, typed). I never said it's better. Government&banks-robbing-all is a worthy cause to fight anytime, even if it doesn't directly help the criminals-robbing-a-few problem, because actually, the latter already happens today, and will always happen (sadly). So we must fix one thing at a time.
yes but that tranfer fee is the same for 100 or 1 billion in value, and lightning correctly implemented pushing that fee down to the subcent number.
One of the biggest misconceptions around Bitcoin is somehow that it was supposed to sort all this out before it bootstrapped to a large enough network, but we all know that´s impossible.
Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today.
Depends on how quickly you need that transaction to hit the blockchain.
Anything over 30 minutes is currently 1 sat/vByte and 1 sat = $0.00019230 dollars. The average bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes. That's $0.048075 or almost 5 cents.
I think if you consider normal (fractional reserve) banking “theft” it’s pretty easy to understand why you’d also consider BitCoin as a positive force.
If, on the other hand, you accept contemporary definitions of inflation and consider normal modern monetary systems as being the least bad - then it’s a pretty different picture.
I'll assume you're referring to obtaining drugs which many consider to be something that at the very least should not be punished by prison time (myself included), as opposed to say... the distribution of child pornography, ordering hit men, arms trafficking, or the selling of hacked credit card numbers, passwords, and zero days.
If that was your idea, wouldn't we be better served by lobbying our politicians to move the needle on the drug war (seems to be happening) instead of creating volatile whale controlled crypto "currencies" which use huge amounts of electricity as our planet faces a climate change crises and which also enables all of the other really terrible illegal things listed?
> If that was your idea, wouldn't we be better served by lobbying our politicians to move the needle on the drug war (seems to be happening) instead of creating volatile whale controlled crypto "currencies" which use huge amounts of electricity as our planet faces a climate change crises and which also enables all of the other really terrible illegal things listed?
What would really be better is to push politicians to stop using the banking system as a mass surveillance apparatus and allow there to be above-board systems for the anonymous digital transfer of modest amounts of cash. Then you destroy the demand for cryptocurrency by out-competing it, and eliminate the energy waste problem.
Although true, philosophically speaking the governments of the world take on powers that exceed what is reasonable.
The US, for example, will happily assert its ability to intercede when Iran and China trade. It isn't at all obvious why that should be the case, and it is profoundly unclear why China and Iran should cooperate. It is plausible that countries should be trading using a decentralised system like a bitcoin-style cryptocurrency. US law really should stop at the US border.
"Think of the children" when all other arguments fail.
Kids would benefit if their parents' savings in USD wasnt debased at an accelerating rate aka 50% loss of purchasing power every 8-10 years (soon to be 5-10 years).
Money is a self-organizing system of resource management.
Bitcoin is better money, because it allows for more pure self-organization, as a result of its money supply being predetermined by hard-coded algorithm, rather than by fiat decree.
This single benefit far outweighs the mentioned negatives. It has the potential to completely eliminate the boom/bust cycle, eliminate currency manipulation that facilitates international trade imbalances, and free hyperinflated jurisdictions from that aspect of their poverty.
Many think these expectations are unreal, and that's fine. I'll see you when we get there.
> Bitcoin is better money, because it allows for more pure self-organization, as a result of its money supply being predetermined by hard-coded algorithm, rather than by fiat decree.
Because bitcoin requires substantial inputs (hardware, energy), if it actually has legs, it will end up being controlled by whoever controls the most capital.
That's not self-organization, that's just replicating the same broken economic system we have right now, but (ironically) with much lower efficiency.
> It has the potential to completely eliminate the boom/bust cycle
Citation needed. =)
> eliminate currency manipulation
"A single anonymous market manipulator caused bitcoin to top $20,000 two years ago, study shows"
> free hyperinflated jurisdictions from that aspect of their poverty.
