You got it Mike. Bitcoin is absolutely for fascists. It is for the libertarian mindset - for people who want to make something from nothing, to divide us all and conquer the other side. It pretends in some ways to be a currency. As an alternative to the US dollar, to other countries’ currencies? And yet it offers no stability. Currency without stability is speculation.Bitcoin will always be speculative. Ironically if it reaches stability it will no doubt lose attractiveness and then ultimately further fall in value. And yes “a pyramid scheme of nothingness”, no more value than 🌷 tulips.
Yep. And ironically all the people I know who love bitcoin, love it because it's supposedly free from regulation and taxes. F-ing idiots. Bitcoin can only exist because we have those things, and we have those things for a reason.
Bitcoin IS “FIAT CURRENCY.” Private Fiat currency. Instead of “the full Faith and credit of the United States,” you have the full Faith and credit of? The Blockchain? The algorithms???
LibertariCons want you to hate everything GUBMINT and want and expect all governments to fail creating some Libertarian paradise. You might as well invest in money printed by THE JOKER. Because once private individual trillionaires get to decide what constitutes MONEY.
It’s not that deep. It’s a greater fool scheme. They’re desperate for it to have value because they wanna get rich. But it’s never had a use case besides crime because it’ll never have a use case besides crime. They don’t grasp (or don’t care to grasp) what it means to be a currency or an investment. So they claw desperately at any reason for existence.
the fact that the valley got tricked into supporting fascism because they were promised they could get rich quick says a lot about the rot at the core of the american experience.
i like to put it a bit more poetically and say things like "Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Is About To Devour The World"
Yeah but its like boy who cried wolf and then the real wolf turned up in AI clothing now Palantir has contracts with CIA, FBI, Grok is govt preferred AI, consuming electricity increasing prices for all (remember bitcoin is going to boil the oceans!). Fascists projects are everywhere, nothing new. What's protestant mega churches in US? Fascist
Just another Ponzi scheme, you know, like stock and bond trading. I just watched it fall from 125K to 80K, so a rapid 45K sell off and gamblers come one and come all to "get in" at a bottom so some other suckers can build up your value for you and all while you aren't lifting a damn finger. Phoey!
I mean, I have no need in this moment to quickly send money across the world. How much do you do this? Do you do it more often than the innumerable other things in your life, for which tedium could give way to convenience? Why is this the thing I should care about more than the things I laid out in my post? Answer that question, and I might begin to take you seriously.
Agreed. Given all the scams, drugs, guns, human suffering, political manipulation, greed and generally anti social things crypto is responsible for, all you've got is speed? I mean, I use my Visa card overseas. It's pretty much instant. Why are bitbros so obsessed with transaction speed? Because that's about all blockchain can offer - along with burning ridiculous amounts of power, "mining" (as if it's an actual thing) pixie dust.
I have coworkers with family in Venezuala and the Philippines for ex. They send money to family regularly. They can send western union and pay fees on each end with a 500 max, or they can send bitcoin.
I am happy for you. I am. I am also happy for human rights activists who use it to defend against de-banking by authoritarian regimes. But one must take stalk of the society-level and civilizational-scale implications. Which libertarians and anarchists don't. Which is why most bitcoin advocates are libertarians and anarchists.
You-know, unless you're running pig butchering scams, sex trafficking, selling drugs, weapons or bypassing international norms and laws. Then you might want to move money quickly across the world, without oversight, bypassing the IBAN system which is quite capable of transferring money, quickly, legally.
I suspect that makes up about 0.00000000001% of bitcoin transactions. Given the massive amount of harm the blockchain is causing, I think we could come up with a better solution. Like maybe just making Western Union charge a bit less. And I'm pretty sure the underpaid laborers from Sudan and Pakistan that send money home from my country, are not managing bitcoin wallets on their iPhone17s.
There are DLT implementations that can preserve security, decentralisation and scalability while potentially scaling up to tens of thousands TPS for complex (compound) transactions.
But it's relative "value" is dropping like a stone--because at the moment and framed in this way ( security, decentralisation, scalability) there is no value.
It produces no value.
That is the lesson of the crypto quagmire.
If one souped up technology within this dubious framework produces no value what does it say about all the other contenders?
Don’t worry. I can smell the doubt behind your words. I can feel the petulance reaching out, hoping to get me to question myself. To make me think: maybe I don’t understand what I’m saying. I can see the gaslighting. Clearly.
I view Bitcoin similarly. Thank you for connecting many of the dots in this dangerous (and disingenuous) game of digital currency. As a practical matter, I assume anything the T Rump family gets involved in is actually nothing more than a grift.
