Good. I hope its overall era is over soon too. Insane that we allowed crypto to exist in the first place; a massive sink of time and energy just to allow criminals to defraud people easier.
When I was a kid, I had a typewriter. Was even still possible to buy ink ribbons for it in a local stationary store, not that I could afford them on pocket money, but I've not seen ink ribbons in a stationary store since the early 90s.
I think Bitcoin will be the currency of an interplanetary humanity. And I don't even own any bitcoins or think it will continue going up in the next years. But technically, blockchains will be key as store of data in the (distant) future.
Blockchains don't need to be a currency, we've already got git, it's much less computationally intensive.
If you're using the bitcoin consensus approach in an interplanetary era, you quickly end up with using the full output of Dyson swarm just to stop someone else doing the same, not for any real gain over "I trust you to keep this ledger correct because we all know what 'accountants' and 'lawsuits' are".
"Talking about" is relatively easy for all four; but IMO the use of accountants and lawsuits is much more likely than people using Bitcoin and JavaScript.
If we don't have lawsuits, there's no process by which someone's failure to have an accountant could be held against them. If you don't have something accountant-shaped that can examine the real world, then you have no way to audit that your debit of 100 Martian Pesos was balanced with a credit of 100 traditional Martian didgeridoos, no matter if the Martian Peso was a cryptocurrency, a fiat currency, or commodity money consisting of transmuted post-transuranic-island-of-stability-metal. If you don't care about that, you're probably only playing with money and assets anyway and are functionally post-scarcity.
We might be post-scarcity, annihilated, or post-apocalyptic in 100 years, but none of these three would likely keep Bitcoin, and only one JavaScript.
Bitcoin is absolute crap for interplanetary use. Delay to Mars is between 3 and 22 minutes. So at worst you would have 2 blocks in between. Have fun with double spends. Or distributing the mining...
Expand to other solar system and it will get worse still.
Crypto is just messages in a permissionless p2p network. To not “allow” it to exist is the legislature banning what is presently considered protected expression/free speech.
Crypto is speech, not property.
I really don’t think you’d like where that can of worms leads.
It doesn’t even matter if you like cryptocurrencies or not; we all have a vested interest in being able to create p2p networks amongst the whole internet and send any kind of messages/frames within them that we wish.
Similarly savings accounts and loans are just messages that describe agreements between private parties.
So how can we have bank regulation, when everything that a bank does is just speech?
The answer is that the law is interested in the content of communications, and whether the messages are cryptographically peer-to-peer this-or-that is irrelevant. If your crypto messaging is about selling drugs or unregistered securities, it's not much of an excuse that you were doing it peer-to-peer.
The difference is that bank has a CEO that can take your money or loose it by doing risky things with your money.
Bitcoin network doesn't have a CEO. It is what it is and will always be that. Bitcoin network will not decide, at some point, to lend out your bitcoin at 100x leverage. There will never be a run on Bitcoin network because it always has the same amount of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin network is already "regulated" by the code.
Bitcoin regulations are merely governments trying to regain control they had with banks (they can get all the info they want about you, they can order banks to shutdown your account, like Canadian government did).
They’re called virtual currencies for a reason; they don’t actually exist. It’s just a set of consensus rules about who can make which transfers. The transfers themselves are just packets. To use bitcoin is to send packets containing signatures, nothing more.
Practically speaking, they can’t be anything but speech.
What you call it doesn't matter. If you can use it like a currency, it's property. Even if you can't use it like a currency but it's tradable at all, it's property.
That's a very first world opinion. You can find physical crypto-fiat exchange booths all over the developing world. Because usual banking gets complicated when you passport is not first-class.
Having no details about your misadventure I cannot be a judge for the case, I just can say for my need (sending money to family members) it always worked well. Though you definitely need a practical experience (even if you're techie) to get it right. Not sure it would work well for a travel cause you have to measure reputations, and assess concomitant risks which is hard to do when you aren't a part of community, don't speak language, and can't read omens so to say. However, as a counterexample, my colleague who visited Argentina some years ago got scammed at usual exchange, and robbed 10 minutes later (which she believes to be connected events) so maybe having cash is not necessary better in some places where foreigner is a game to hunt.
That is interesting. I do wonder, given all the volatility, if they are really used by the general population there or if they mostly exist to facilitate questionable business activities.
It seems like you missed the elephant in my commentary: there are plenty of "general population" who can't use banking system at least cross-border. So imagine yourself in need to choose between 1) significant risk of frozen transfers, or even not having account at all at a place you are now, and also maybe risk of extortion and corruption at a place where recipients are, and 2) this scary VOLATILITY? Also, in practical terms there are stablecoins which are quite stable, and bitcoin has been mostly growing for years now