I'm sure that'll work great for folks who can afford to buy (or would be payed in increments of) approximately 0.0005 BTC at a time. What are transaction fees these days, anyway? =)
> Because bitcoin requires substatial inputs... it will end up being controlled by whoever controls the most capital
Huh? Whoever has the most capital has the most capital? I don't get it.
> Citation needed
The boom/bust cycle is caused by what we declare to be the solution: active management and printing of the money supply as desired to achieve short-term economic or political goals.
> an anonymous market manipulator caused bitcoin to top $20k
I was speaking about the money supply, not the price. Dunno if you meant to misinterpret or not. But regardless, even that criticism isn't really doable at the scale Bitcoin will achieve.
> I'm sure that'll work...
I don't consider this to be a real criticism. I don't consider any scaling criticism to be valid, because they all come from the perspective of "Bitcoin hasn't scaled already, therefore it will never scale." 80% of software engineering is scaling. It's what we do, it's what's being done. It's a lazy argument. For it to be interesting, you have to tell me why Bitcoin can't scale, ever, in principle.
> The boom/bust cycle is caused by what we declare to be the solution: active management and printing of the money supply as desired to achieve short-term economic or political goals.
That seems like quite an extraordinary claim without much evidence.
I don’t think any of these things come close to paying for the energy cost Bitcoin used circa 2018 (I haven’t looked recently — has it decreased?). And that cost would skyrocket if everyone used it day to day
I have commented on this elsewhere but because energy is not just a cost for bitcoin mining but essentially the only cost outside initial capital investment, Bitcoin's POW will in the long-term drive all mining to off-grid self-power by renewables.
It's an efficient store of value. Here is a dilemma - you have 10 million dollars. You need somewhere to park your money. Do you follow the Chinese businessman pattern and buy real estate in Toronto? That seems complicated - picking a property, being subject to the real estate market, etc. Often these houses sit empty, since you are on the topic of wasted resources.
Do you buy gold? Gold is as useless as Bitcoin, in terms of intrinsic value, your special snowflake "industrial applications" of coating McLaren F1 engines as a heatshield and superconductivity aside.
Buy stocks? How do you pick them? A financial advisor certainly won't do it properly for you. And the fed is pumping out USD.
Of course USD is going to deflate.
So, Bitcoin suddenly doesn't seem so useless.
"is the huge energy waste"
Gold takes a lot to store, secure, and transport. BTC replaces that with mining.
"The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous criminals, all enabled with cryptocurrencies."
Every single transaction is on the chain. At this point they are worried that Monero is insecure. There are even conspiracy theorists saying that "the man" wants blockchain currencies as the norm due to the "nowhere to hide" policy.
And yes, you can create a wallet on some hotspot, and it is "anon". But let's be honest.
"Unless equally sized positive effects would emerge"
It's a secure place to park cash that doesn't deflate by nature.
edit: If you downvote, try to explain what you disagree with.
I disagree with the 'store of value' argument. I got into a similar argument with someone on here before, and I believe it is an insufficient economic principle to justify a currency. A good currency serves as a medium of exchange or a standard of value.
Are people using bitcoin to replace USD in general? No, not really. It's not a very good medium of exchange not because of the illegal stuff but because no one knows how it works and it's messy, that's why no one buys stuff with it. They also don't know how much it's worth on average and therefore struggle to use it, bringing me to my next point...
Are people using it as a standard of value? No, if I tell you a car costs 15k USD you know what that means. If I tell you it costs 1 BTC, you have no tangible idea of how to relate that to the real world because BTC's value changes sporadically. I am sure this will stabilise as crypto matures, but i dont think people should invest this much effort into something that is just going to be used as a value measurement.
So back to the 'store of value' thing, why do I want people not to invest their money? Is wealth hoarding not a problem now, or do you believe that just by virtue of it existing as BTC, it's doing something good?
First of all, thank you for the coherent argument. Going to start with what I think your central argument is at first.
