Bitcoin News Thread

VladKinder

Well-known member
A once every four year event when the amount of new BTC mined is cut in half.

It's due at around midnight tonight.

Historically this has been very bullish for BTC long term, but in the past there has been a post-halving dip before it really takes off,
and of course BTC's price is affected by sentiment, what is happening in the stock market, inflation, and geopolitics etc...

But over the course of the next 4 to 5 years I am very very bullish, which is why my portfolio is now around 15% BTC.

As with any asset you think is good long term any short term corrections/crashes just means it's got cheaper in the short term,
and any parabolic moves up means it's got more expensive (good for money already invested, but bad for FOMO).
Volatility is your friend not your enemy (unless your risk management skills are not good).

 
Bitcoin isn't money though is it? i.e. a medium of exchange. Who is using it to trade commodities and which commodities? How much Bitcoin was used in such transactions?

Bitcoin has not replaced any established fiat currency. Like all the other cryptos it is used as a traded security and valued against actual money $, £ etc.
 
Bitcoin isn't money though is it? i.e. a medium of exchange. Who is using it to trade commodities and which commodities? How much Bitcoin was used in such transactions?

Bitcoin has not replaced any established fiat currency. Like all the other cryptos it is used as a traded security and valued against actual money $, £ etc.

What Bitcoin is depends on where you live in the world.
 
That table is a joke, must be from a crypto/ bitcoin site, surely? I've got about 1-2% of my investments in Crypto, but it's basically a combination of hedge/ FOMO and my belief that it works quite well on the greater fool theory aspect. I don't think it's going to do anything notable in my lifetime (as in come into wide use). The price might keep going up, just based on the greater fool theory, which is the main reason I've punted into it on a small scale.

For bitcoin to "win", it would need pretty much all the other crypto to lose, as well as beat all other currencies. Although bitcoin is crypto and the main one, it's difficult to lump all those things which are good about bitcoin in the same column as crypto, as there are various options etc. A lot of the pro's of bitcoin are the technology/ blockchain, not the actual crypto or bitcoin themselves.

Dollar not durable? 99.999% of the value of the transactions is just numbers on a screen, same applies to gold for portability. The only people lugging gold bars around are the miners. Gold and the dollar have been around for an exceptionally long time, proving their durability, bitcoin has only really been known about in the public domain since around 2017.

You can divide a dollar down to a cent, and the guys mine gold which is barely visible to the naked eye.

Online transactions for all are as secure as you want them to be. But writing a bitcoin wallet list of access codes down is not safe, and there's also a risk of losing it and never finding it again (I did this, like may have). If you lose your bank pin, account no or logon details you can get them all back relatively easily. You can even get access to dead peoples accounts if you've got permission/ rights.

The dollar is more decentralized than bitcoin, it's practically the world currency, the number of things controlling the price of the dollar is massive, this is both a good and bad thing but it keeps the price/ value in check. Never mind there are other currencies which can be used to hedge the dollar.

Gold being fairly scarce is a good thing, it's becoming more costly to mine, and harder to find, this will probably help gold prices long term, but there's also a chance that people realise it actually has little physical use in reality. I think it's similar to bitcoin in this way.

Most people are investing in bitcoin because they think the price will go up, but I bet not many are truthfully investing in it that think it will get physically used day to day. There are a million other options for investing which can be extremely diversified, with proven good returns over very long timeframes, bitcoin is also competing with those.

There are probably a limited few key players in bitcoin, as miners/ major holders, and they probably have more control of the price of bitcoin than the US government has control over price of the dollar.

There should be rows for:
Investment risk:
Investment track record:
Volatility:
Covered by the FSCS:
Ponzi scheme:
Greater fool theory:
Chance of going to zero:
Exceptional waste of energy:
 
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What would happen if someone brought the Internet down or locked access to Bit coin sites?