You can’t really regulate it. It’s software protected by the 1st amendment. At best you can make up rules about what people can spend their money on…but then I’d ask who exactly is acting like a fascist in that scenario?
pushed by the same people who say 'Taxation is Theft' while lobbying with all of their wealth to get government contracts for their new ventures. Ask any one of them if they think the average Isreali Citizen should be as free of the obligation to pay taxes as them. Israel would cease to exist in a week. And these people see large year over year growth in their investment portfolios based on Isreali government defense spending. it's a Con!!!
Bitcoin sold people the myth of freedom while smuggling in a worldview where community is a bug, not a feature. That’s why the rhetoric always sounds like a libertarian tantrum wrapped in math. You nailed it: if you build a system for enemies, you end up living in a world that feels hostile even when no one’s actually out to get you. Most folks don’t want to be war-gamers in a digital bunker. They just want a life that isn’t rigged.
Bitcoin doesn’t prevent community it just doesn’t require trust because it is an open source mometary network governed by rules not rulers. It’s literally the most fair system devised. People unwillingly to learn will miss it and hopefully will have fun staying poor and not harbor too much regret about it.
If done directly, it would need about 500 txs just for the everyday, by my very rough estimate. At the moment, it has about 8 or so txs.
Or as a store of value, where people draw down periodically.
Why, when, for what?
And what will these 100M people do when they draw down, but use ordinary fiat? Operating with rules and within the law, which crypto people think must be replaced by a "fair" system as an economic and moral imperative.
Why do some crypto people not buy into BTC, while others might hold BTC and other coins?
What makes their vision wrong and the pure BTC vision right?
Or, how are these hybrid visions to exist together?
Based on what?
Crypto is portrayed as a fair game that works according to the rules.
But pragmatically, no one can articulate what those rules are and how they play with others using slightly different rules.
More catastrophically, no one can be sure that the rules are not gamed in many and varied ways.
This goes from individual transactions, one by one, where there is the possibility of MEV, to sophisticated, or not so sophisticated, data hiding and false flags for market advantage, all the way through chain bridges and oracles. Not to mention the further consequent problem of reliably surfacing data of past transactions.
And then people say, It's open source, there's a community.
The lightning network and other second layer technologies enable unlimited txs per minute. Lighting and ecash tech enable greater privacy and speed as well as much less expensive transactions.
it has stored my value better than any other asset I’ve owned over the past 8 years. Volatility is generally up and to the right…preferably to the usd down and to the right as it is reliably done for the past century.
And how's that going for bitbros right now? Many "Respected" financiers and analysts predicted we'd be at 280,000+ about now. It's more like 80 today. So are you having fun being poor yet? And this could be the start of a much larger slide. If outfits like Strategy - that are basically propping up the entire market, panic, they'll trigger a catastrophic drop, because there's zero utility or actual value in a bitcoin. It's potential price is zero. Similar to digital pictures of monkeys smoking cigars, 'dogs wif hats' and frog memes, it's nothing but ridiculous speculation. The blockchain is just a digital book being run by criminals. There are asshats who'll make money from fools, as is always the case. But ultimately, you're not investing in companies, or technology, or anything that usefully moves humanity forwards in any way. You're investing in nothing for purely selfish gains at the expense of others. And that has a very short lifespan.
I suggest you study more. I really don’t base my life around random analysts predictions, no one else should either. All I see is a world of governments who can’t help but to create more money which forces everyone to buy assets to protect from debasement. Bitcoin is the lowest friction asset and monetary network ever devised and with a fixed supply it is the only thing in the universe that I know which can’t be debased. Saylor can do whatever he wants with his bitcoin, there is no price drop that I view as catastrophic.
Bitcoins value or utility is simple. If I can memorize 12 words I can take all my wealth with me and no one can take it away from me. It is the only thing you can truly own in this regard. It can’t be copied it can’t be faked. I think this has value, and apparently so do a lot of other people.
Monkey JPEGs have nothing to do with Bitcoin. The blockchain is just one part of the tech stack that makes Bitcoin function but it is not really the most important part of the system.