"why do I want people not to invest their money"
You don't - you absolutely don't want someone to park their money in BTC and avoid spending it. It's an economic inefficiency. It's also the nature of people to hoard wealth - that's why they buy land to "sit on" and why they buy gold. Both do not have the world OR wealth distribution. That's also why in the US, we have a property tax - to keep the wealthy from hoarding all the land without generating a profit on it (assuming they aren't living on the property.
Conclusion - we need, or at the very least have used stores of value throughout history that are not "investments" in the sense of efficient use of resources.
"What are the benefits of BTC over existing stores of value?" ("USD" in a bank account, USD (cash), gold, and property).
The ones I listed above - USD depreciates. It's trite but it's also true - you cannot hold USD without losing wealth. Gold has no intrinsic value, you have less control over the asset unless you store it in your basement (managed by third party), you cannot easily move it or transact in it.
Real estate is entirely too complicated for a non-professional to invest in. Same with land.
BTC does what cash was supposed to - you buy it, it sits there, it doesn't depreciate.
Now, you will correctly say "No, I buy BTC at $20,000 and tomorrow it's $3,000". Completely correct and true, but the bet is that as it becomes more established it will become a more reliable store of value than a nationally backed currency, kind of like currency was when it was backed by the gold standard.
Hopefully that helps you understand my viewpoint without thinking I am trying to shove my opinion down your throat, as most crypto debates go that way, and it's definitely not my intent. I don't even hold crypto, nor do I necessarily think it's "changing the world".
A single bitcoin transaction (that is, literally one) uses as much electricity as a house consumes in several weeks. The entire system uses roughly the same amount of electricity as the country of Ireland, or Denmark. For ~300k transactions per day.
No, the "huge energy waste" is so vast as to be nearly inconceivable. It cannot reasonably be compared to anything else. Even shipping literal gold around by helicopter might be more efficient.
Anyway, the BTC-enthusiast argument to that is "Well, if BTC replace banks, imagine how much money that would save."
That argument holds some ground - think of all the armored cars, shipping containers, and facilities that serve to move and store cash and gold, as well as all the labor involved in maintaining the system.
Of course, BTC is not going to replace cash/gold fully in the near future, if ever, and the cost is absurd. Nor is there a solution to this, as transaction demand will just continue driving up price.
> Anyway, the BTC-enthusiast argument to that is "Well, if BTC replace banks, imagine how much money that would save."
> That argument holds some ground - think of all the armored cars, shipping containers, and facilities that serve to move and store cash and gold, as well as all the labor involved in maintaining the system.
There are very good counterarguments to that as well.
The idea that the "banking system" functions primarily by shipping cash and gold around is nonsense. 99.9% of traditional banking nowadays happens on computer networks. The Visa network for example handles 150 million transactions per day (that is, 500x more than bitcoin) while using a tiny fraction of the electricity. When a bank in London wants to send money to a bank in New York, they don't ship a container full of gold, they send the money electronically using the SWIFT network. To the extent that cash is still physically shipped around, it's only because people still sometimes use cash to pay for things, and banks collect and distribute this cash and replace damaged bills.
And your estimate of labor is similarly flawed. To begin with, the "banking system" includes an enormous amount of services that Bitcoin doesn't provide (loans, mortgages, securities), and retail banks are part of that as well. The transactional parts of banking can be (and are being) largely replaced with mobile apps and ATMs. The other aforementioned parts of banking aren't replaced by Bitcoin, so all of that labor still needs to exist.
So the efficiency argument shouldn't be "what if BTC replaced banks", it should be "what if BTC replaced SWIFT, ACH, BACS, Visa network, etc." there is a value proposition here but it is much smaller than the one originally proposed.
The problems with ACH is that ACH takes 3 business days. If you want an "immediate" transaction, you do a wire transfer, and pay $30-60 for it, which is a hefty sum. That was one of the original "problem statements". Of course, BTC transactions are now very expensive, and that's an issue until lightning solves that.