Is the supply of Bitcoin always going to be limited, surely depends on future technologies, there is already a multitude of crypto currencies and pseudo products i.e. stable coins etc.

Investors have had bitcoins stolen you can't call it highly secure.

Gold does have alternative applications e.g. in the electronics industry, jewellery industry, physical coinage.

Bitcoin price is volatile

The great thing Bitcoin has going for it is that young people see the price rise in the last 10 years, their adult years and think it will continue. Once competent they can trade on their phones which they life with and generally trust. They think its something new and gold is for old people.
 
Bitcoin isn't money though is it? i.e. a medium of exchange. Who is using it to trade commodities and which commodities? How much Bitcoin was used in such transactions?

Bitcoin has not replaced any established fiat currency. Like all the other cryptos it is used as a traded security and valued against actual money $, £ etc.
General comment - Didn't Elon Musk offer to sell his cars priced in Bitcoin? It seems to have gone quiet on that.
 
That table is a joke, must be from a crypto/ bitcoin site, surely? I've got about 1-2% of my investments in Crypto, but it's basically a combination of hedge/ FOMO and my belief that it works quite well on the greater fool theory aspect. I don't think it's going to do anything notable in my lifetime (as in come into wide use). The price might keep going up, just based on the greater fool theory, which is the main reason I've punted into it on a small scale.

For bitcoin to "win", it would need pretty much all the other crypto to lose, as well as beat all other currencies. Although bitcoin is crypto and the main one, it's difficult to lump all those things which are good about bitcoin in the same column as crypto, as there are various options etc. A lot of the pro's of bitcoin are the technology/ blockchain, not the actual crypto or bitcoin themselves.

Dollar not durable? 99.999% of the value of the transactions is just numbers on a screen, same applies to gold for portability. The only people lugging gold bars around are the miners. Gold and the dollar have been around for an exceptionally long time, proving their durability, bitcoin has only really been known about in the public domain since around 2017.

You can divide a dollar down to a cent, and the guys mine gold which is barely visible to the naked eye.

Online transactions for all are as secure as you want them to be. But writing a bitcoin wallet list of access codes down is not safe, and there's also a risk of losing it and never finding it again (I did this, like may have). If you lose your bank pin, account no or logon details you can get them all back relatively easily. You can even get access to dead peoples accounts if you've got permission/ rights.

The dollar is more decentralized than bitcoin, it's practically the world currency, the number of things controlling the price of the dollar is massive, this is both a good and bad thing but it keeps the price/ value in check. Never mind there are other currencies which can be used to hedge the dollar.

Gold being fairly scarce is a good thing, it's becoming more costly to mine, and harder to find, this will probably help gold prices long term, but there's also a chance that people realise it actually has little physical use in reality. I think it's similar to bitcoin in this way.

Most people are investing in bitcoin because they think the price will go up, but I bet not many are truthfully investing in it that think it will get physically used day to day. There are a million other options for investing which can be extremely diversified, with proven good returns over very long timeframes, bitcoin is also competing with those.

There are probably a limited few key players in bitcoin, as miners/ major holders, and they probably have more control of the price of bitcoin than the US government has control over price of the dollar.

There should be rows for:
Investment risk:
Investment track record:
Volatility:
Covered by the FSCS:
Ponzi scheme:
Greater fool theory:
Chance of going to zero:
Exceptional waste of energy:
Andy, you comment on the crypto/bitcoin threads everytime they crop up with such authority but your knowledge of them is still extremely limited. All of those things you are debating you are using the general terms and not the specific terms you would use to describe an asset. The $ is less durable because cash is not durable. It can be destroyed. Even the digital version of $ can be destroyed because you can delete any databases, your bank can go bust and your money is gone etc. It just no longer exists.

Security has nothing to do with whether you can remember your login details but how easy it is for someone to move your money without your permission. Forgetting your details is the most extreme example of security. You can't access it but neither can anyone else. It will stay there forever. That's not the case with $ which can be confiscated, frozen, hacked etc. Nobody that owns gold in any serious quantity actually owns it. Someone else owns it and they keep a record that you own x amount of it. That gold could still be stolen or those records deleted.