I don't need to study more. I was just pointing out that supposedly clever people are constantly predicting bitcoin will go the moon, even as it's heading for the gutter. They will do this because they have a vested interest. Pump and profit. My experience of Bitcoin is not "frictionless". The apps I tried were painful. I had to transfer money to a dodgy company in the Cayman Islands. And if you think it's frictionless, try to sell and get your money out when things aren't going so well. Frictionless is Apple Pay. Or, I dunno, money. Fixed supply? Maybe, but excuse me if I don't trust that. Plenty of tokens have split, multiplied, paired or changed their system. Right now there are companies wasting gigawatts of electricity mining more. Massive amounts are held in individual accounts which can effectively change the supply/demand/price - unlike dollars which governments regulate to avoid sharp changes. Gold, Silver... there are better examples of relatively fixed supply. "Nobody can take it away from you" - OK in theory, but in theory nobody can take money away from you either. Thing is, billions of crypto tokens get scammed every day. Wallet keys lost. Governments have confiscated it too. Just like money. "It is the only thing you can truly own" I can't unpack that. I own a bunch of stuff, I'm sure you do too. But 'owning' something that has no value or utility is questionable. If it's nothing, can you own it? Yes a lot of people are into it. That doesn't make it good. It just means there are a lot of greater fools and when it crashes, it'll hurt a lot of people, even people who have nothing to do with it, which is unfortunate. Monkey jpgs were simply a adjacent example. I know the difference. But the fact idiot influencers and celebrities were pumping them and lots of people got caught up in it, then it went bust, only a short time ago, I thought, was a pretty good example of what can happen with digital "assets".
Bitcoins utility is incredibly limited whereas the harm it causes is vast and far reaching. "The only thing in the universe that can't be debased" - again, I hardly know how to unpack that. I guess maybe - given it has zero value, it can't be debased further? But I just don't understand what you're saying. As a store of value, a definition of money, crypto fails miserably. At one point it rocketed. Now it's trending backwards. It's highly volatile. Sure, money changes a bit, like with the inflation that's definitely not happing in the US right now. But it doesn't change by 20% in a matter of days.
It isn't a fixed supply in the sense that BTC can fractionise. In effect, there is a huge supply.
Either way, it has no value because it adds none. There is nothing about BTC (or crypto) that uniquely enables anything complex and at volume that is reliable in execution and the record of, that people and companies want to use.
If people could reliably predict the future price of things we would all be rich. This is not how reality works. My cost basis for bitcoin is under 20k. I’ve lived through several 80% draw downs. I’m smart enough to know that the way you win is you buy and hold and you do this with all the fiat you want to save. I’ll be retired from corporate America within the next 10 years only because I buy an asset that doubles my net worth every 2 years.
The dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power over the last century. So yes the government does control the rate of dollars in a steady way so that you can predictably know that you will need to get annual raises each year above 7% to stay at parity. You will know That mortgages for homes and loans for cars will go from 30 years to 50 and 7 years to 15 respectively. This is not a serious system and is clearly designed to enrich the banking elite.
Bitcoin is frictionless. You can send substantial amounts of bitcoin to anyone else in the world who owns a cell phone for almost nothing instantly. You can send billions of dollars of value for a fee of a few dollars with final settlement taking 10-60 minutes. Such a transaction in the fiat world would take over a week(and it’s arguably that final settlement takes many more) and cost millions in exchange rate markups. Bitcoin does this in a trustless way, the fiat world requires a trusted third party(or many trusted parties). Bitcoin is superior in this regard.
monkey JPEGs are not digital assets. There is Bitcoin a decentralized network secured by energy and the largest amount of computing power on the planet and there is everything else. They are talked about in the same sentence by the ignorant and those who wish to harm adoption of a technology that can free the world from the banking cartels.
anything physical you own can be taken from you. All the money in your bank can be seized. You never own a property you are forced to pay taxes on each year. No one can take the bitcoin I have in self custody. Such a thing has never existed before. It is the power of kings available to all. Once you understand this you will look at the world differently.
you clearly need to study Bitcoin more since you think the supply can be changed. This might be true for other digital currencies, but Bitcoin is not the same and understanding this generally requires study. It took me years to understand Bitcoin enough to buy it and more to put all my wealth into it.
This doesn't really address any of my points above. And if a digital monkey that people paid for the exclusive right to 'own' isn't a digital asset, what is it? Certainly a dumb investment. It was an adjacent example anyway, and you skipped all the moral issues: 1) Like all bitbros, oligarchs, terrorists, rogue nations, and drug dealers etc, not paying tax is clearly a huge motivator for you. But our society relies on tax. The very system you use to store and transact your precious pixie dust, relies on tax. Tax avoidance, particularly by the rich and large organisations is NOT a good thing. If everyone abandoned real money and paid no tax then ultimately you'd get societal collapse, anarchy, and we're back to your pixie dust being worthless. That's not likely to happen, but still, bitbros love to bag the system that allows bitcoin to exist. 2) As above, you're not investing in the production of anything. Investing in shares is investing in companies that invent, produce, employ etc. Invest in Ford and you're helping to produce better cars, innovation, employment, exports... Meanwhile Strategy invests in bitcoin, stops innovating its cloud products, fires all its staff because they no longer make anything... ultimately, again, if everyone adopts bitcoin and stops investing in actual real companies that make things, society suffers. 3) Frictionless transfers. Again, not good. How often do regular people want to move millions overseas? The use case for moving millions without friction is almost purely illegal – drugs, weapons, human trafficking, avoiding sanctions, and generally stuff nobody should be doing. Normal people use Western Union, Visa, or legal systems like SWIFT. They pay the tax and accept that's part of living in society with all its benefits. If you don't want that, maybe society should kick you out?