As far as loans - the theoretical, grand idea there is that the loan market becomes global, e.g. Americans can loan to Sierra Leone, where they don't have access to a traditional, efficient banking system. Again, a pipe dream for now. Btw, there are other coins claiming to do loans based on reputation, but so far, I haven't seen them working well. And of course, there will be scammers.
>To begin with, the "banking system" includes an enormous amount of services that Bitcoin doesn't provide (loans, mortgages, securities), and retail banks are part of that as well.
This may be a lack of imagination on your part....Many companies already offer loans/mortgages using Bitcoin as collateral (at much lower interest rates than traditional banks). Not having thousands of idle bank employees sitting around in brick and mortar banks makes the financial system a lot more efficient...
I'm not sure you understood the point I was making, which is that you can't get a loan/mortgage from "bitcoin", you have to go to a separate entity that can offer you a loan/mortgage using bitcoin to mediate the transaction. A "bitcoin bank", if you will. The labor requirements are going to be similar either way.
> As the parent poster mentioned, the US’ monetary policy is awful and many believe is on the brink of major problems.
Ah yes, "the brink of major problems". That's the undying adage of USSR and later Russian news programs. "Dollar is on the brink of collapse".
> So, yeah, some new alternative financial instrument seems attractive to me.
How can one forget, that these crises are unique, are happening for the first time ever, d no one in the history in the world ever had 10 million dollars before, so they have no idea what to do with this money.
I don’t think the USSR existed during a global pandemic. In fact, I would posit that the globalized nature of our economy adds a new twist to any pandemic that has come before. I don’t think the absoluteness of your position is warranted.
As you mentioned in another reply- diversification of ones’ portfolio is important. I, and most people, would never put all their money into BTC or crypto in general. That would clearly be a bad decision. But, why _shouldn’t_ I put <10% of my portfolio in a new asset class that has growth potential? Many people put 10% of their portfolio into all kinds of crazy things.
> I don’t think the USSR existed during a global pandemic.
The USSR existed during multiple global conflicts. The USSR existed during the oil crisis in the 70s. Russia existed during multiple global conflicts. Russia existed through multiple global economic crises including the one in 2008.
And through it all the fall f the US dollar was just around the corner. Within weeks. Well, months at most.
In 1998 I was an exchange student in the US. I read an editorial in some newspaper like The NY Timesthat argued that financial crisis that would kill the dollar was inevitable within at most two-three years. And yet, here we are.
So no, I don't buy "you sould put money in bitcoin because of course USD is going to deflate and is on the brink of major problems." as an argument for storing 10 million dollars in Bitcoin.
On top of that this entire argument ignores the actual reality of how people protected their assets before Bitcoin. Let me show you how: https://dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=BRK
Genuinely not my intent. This topic is bound to be controversial, but it also seems to be worth discussing for the people who are willing to take a little heat for their opinions.
Ok, but intent isn't enough. You need to post in a way that isn't likely to lead to flamewars, and that responsibility grows as the topic gets more controversial.
This seems more like it's questioning cryptocurrency itself, and putting it at odds with fiat currencies and states.
As for states, they're rolling out their own cryptos. The Chinese have CryptoYuan, the EU central bank is releasing a currency likely by late 2021, and the Federal Reserve is also planning to create a new currency. That's how they beat Bitcoin.
Fiat currency is likely going to be slowly phased out as cryptos take hold, like an old iPhone.
States will absolutely gain power if they adopt cryptos, because they can implement currencies that can always be tracked and disseminated much faster and easier than fiat.
Transparent monetary policy for 100+ years hard coded... No secret fed meetings about policy that give large banks a permanent information advantage while the rest of the population is left in the dark and forced to plan in 4 year(if your lucky) periods.
Considering China has bought up a majority of gold in the past decade, and they're the global leader in production, I'd say CryptoYuan will have the best chance of winning out.