Gold isn't scarce, not at all. It's hard to get to but there is loads of it. Look outside of our planet and it is everywhere. It's not inconceivable that we will be able to access it at some point.

"In our solar system alone, there is an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter named 16 Psyche that scientists believe contains more than 700 quintillion dollars in gold and other precious metals. Considering today's gold price that is $63,039 per kg, this becomes around 11 trillion tons of gold."

You also don't seem to understand the concept of divisibility. If we need more $ we print more $, we don't divide it. That means the value of $1 is reduced every year due to inflation. Bitcoin can't be created beyond it's cryptographical limit of 21m. If more people want bitcoin they have to buy it from the existing supply.

Bitcoin is decentralised. Nobody can control it individually. The fed is in control of the $. They can print as much as they want, they implement policies that affect the supply of the $. Nobody can do that with bitcoin. You are confusing the price of bitcoin and the dollar with the supply. The price of bitcoin, gold, the $ or anything else is based on supply and demand. Nobody can really control the demand on any of them but the fed can control the supply of the $. If demand get s too high, they just print more. If bitcoin demand gets too high then the price goes up.

Bitcoin "winning" doesn't need all other cryptos to "lose". That doesn't even make sense. You can have loads of different cryptos doing loads of different things running simultaneously. Same way you can have the $, the £ and all the other currencies alongside Gold, Silver and any other physical asset and all sorts of other businesses like VISA, Mastercard, Paypal doing financial transactions and all the other businesses doing things like contracts, securities etc.

None of this of course means it is worth investing in but your post on this topic, as usual, is chock full of misinformation and ignorance.
 
1. What would happen if someone brought the Internet down or locked access to Bit coin sites?

2. Is the supply of Bitcoin always going to be limited, surely depends on future technologies, there is already a multitude of crypto currencies and pseudo products i.e. stable coins etc.

3. Investors have had bitcoins stolen you can't call it highly secure.

4. Gold does have alternative applications e.g. in the electronics industry, jewellery industry, physical coinage.

5. Bitcoin price is volatile

6. The great thing Bitcoin has going for it is that young people see the price rise in the last 10 years, their adult years and think it will continue. Once competent they can trade on their phones which they life with and generally trust. They think its something new and gold is for old people.
1. Bitcoin is just a database. If nobody has access to it then the database will not be able to be changed. When the internet is turned back on it would be exactly as it was when it was turned off. If the internet was brought down though then the value of bitcoin is the least of our worries. You wouldn't be able to spend the money in your bank account either.

Say you banked with HSBC, You know how much money is in your account because HSBC tells you how much is there. E.g. They have a database that says Redwurzel account has £10,000 in it. Nobody outside of HSBC has a copy of that database. If all their systems completely failed and their database was deleted then your £10k has gone because you have no proof that you had £10k. Bitcoin is exactly the same but instead of HSBC holding that database, every single computer in the world can have a live copy of that database so there isn't a single point of failure.

2. It's maths. You can't change anything about the supply of bitcoin. That's why it is known that the halving is happening today. We knew it would years ago and we know exactly when every bitcoin that will ever exist will come into circulation.

3. Nobody has had bitcoin stolen from their account unless they have revealed their details to someone. Your bitcoin wallet is an address and you hold the key. If you give your address to someone and a copy of your key then they can enter your house. Someone can beat you up and take your key but they can do the same with your house key or your wallet full of cash or your bank account.

4. It does and that's why it is a good investment because it is always needed. We don't need the majority of it though. There is a lot more gold that isn't used than is used.