OK, I get it, banks suck. The subprime crisis exposed how rotten it all is. But that's because Reagan deregulated them and let them create all kinds of complex, obfuscated financial instruments. Like bitcoin.
And I have to say, I fail to see how bitcoin is the power of kings. Kings owned property and collected taxes. Just like a government, except unelected, they had to run the country - build roads, educate and protect their citizens etc... exactly NOT like bitcoin.
It's hilarious you guys think bitcoin isn't controlled, somehow the price moves with the market and nobody but individual punters' demand controls it. Retail schmucks like yourself, are at the mercy of eg; The US government, a Tweeted emoji from Elon, a hack from North Korea, A dump from Saylor. Plus inflation etc. Because one of the biggest practical problems with bitcoin, is that it's inevitably tied to fiat. You say inflation has made money worth 90% less than today. But that's over 100 years. Bitcoin has fluctuated by that amount in a few months. And, back to my point (sorry, rambling) when you want to spend your bitcoin on actual stuff, for example, a pizza, you'll need to convert it to fiat or something pizza makers accept. And you'll find the price of a pizza has gone up. Sure, bitcoin might rocket up by 100% or whatever, but your pizza is still subject to inflation - unless you convince everyone to accept bitcoin direct. And again, there's yet another contradiction; If everyone buys bitcoin, and it rockets in price, the value becomes meaningless. You end up with galloping inflation because everyone's got millions in bitcoin and no longer sees why they should make you a pizza. That's why we need real money, and why it needs to have a more-or-less fixed value that governments can regulate.
Anyway, big ramble, but this is, after all, a philosophy blog.
As a woke guy myself, I completely understand the sentiment, especially after how fascists/libertarians/magas/rightwingers appropriated the bitcoin brand, so to speak. But bitcoin is for everyone, and the aspect of it that you seem to hint to be oligarchyish will stop being true once the middle and lower classes wake up and decide to earn bitcoin instead of earn fiat. And after that happens, fiat money will disappear and saving it won't accrue you higher levels of purchasing power anymore. You're just angry at how this phase of bitcoin adoption looks like: hoarders beat workers, which is definitely heartbreaking, I'm with you. But not for long my friend.
> Bitcoin is going to crash when this market bubble pops. Know this.
OMG I would have never expected to receive such a dull response from you.
Bitcoin has crashed dozens of times. And yet it has resurfaced back again, higher than before. Why? Because we're right now measuring its value with a fiat-measuring stick. And what happens if you measure the value of something finite with an infinite unit of account? That it will feel that it always goes up in the long-term, even if it has short-term spikes and dips.
Know this.
> fiat money will disappear and saving it won't accrue you higher levels of purchasing power anymore
BTW I just realized that this sentence that I had written before is a bit confusing. With the word "it" I meant bitcoin, not fiat.
The problem is, Bitbros talk about it like it's the new money. It isn't. Not right now anyway. Since it's inception, it doesn't obey even the most fundamental laws of what constitutes money that we're taught at school. Store of value springs to mind. Bitcoin went from being worth cents to hundreds of thousands. Which was nice for early adopters (people buying illegal stuff on the darkweb). But if everyone was being paid in Bitcoin, can you imagine the chaos? "Last week I was paid $200 in bitcoin, now it's worth $2million, not sure I'll go into work today." When it inevitably goes back to being worthless, again, what happens to society if the 'money' in your wallet is digital dust? Bitcoin, in it's current form anyway, has become a purely speculative asset, whose fair value is nothing, and relies entirely on the 'greater fool' premise.
Good on Bitcoin and on target with Mises, but you missed it with Hayek who supported a guaranteed national income because the market process eroded the informal networks that protected people from adversity.
Duhhhh! Of course it’s a lie. It’s a pyramid scheme of nothingness.
You got it Mike. Bitcoin is absolutely for fascists. It is for the libertarian mindset - for people who want to make something from nothing, to divide us all and conquer the other side. It pretends in some ways to be a currency. As an alternative to the US dollar, to other countries’ currencies? And yet it offers no stability. Currency without stability is speculation.Bitcoin will always be speculative. Ironically if it reaches stability it will no doubt lose attractiveness and then ultimately further fall in value. And yes “a pyramid scheme of nothingness”, no more value than 🌷 tulips.
Yep. And ironically all the people I know who love bitcoin, love it because it's supposedly free from regulation and taxes. F-ing idiots. Bitcoin can only exist because we have those things, and we have those things for a reason.