I assume they're keeping their designs under wraps for now, but I haven't really taken a deep look. There is some info available though:
The author didn't really do serious research. I can imagine having doubts or questions after reading this book, but without basic knowledge about money there's no point in arguing (I agree with Jimmy Song's comment, but I find Saifedean's book much better researched)
So to actually comment on the article instead of just ranting how bitcoin is either amazing or terrible:
> I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin
Can't you just compare it to the gold standard? Seems like we have a lot of history we could look at where gov could not print money how it pleased.
> The enforcement of debt and the ability to track money seem, to me, like some of its most important properties. If I can’t tell how much Bitcoin someone has, how can they be made financially responsible in court?
Seems fairly easy to me - you ask them how much money they have, they tell you. If they lie, you throw them in jail. Its really no different than how we handle people who keep there money in the form of gold bars under the bed, or in offshore bank accounts. Sure you can sometimes get away with shinanigans, but its not a new problem.
> I’m also interested in what a world with a fixed amount of currency really looks like. I would imagine “inflating away” debtors obligations through fiat would not really be on the table.
It would look like the gold standard. inflating away debt with fiat in a major way is pretty uncommon anyway and usually ends badly (Germany tried that and we ended up with WWII!)
> 65% hashrate by china, 51%attack, etc
It should be noted that a 51% attack is generally something noticeable. Its not a secret attack. So that reduces risk somewhat. Also i thought 51% attacks were actually closer to only needing 33%.
> Energy, environment
Yeah, i agree with author on these points. Ethereum is doing some interesting stuff here.
There have been lots of other currencies privately traded previously, but since the state has the guns the state can outlaw it. If it truly started competing with major currencies you would see it outlawed.
It also is not secure as China is controlling a majority of the mining now and the majority can control the currency. Further, Google has a computer that can hack the encryption and you will see a lot more organizations have them soon.
It consumes more power than Switzerland. It's bad for the environment.
It's just a bubble and can be popped anytime.
Not to mention that it is just unusable for actual legal transactions on a regular basis.
The state has the guns to outlaw a lot things. Yet many of those products, I can still purchase on the local street corner. Simply having a monopoly on force isn't enough to totally stop trade in some good. Especially when that good is easy to hide, and easy to move. Crypto is pretty much the easiest good to hide and move in the history of mankind.
I am guessing the poster is referring to quantum computers, which are not yet even close to breaking cryptographic hashing algorithms as far as I understand.
It looks like you need a lot more qubits than the most powerful quantum computer we have now. Also, it's fairly trivial for Bitcoin to adopt a quantum resistant algorithm with consensus.
I think the far larger problem would be every non-quantum resistant encryption on the planet being broken at once.
A QC to implement shor's algo at a practical level would need millions of non-ec'ed qubits. At least publicly, we are likely quite far from any such advance.
Fiat currency is an agreement of settlement using an inflationary mechanism created at will with no work required to provide value.
Bitcoins are an asset created in response to work performed, scaling proportionately with the work required giving it value.
It really is that simple and makes perfect sense.
I disagree that bitcoins are made "in response" to work performed. The value of a bitcoin doesn't come from the work performed. Otherwise recently mined bitcoins would be more valuable than early mined bitcoins, due to different hash difficulty level.
Anyways, currency is not value. Currency represents value. It is symbol. I feel like confusing the symbol with what it represents is the source of much of the misunderstandings of how money works.
I think there are technicalities to bitcoin that make typical economic reasoning futile, and as a result non-tech people argue for things they don't really understand.
The energy consumption argument alone should completely destroy bitcoin's prospects. I'm not sure how you can even apply classical economics principles to something as uniquely different as bitcoin. Maybe the cost means people should only trade in extremely high amounts of bitcoin so there are less transactions? I don't know.
some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong:
>I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it.