5. It is volatile but the supply isn't. Price volatility is based on demand. The supply is predictable.

6. Young people investing is a tiny percent of the supply. The major players now are institutional investors.

7. Yes, Tesla accepted Bitcoin for a short while. The volatility means it is not great for a business to be accepting bitcoin. Any business with shareholders don't want the risk that comes with that volatility. I wouldn't accept Bitcoin as salary for the same reason. It doesn't mean that in the future that volatility will always exist. The reason it is still so volatile is because it's still primarily a speculative asset. It has utility but it is not currently being used for that. Volatility is the biggest reason for that. The same way that Tesla won't accept bitcoin as payment, bitcoin holders don't want to use it as payment because they think it is going to go up in value. Why would you buy a $70k car for 1btc now when that 1btc might be worth $100k next week?
 
1. Bitcoin is just a database. If nobody has access to it then the database will not be able to be changed. When the internet is turned back on it would be exactly as it was when it was turned off. If the internet was brought down though then the value of bitcoin is the least of our worries. You wouldn't be able to spend the money in your bank account either.

Say you banked with HSBC, You know how much money is in your account because HSBC tells you how much is there. E.g. They have a database that says Redwurzel account has £10,000 in it. Nobody outside of HSBC has a copy of that database. If all their systems completely failed and their database was deleted then your £10k has gone because you have no proof that you had £10k. Bitcoin is exactly the same but instead of HSBC holding that database, every single computer in the world can have a live copy of that database so there isn't a single point of failure.

I've no skin in the game here, but that statement re HSBC is ridiculous - you honestly think there's a risk that they lose details of all their account holdings?

"Nobody outside of HSBC has a copy of that database", you obviously dont understand disaster recovery and data centre resilience, let alone the use of cloud computing.
 
Say you banked with HSBC, You know how much money is in your account because HSBC tells you how much is there. E.g. They have a database that says Redwurzel account has £10,000 in it. Nobody outside of HSBC has a copy of that database. If all their systems completely failed and their database was deleted then your £10k has gone because you have no proof that you had £10k. Bitcoin is exactly the same but instead of HSBC holding that database, every single computer in the world can have a live copy of that database so there isn't a single point of failure.

Utter rubbish, I can't believe what I have just read. The company I am head of has data stored in three locations, two of them internal and one external. I suspect that HSBC are ahead of us in this.
 
A colleague of mine has had a bitcoin stolen from him and been completely unable to recover. Not sure what wallet he was using but someone managed to hack it, change his email address and take it. A chunk of the blame is on him for not checking regularly enough but he wrongly assumed it was secure and safe. They won’t even respond to him.
 
I've no skin in the game here, but that statement re HSBC is ridiculous - you honestly think there's a risk that they lose details of all their account holdings?

"Nobody outside of HSBC has a copy of that database", you obviously dont understand disaster recovery and data centre resilience, let alone the use of cloud computing.
Utter rubbish, I can't believe what I have just read. The company I am head of has data stored in three locations, two of them internal and one external. I suspect that HSBC are ahead of us in this.

No. I don't think it is likely, at all. It's just a simplified example to show the difference between a distributed ledger and a centrally held one. I don't think there is any risk that HSBC will lose their database.

There is a risk that the bank could go bust and if you are holding more than FSCS protected limit then you could lose your money though. It doesn't matter if their database says you have £1m if they go bust, you no longer have £1m, you've got £85k.

A colleague of mine has had a bitcoin stolen from him and been completely unable to recover. Not sure what wallet he was using but someone managed to hack it, change his email address and take it. A chunk of the blame is on him for not checking regularly enough but he wrongly assumed it was secure and safe. They won’t even respond to him.
A bitcoin address can't be hacked. The hacking has come from someone obtaining his address and key either through exploiting their wallet with malware or finding where they have stored their address and key on their computer. Maybe they have written it down in a notes app, word document, piece of paper etc. Whatever it is is as simple as giving someone your address and key and yes, there is not much you can do about it once it has happened. Bitcoin itself isn't the problem in this situation, it is that someone has something that someone else wants and hasn't secured it effectively.
 