This is definitely the Age of Ironic Unattachment. What George Orwell warned about.
Bitcoin IS “FIAT CURRENCY.” Private Fiat currency. Instead of “the full Faith and credit of the United States,” you have the full Faith and credit of? The Blockchain? The algorithms???
LibertariCons want you to hate everything GUBMINT and want and expect all governments to fail creating some Libertarian paradise. You might as well invest in money printed by THE JOKER. Because once private individual trillionaires get to decide what constitutes MONEY.
YOU AIN’T GETTING ANY.
It’s not that deep. It’s a greater fool scheme. They’re desperate for it to have value because they wanna get rich. But it’s never had a use case besides crime because it’ll never have a use case besides crime. They don’t grasp (or don’t care to grasp) what it means to be a currency or an investment. So they claw desperately at any reason for existence.
Well said. The Randian model will not share a coffee, shovel your walk or show an ounce of unpaid kindness. People can be kind and care, and
build community in the process. It is our secret power.
bitcoin has always been a fascist project, basically from the jump but definitely since around 10 years ago. David Golumbia even wrote a whole book about this way back in 2016: "The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism": https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Bitcoin-Right-Wing-Extremism-Forerunners/dp/1517901804
the fact that the valley got tricked into supporting fascism because they were promised they could get rich quick says a lot about the rot at the core of the american experience.
i like to put it a bit more poetically and say things like "Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Is About To Devour The World"
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/cryptocurrency-is-a-hideous-monstrosity
Yeah but its like boy who cried wolf and then the real wolf turned up in AI clothing now Palantir has contracts with CIA, FBI, Grok is govt preferred AI, consuming electricity increasing prices for all (remember bitcoin is going to boil the oceans!). Fascists projects are everywhere, nothing new. What's protestant mega churches in US? Fascist
Just another Ponzi scheme, you know, like stock and bond trading. I just watched it fall from 125K to 80K, so a rapid 45K sell off and gamblers come one and come all to "get in" at a bottom so some other suckers can build up your value for you and all while you aren't lifting a damn finger. Phoey!
Show me an easier, quicker way to send and receive money across the world.
You say that like, that's the most important thing.
Its not important?
I mean, I have no need in this moment to quickly send money across the world. How much do you do this? Do you do it more often than the innumerable other things in your life, for which tedium could give way to convenience? Why is this the thing I should care about more than the things I laid out in my post? Answer that question, and I might begin to take you seriously.
Agreed. Given all the scams, drugs, guns, human suffering, political manipulation, greed and generally anti social things crypto is responsible for, all you've got is speed? I mean, I use my Visa card overseas. It's pretty much instant. Why are bitbros so obsessed with transaction speed? Because that's about all blockchain can offer - along with burning ridiculous amounts of power, "mining" (as if it's an actual thing) pixie dust.
you, the one single person, has no need, so let's extrapolate that haha - shows your LOW IQ
I dream of one day possessing your capacity for intellectual discernment.
Hiring freelancers?
I have coworkers with family in Venezuala and the Philippines for ex. They send money to family regularly. They can send western union and pay fees on each end with a 500 max, or they can send bitcoin.
I am happy for you. I am. I am also happy for human rights activists who use it to defend against de-banking by authoritarian regimes. But one must take stalk of the society-level and civilizational-scale implications. Which libertarians and anarchists don't. Which is why most bitcoin advocates are libertarians and anarchists.
No.
You-know, unless you're running pig butchering scams, sex trafficking, selling drugs, weapons or bypassing international norms and laws. Then you might want to move money quickly across the world, without oversight, bypassing the IBAN system which is quite capable of transferring money, quickly, legally.
Or if you want to send money to family in poor countries without exorbitant fees.
I suspect that makes up about 0.00000000001% of bitcoin transactions. Given the massive amount of harm the blockchain is causing, I think we could come up with a better solution. Like maybe just making Western Union charge a bit less. And I'm pretty sure the underpaid laborers from Sudan and Pakistan that send money home from my country, are not managing bitcoin wallets on their iPhone17s.
There are DLT implementations that can preserve security, decentralisation and scalability while potentially scaling up to tens of thousands TPS for complex (compound) transactions.
But it's relative "value" is dropping like a stone--because at the moment and framed in this way ( security, decentralisation, scalability) there is no value.
It produces no value.
That is the lesson of the crypto quagmire.
If one souped up technology within this dubious framework produces no value what does it say about all the other contenders?
Don’t worry. I can smell the doubt behind your words. I can feel the petulance reaching out, hoping to get me to question myself. To make me think: maybe I don’t understand what I’m saying. I can see the gaslighting. Clearly.
I view Bitcoin similarly. Thank you for connecting many of the dots in this dangerous (and disingenuous) game of digital currency. As a practical matter, I assume anything the T Rump family gets involved in is actually nothing more than a grift.