I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post
>The enforcement of debt and the ability to track money seem, to me, like some of its most important properties
I don't think you could track money at all, because I think in a world where bitcoin is dominant, you can bet that you would have many other cryptocurrencies as well. And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.
Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course
>I’m also interested in what a world with a fixed amount of currency really looks like.
It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists and each currency and inflation would have to be determined individually and you would have booms and crashes based on just how individual markets supply/demand progresses (i think?)
It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists
Yes, it would be fixed. Each bitcoin is currently divisible to 100 million satoshis and it could be further subdivided if necessary.
Regarding not knowing how much exists, at least with Bitcoin, that's not true. Anyone running a full node has a complete copy of every transaction going back to 2009. And the generation of each and every block that contains newly created bitcoin.
We would know exactly how much money exists if we were on a Bitcoin standard.
> And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.
This doesn't sound any different from cash. Which is why existing systems of taxation don't rely exclusively on the banking system. When you buy a television, you don't self-report the purchase and pay sales tax at the end of the year, the vendor charges it up front. When you're paid a salary, the employer withholds income tax. The businesses, in turn, have their own income tax, and want to report the employee's wages to be able to deduct them from their own taxes. They want to report sales in order to be able to legally deliver those profits to shareholders. So what's different about cryptocurrency here?
>>> Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course
They could tax you by a percentage of each asset. At the end of the year, you might owe 31 bitcoins, 0.0125 acre of land, and a chicken.
Ironically, this is why money was invented in the first place -- an asset that represents value rather than having inherent value (such as, the inherent value of a chicken is one chicken).
>you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from.
I don't get why people buy into this idea that BTC is super-hacker-cash that can't be traced.
BTC can be traced. That's the point of an open ledger. If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias).
The problem is the second you start buying things with the BTC and sending them to your house, your anonymity is shot.
There are coins (like Monero) whose purpose is to make transactions more untraceable but BTC is intended to be traced.
The environmental impact of bitcoin mining is the major argument against it. I don't think it will be feasible in the long run. The fact there are allegedly mining farms in the Mongolian lake of dystopia Bautou undermines the infeasibility long term.
As pointed out elsewhere here, fiat currency is as equally arbitrary as bitcoin is.
Bitcoin's age and seeming resistance to network manipulation and cracking over a long period of time is really the source of its enduring value.
In my personal opinion/perception, the true devaluation of other cryptocurrencies occurred in the "aaaand its gone" twitter moment. Even if it was a joke/stunt, it really highlighted the superfluous nature of almost all cryptocurrencies besides BTC.
What's the risk for bitcoin pertinent to entrenched pre-quantum encryption? Are the wallet/private key pairs based on such cryptography?
What's the technical feasibility of migrating BTC's pow scheme to quantum-resistant hashing?
What is the technical feasibility of migrating wallet/private keys to quantum-resistant crypto?
Would any such migration of wallet/private keys be dependent on public/non-public interactions with the blockchain by wallet holders, and would those interactions introduce deanonymization or other risks?
There is no particular negative interactions with the hash functions and quantum cryptography.
Bitcoin is designed so that different asymmetric crypto governing controlling coins can be compatibility introduced-- as has been done a couple times in the past (to introduce revisions to the script system). PQ crypto could be introduced in that way.
Unfortunately existing PQ signature schemes don't have a great mix of maturity and performance that make them especially attractive absent a clear and present need.
For years I maintained a private patch set to introduce hash based signatures on short notice if needed. I haven't for a number of years now in part because there are now enough contributors I'm confident that if it were needed it could be done quickly without any special preparatory effort.
Users can change the rules governing their coins just by moving them.
This includes seamlessly migrating wallet keys to a quantum resistant scheme without end user intervention? Seems that users would need to do a kind of transaction using existing keys to new wallet/key pair?
Yes, users would need to take some action-- otherwise how would you know if your coins were being moved to your new key vs my new key. :)
We know how to construct kinds of forward compatibility that could allow being spent with a new scheme but the specific scheme would have to be set in advance so they users could generate the future keys at the same time the generate the current ones. And, as mentioned, the existing choices aren't that great (for this application).
Is it reasonable to assume that many wallets won't get migrated and could eventually be seized by whoever (eventually) possesses a sufficiently strong QC? If Larry Fink is right, then that could be untold billions, assuming for sake of argument BTCUSD goes to $1,000,000 by the time such a QC is feasible.
If Satoshi Nakamoto did lose his keys to those treasure trove wallets, those will be up for grabs, as will anyone who lost keys.
Perhaps hoarded encrypted PCAP's aren't the only motivator for quantum opportunists.
Bitcoin makes a lot of sense. Not for physical things but for digital ones.
Bitcoin (crypto) will be used for second hand sales of digital items from gaming characters to digital weapons or other unique items across different games from completely different gaming developers.
Everyone wants to be rich through bitcoin as an investment. No one will actual use it as an everyday currency. If it is the winner of the cyrpto digital currency war. It will be the end of civilisation.
I can tell you have never experienced this problem before but it might surprise you to know that many counties not under international sanctions have big issues to send money to other countries
Of course they find a way, they have to. Doesn't mean it is easy.
The vast majority of people don't even know about bitcoin or blockchian. But the use case is there and it is vastly superior to what western union and moneygram offer in such countries. I'm not telling you as a bitcoin enthusiast, I'm telling you as someone who uses crypto to send money abroad to my gf. I have friends who do the same because it is faster and cheaper than anything else.
> The vast majority of people don't even know about bitcoin or blockchian
And that's the main reason why WU or MoneyGram are vasty more convenient for most people.
> I'm telling you as someone who uses crypto to send money abroad to my gf.
Because you:
- are a technical perso
- who knows about bitcoin
- can navigate the intricacies of setting up a wallet and buying bitcoin, and then
a)
- can find a person/org in the destination country who offers services to convert bitcoin to a real currency.
- can verify that this person/org can be trusted
or
b) explain the intricacies of setting up a wallet, accepting bitcoins and converting bitcoins to currency to people you send money to
> because it is faster and cheaper than anything else.
How do you account for bitcoin's volatility? Its price can rise or drop by any numbeof percents even in a single day. If you send 1k USD worth of bitcoins, the receiver can easily get just 800. That is not really cheap.
There are no new inventions in finance. Be it tulips, joint stock enterprises, junk bonds, or good ol debt, it's all been done before and will all come crashing down yet again, taking the speculative euphoria with it.
I'm still surprised that bitcoin is hated here, such a great technology. It's a decentralised currency, and it's working really well. A lot of big institutions are taking it seriously now. Does paper cash printed by government make more sense?
In my view, money is a technology. A technology is designed to serve a purpose, and is said to work if it achieves that purpose reasonably well.
My simplistic view is that government money such as the dollar serves a small handful of purposes: It's a medium of exchange, short term store of value, and tool of government economic policy. The government has loosely defined "short term" by the target inflation rate. I suppose that regularizing the taxation process is another purpose.
Does it work? Apparently some national currencies work better than others. People in some countries will, if possible, use some other country's money in preference over their own, for all but minor daily transactions. Thus, objecting to one kind of money, and swapping it for another, predates bitcoins.
What I think makes bitcoin different is that no government can influence its purpose, leaving its purpose up to each user to define on their own terms.
Perhaps another way of thinking about it, is that its own behavior defines its purpose, because if your use is in opposition to its behavior, then it doesn't work for you. This could be said to be true of dollars as well.
As an abstract symbol to represent value, yes, government printed cash works better for most people's use cases.
Bitcoin is interesting because of its decentralization, but it definitely pays a high cost to support that feature. If decentralization is not a feature you care about, than a central authority printing cash is a much better system.