The issue is you cannot ban it.
You can regulate it but Democrats did nothing when they had the chance.
Gensler did some inappropriate stuff and courts threw his SEC rulings out.
If you want to ban it you have sacrifice some liberties like encryption and many more. Its not worth it.
You can’t really regulate it. It’s software protected by the 1st amendment. At best you can make up rules about what people can spend their money on…but then I’d ask who exactly is acting like a fascist in that scenario?
pushed by the same people who say 'Taxation is Theft' while lobbying with all of their wealth to get government contracts for their new ventures. Ask any one of them if they think the average Isreali Citizen should be as free of the obligation to pay taxes as them. Israel would cease to exist in a week. And these people see large year over year growth in their investment portfolios based on Isreali government defense spending. it's a Con!!!
Cryptocurrency is a godsend for criminals.
https://substack.com/@cryptadamus/note/c-180556868
It is the currency of the damned.
Bitcoin sold people the myth of freedom while smuggling in a worldview where community is a bug, not a feature. That’s why the rhetoric always sounds like a libertarian tantrum wrapped in math. You nailed it: if you build a system for enemies, you end up living in a world that feels hostile even when no one’s actually out to get you. Most folks don’t want to be war-gamers in a digital bunker. They just want a life that isn’t rigged.
Bitcoin doesn’t prevent community it just doesn’t require trust because it is an open source mometary network governed by rules not rulers. It’s literally the most fair system devised. People unwillingly to learn will miss it and hopefully will have fun staying poor and not harbor too much regret about it.
Will BTC serve say 100M people?
How?
If done directly, it would need about 500 txs just for the everyday, by my very rough estimate. At the moment, it has about 8 or so txs.
Or as a store of value, where people draw down periodically.
Why, when, for what?
And what will these 100M people do when they draw down, but use ordinary fiat? Operating with rules and within the law, which crypto people think must be replaced by a "fair" system as an economic and moral imperative.
Why do some crypto people not buy into BTC, while others might hold BTC and other coins?
What makes their vision wrong and the pure BTC vision right?
Or, how are these hybrid visions to exist together?
Based on what?
Crypto is portrayed as a fair game that works according to the rules.
But pragmatically, no one can articulate what those rules are and how they play with others using slightly different rules.
More catastrophically, no one can be sure that the rules are not gamed in many and varied ways.
This goes from individual transactions, one by one, where there is the possibility of MEV, to sophisticated, or not so sophisticated, data hiding and false flags for market advantage, all the way through chain bridges and oracles. Not to mention the further consequent problem of reliably surfacing data of past transactions.
And then people say, It's open source, there's a community.
See my full comment above.
The lightning network and other second layer technologies enable unlimited txs per minute. Lighting and ecash tech enable greater privacy and speed as well as much less expensive transactions.
it has stored my value better than any other asset I’ve owned over the past 8 years. Volatility is generally up and to the right…preferably to the usd down and to the right as it is reliably done for the past century.
And how's that going for bitbros right now? Many "Respected" financiers and analysts predicted we'd be at 280,000+ about now. It's more like 80 today. So are you having fun being poor yet? And this could be the start of a much larger slide. If outfits like Strategy - that are basically propping up the entire market, panic, they'll trigger a catastrophic drop, because there's zero utility or actual value in a bitcoin. It's potential price is zero. Similar to digital pictures of monkeys smoking cigars, 'dogs wif hats' and frog memes, it's nothing but ridiculous speculation. The blockchain is just a digital book being run by criminals. There are asshats who'll make money from fools, as is always the case. But ultimately, you're not investing in companies, or technology, or anything that usefully moves humanity forwards in any way. You're investing in nothing for purely selfish gains at the expense of others. And that has a very short lifespan.
I suggest you study more. I really don’t base my life around random analysts predictions, no one else should either. All I see is a world of governments who can’t help but to create more money which forces everyone to buy assets to protect from debasement. Bitcoin is the lowest friction asset and monetary network ever devised and with a fixed supply it is the only thing in the universe that I know which can’t be debased. Saylor can do whatever he wants with his bitcoin, there is no price drop that I view as catastrophic.
Bitcoins value or utility is simple. If I can memorize 12 words I can take all my wealth with me and no one can take it away from me. It is the only thing you can truly own in this regard. It can’t be copied it can’t be faked. I think this has value, and apparently so do a lot of other people.
Monkey JPEGs have nothing to do with Bitcoin. The blockchain is just one part of the tech stack that makes Bitcoin function but it is not really the most important part of the system.