One of the big selling points of Bitcoin was it was supposed to enable free and fast transactions. As it turns out, the average transaction clearing time is 200 minutes and transaction fee is about $11. Now, compare that to Australia's New Payments Platform, which enable instant free transfers of fiat.
Perhaps there were people who thought Bitcoin was supposed to enable free and fast transactions but obviously it isn't. There are other cryptocurrencies that are. Bitcoin is more like digital gold.
For everyday transactions, paper cash makes more sense than Bitcoin, which isn't designed for everyday transactions. There are other cryptocurrencies designed for everyday transactions.
“Disrupt incumbents! Topple the establishment! We have the power to do great things! Let’s found a startup!”
When it comes to bitcoin:
“Well actually individuals shouldn’t be trusted, decentralization bad, I LOVE my ancient bank with its shitty website, how dare you question authority?”
It's invaluable if you are involved in grey/black market trade. I was briefly involved in a legal-yet-taboo industry years ago, and being able to instantly receive private payments from people on the other side of the world without permission from anyone (indeed, while payment processors were limiting and closing my accounts) was phenomenal. It made sense then.
In fact I became a bit of a Bitcoin evangelist in my circles, especially as it aligned with my then-libertarian worldview. (However, the questionable leadership of the core Bitcoin fork has mostly eroded that enthusiasm over time.)
Now, as a regular taxpayer, Bitcoin makes no sense to me either. And I say that as a fortunate person with a significant stake, and a retirement fund increasingly grateful to all the dumb money being poured into it.
Its popularity and exchange rate is not a function of its utility, but rather an indication of a disillusioned and frustrated middle class looking anywhere for financial relief. Cryptocurrency is lottery tickets for people who consider themselves too clever to buy lottery tickets. (Especially all of the new, more volatile cryptocurrencies popping up each day.) Governments would be well-advised not to deprive their taxpayers of this distracting fantasy.
You'll know when you need it. Until then, if you want to take a gamble at timing your exit better than the next guy, thanks very much.
Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control. That’s the magic! Whether you think this is good or bad is for debate, but there are apps in every country where you can buy and hold bitcoin (even countries like Nigeria and Venezuela) and it doesn’t take that many people who value it globally to make BTC shoot up in price. If even 1 out of 1000 people on earth desired bitcoin, its value would go up and sustain it. So it doesn’t matter if 999 people dislike it - bitcoin (and crypto) is a niche that can grow much larger without much additional enthusiasm. And the fact it’s worth so much blows people’s minds, making it like a global phenomenon that markets itself every time it goes up.
No one makes you buy bitcoin! If you don’t like it, just ignore it. I could list many more arguments here as to why different sorts of people value it, from libertarians to drug dealers to hedge funds to people in countries that have terrible fiat currencies and corrupt central banks, but ultimately it’s a variation of the government not having control.
One final thought is that the term “currency” confuses a lot of people. Whether it can actually be used like a dollar is moot - it’s an asset that can be used sometimes like a currency, but being a true currency is not required for utility and value. It’s a misnomer.
> Bitcoin is an asset the government simply cannot control.
It certainly can, at least if you intend to exchange it for tangible goods or services, or if you convert it to a government currency. Why do you think these sorts of transactions cannot be regulated?
The settlement layer is purely peer to peer. Governments can enact laws to make actions illegal, and tougher for centralized entities like banks and corporations from using it. But there are addresses out there known to authorities with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen bitcoin - and there is absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it from being moved. If you have the private key, you own the coins.
Ultimately, you will need to exchange your bitcoins for _something_ for them to have provided you with value (dying with a horde of bitcoin, stocks, USD, ect is a waste). Yes, there are many bitcoins moving around that the government cannot influence, but who cares? Go try and buy a car with these bitcoins, and it will be a different story.
For a better understanding of money and why Bitcoin is a better money, I would recommend this article:
https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...
I'll also toot my own horn a bit which also delves into this confusion:
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Bitcoin-Book-Matters-Finances/...