I don't need to study more. I was just pointing out that supposedly clever people are constantly predicting bitcoin will go the moon, even as it's heading for the gutter. They will do this because they have a vested interest. Pump and profit. My experience of Bitcoin is not "frictionless". The apps I tried were painful. I had to transfer money to a dodgy company in the Cayman Islands. And if you think it's frictionless, try to sell and get your money out when things aren't going so well. Frictionless is Apple Pay. Or, I dunno, money. Fixed supply? Maybe, but excuse me if I don't trust that. Plenty of tokens have split, multiplied, paired or changed their system. Right now there are companies wasting gigawatts of electricity mining more. Massive amounts are held in individual accounts which can effectively change the supply/demand/price - unlike dollars which governments regulate to avoid sharp changes. Gold, Silver... there are better examples of relatively fixed supply. "Nobody can take it away from you" - OK in theory, but in theory nobody can take money away from you either. Thing is, billions of crypto tokens get scammed every day. Wallet keys lost. Governments have confiscated it too. Just like money. "It is the only thing you can truly own" I can't unpack that. I own a bunch of stuff, I'm sure you do too. But 'owning' something that has no value or utility is questionable. If it's nothing, can you own it? Yes a lot of people are into it. That doesn't make it good. It just means there are a lot of greater fools and when it crashes, it'll hurt a lot of people, even people who have nothing to do with it, which is unfortunate. Monkey jpgs were simply a adjacent example. I know the difference. But the fact idiot influencers and celebrities were pumping them and lots of people got caught up in it, then it went bust, only a short time ago, I thought, was a pretty good example of what can happen with digital "assets".
Bitcoins utility is incredibly limited whereas the harm it causes is vast and far reaching. "The only thing in the universe that can't be debased" - again, I hardly know how to unpack that. I guess maybe - given it has zero value, it can't be debased further? But I just don't understand what you're saying. As a store of value, a definition of money, crypto fails miserably. At one point it rocketed. Now it's trending backwards. It's highly volatile. Sure, money changes a bit, like with the inflation that's definitely not happing in the US right now. But it doesn't change by 20% in a matter of days.
It isn't a fixed supply in the sense that BTC can fractionise. In effect, there is a huge supply.
Either way, it has no value because it adds none. There is nothing about BTC (or crypto) that uniquely enables anything complex and at volume that is reliable in execution and the record of, that people and companies want to use.
If people could reliably predict the future price of things we would all be rich. This is not how reality works. My cost basis for bitcoin is under 20k. I’ve lived through several 80% draw downs. I’m smart enough to know that the way you win is you buy and hold and you do this with all the fiat you want to save. I’ll be retired from corporate America within the next 10 years only because I buy an asset that doubles my net worth every 2 years.
The dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power over the last century. So yes the government does control the rate of dollars in a steady way so that you can predictably know that you will need to get annual raises each year above 7% to stay at parity. You will know That mortgages for homes and loans for cars will go from 30 years to 50 and 7 years to 15 respectively. This is not a serious system and is clearly designed to enrich the banking elite.
Bitcoin is frictionless. You can send substantial amounts of bitcoin to anyone else in the world who owns a cell phone for almost nothing instantly. You can send billions of dollars of value for a fee of a few dollars with final settlement taking 10-60 minutes. Such a transaction in the fiat world would take over a week(and it’s arguably that final settlement takes many more) and cost millions in exchange rate markups. Bitcoin does this in a trustless way, the fiat world requires a trusted third party(or many trusted parties). Bitcoin is superior in this regard.
monkey JPEGs are not digital assets. There is Bitcoin a decentralized network secured by energy and the largest amount of computing power on the planet and there is everything else. They are talked about in the same sentence by the ignorant and those who wish to harm adoption of a technology that can free the world from the banking cartels.
anything physical you own can be taken from you. All the money in your bank can be seized. You never own a property you are forced to pay taxes on each year. No one can take the bitcoin I have in self custody. Such a thing has never existed before. It is the power of kings available to all. Once you understand this you will look at the world differently.
you clearly need to study Bitcoin more since you think the supply can be changed. This might be true for other digital currencies, but Bitcoin is not the same and understanding this generally requires study. It took me years to understand Bitcoin enough to buy it and more to put all my wealth into it.
This doesn't really address any of my points above. And if a digital monkey that people paid for the exclusive right to 'own' isn't a digital asset, what is it? Certainly a dumb investment. It was an adjacent example anyway, and you skipped all the moral issues: 1) Like all bitbros, oligarchs, terrorists, rogue nations, and drug dealers etc, not paying tax is clearly a huge motivator for you. But our society relies on tax. The very system you use to store and transact your precious pixie dust, relies on tax. Tax avoidance, particularly by the rich and large organisations is NOT a good thing. If everyone abandoned real money and paid no tax then ultimately you'd get societal collapse, anarchy, and we're back to your pixie dust being worthless. That's not likely to happen, but still, bitbros love to bag the system that allows bitcoin to exist. 2) As above, you're not investing in the production of anything. Investing in shares is investing in companies that invent, produce, employ etc. Invest in Ford and you're helping to produce better cars, innovation, employment, exports... Meanwhile Strategy invests in bitcoin, stops innovating its cloud products, fires all its staff because they no longer make anything... ultimately, again, if everyone adopts bitcoin and stops investing in actual real companies that make things, society suffers. 3) Frictionless transfers. Again, not good. How often do regular people want to move millions overseas? The use case for moving millions without friction is almost purely illegal – drugs, weapons, human trafficking, avoiding sanctions, and generally stuff nobody should be doing. Normal people use Western Union, Visa, or legal systems like SWIFT. They pay the tax and accept that's part of living in society with all its benefits. If you don't want that, maybe society should kick you out?
OK, I get it, banks suck. The subprime crisis exposed how rotten it all is. But that's because Reagan deregulated them and let them create all kinds of complex, obfuscated financial instruments. Like bitcoin.
And I have to say, I fail to see how bitcoin is the power of kings. Kings owned property and collected taxes. Just like a government, except unelected, they had to run the country - build roads, educate and protect their citizens etc... exactly NOT like bitcoin.
It's hilarious you guys think bitcoin isn't controlled, somehow the price moves with the market and nobody but individual punters' demand controls it. Retail schmucks like yourself, are at the mercy of eg; The US government, a Tweeted emoji from Elon, a hack from North Korea, A dump from Saylor. Plus inflation etc. Because one of the biggest practical problems with bitcoin, is that it's inevitably tied to fiat. You say inflation has made money worth 90% less than today. But that's over 100 years. Bitcoin has fluctuated by that amount in a few months. And, back to my point (sorry, rambling) when you want to spend your bitcoin on actual stuff, for example, a pizza, you'll need to convert it to fiat or something pizza makers accept. And you'll find the price of a pizza has gone up. Sure, bitcoin might rocket up by 100% or whatever, but your pizza is still subject to inflation - unless you convince everyone to accept bitcoin direct. And again, there's yet another contradiction; If everyone buys bitcoin, and it rockets in price, the value becomes meaningless. You end up with galloping inflation because everyone's got millions in bitcoin and no longer sees why they should make you a pizza. That's why we need real money, and why it needs to have a more-or-less fixed value that governments can regulate.
Anyway, big ramble, but this is, after all, a philosophy blog.
As a woke guy myself, I completely understand the sentiment, especially after how fascists/libertarians/magas/rightwingers appropriated the bitcoin brand, so to speak. But bitcoin is for everyone, and the aspect of it that you seem to hint to be oligarchyish will stop being true once the middle and lower classes wake up and decide to earn bitcoin instead of earn fiat. And after that happens, fiat money will disappear and saving it won't accrue you higher levels of purchasing power anymore. You're just angry at how this phase of bitcoin adoption looks like: hoarders beat workers, which is definitely heartbreaking, I'm with you. But not for long my friend.
Bitcoin is going to crash when this market bubble pops. Know this.
> Bitcoin is going to crash when this market bubble pops. Know this.
OMG I would have never expected to receive such a dull response from you.
Bitcoin has crashed dozens of times. And yet it has resurfaced back again, higher than before. Why? Because we're right now measuring its value with a fiat-measuring stick. And what happens if you measure the value of something finite with an infinite unit of account? That it will feel that it always goes up in the long-term, even if it has short-term spikes and dips.
Know this.
> fiat money will disappear and saving it won't accrue you higher levels of purchasing power anymore
BTW I just realized that this sentence that I had written before is a bit confusing. With the word "it" I meant bitcoin, not fiat.
The problem is, Bitbros talk about it like it's the new money. It isn't. Not right now anyway. Since it's inception, it doesn't obey even the most fundamental laws of what constitutes money that we're taught at school. Store of value springs to mind. Bitcoin went from being worth cents to hundreds of thousands. Which was nice for early adopters (people buying illegal stuff on the darkweb). But if everyone was being paid in Bitcoin, can you imagine the chaos? "Last week I was paid $200 in bitcoin, now it's worth $2million, not sure I'll go into work today." When it inevitably goes back to being worthless, again, what happens to society if the 'money' in your wallet is digital dust? Bitcoin, in it's current form anyway, has become a purely speculative asset, whose fair value is nothing, and relies entirely on the 'greater fool' premise.
How long have you known bitcoin? You sound very new. You should invest 100usd and wait 4years, it will change your perspective.
Good on Bitcoin and on target with Mises, but you missed it with Hayek who supported a guaranteed national income because the market process eroded the informal networks that protected people from adversity.