No. I don't think it is likely, at all. It's just a simplified example to show the difference between a distributed ledger and a centrally held one. I don't think there is any risk that HSBC will lose their database.

But it's failing to account that it's not centrally held, and is in fact held in multiple places and with full back ups at each location, meaning the likelihood of the bank being unable to see what holdings you have is absolutely minimal (close to 0).

Of course a bank can go bust, but there's plenty of things that can go wrong with bitcoin too. You lose your log in, you may still technically have the £1m but you sure as hell cant access it.
 
Andy, you comment on the crypto/bitcoin threads everytime they crop up with such authority but your knowledge of them is still extremely limited. All of those things you are debating you are using the general terms and not the specific terms you would use to describe an asset. The $ is less durable because cash is not durable. It can be destroyed. Even the digital version of $ can be destroyed because you can delete any databases, your bank can go bust and your money is gone etc. It just no longer exists.

Security has nothing to do with whether you can remember your login details but how easy it is for someone to move your money without your permission. Forgetting your details is the most extreme example of security. You can't access it but neither can anyone else. It will stay there forever. That's not the case with $ which can be confiscated, frozen, hacked etc. Nobody that owns gold in any serious quantity actually owns it. Someone else owns it and they keep a record that you own x amount of it. That gold could still be stolen or those records deleted.

Gold isn't scarce, not at all. It's hard to get to but there is loads of it. Look outside of our planet and it is everywhere. It's not inconceivable that we will be able to access it at some point.

"In our solar system alone, there is an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter named 16 Psyche that scientists believe contains more than 700 quintillion dollars in gold and other precious metals. Considering today's gold price that is $63,039 per kg, this becomes around 11 trillion tons of gold."

You also don't seem to understand the concept of divisibility. If we need more $ we print more $, we don't divide it. That means the value of $1 is reduced every year due to inflation. Bitcoin can't be created beyond it's cryptographical limit of 21m. If more people want bitcoin they have to buy it from the existing supply.

Bitcoin is decentralised. Nobody can control it individually. The fed is in control of the $. They can print as much as they want, they implement policies that affect the supply of the $. Nobody can do that with bitcoin. You are confusing the price of bitcoin and the dollar with the supply. The price of bitcoin, gold, the $ or anything else is based on supply and demand. Nobody can really control the demand on any of them but the fed can control the supply of the $. If demand get s too high, they just print more. If bitcoin demand gets too high then the price goes up.

Bitcoin "winning" doesn't need all other cryptos to "lose". That doesn't even make sense. You can have loads of different cryptos doing loads of different things running simultaneously. Same way you can have the $, the £ and all the other currencies alongside Gold, Silver and any other physical asset and all sorts of other businesses like VISA, Mastercard, Paypal doing financial transactions and all the other businesses doing things like contracts, securities etc.

None of this of course means it is worth investing in but your post on this topic, as usual, is chock full of misinformation and ignorance.
It's just an opinion, similar to what most investors who don't hold much crypto think.

My limited knowledge is seemingly proportional to your faith that they're going to get used in a meaningful way anytime soon. Like I mentioned, I've got a small amount of crypto though, as the greater fool thing does seem to work well.

That's the thing though, most people who hold crypto will have very little clue about what it is or does, that's not a good thing, and plays into the hand of those who can game the system/ volatility.

The table I quoted seems to have terrible knowledge of currencies and wealth stores we've been using for 100's of years.

The dollar is practically digital, about 0.000001 of my wealth/ cash is in the UK physical form/ £ etc. I've actually got about 10 more currencies in physical forms than I do pounds, as I intentionally do not carry or want cash.

Bank databases are backed up many, many times, in multiple places I expect, never mind the records that the individual can keep. I keep 7-10 years worth of statements, as well as all the records from trading platforms etc, I need these for self assessment so that's good enough proof for me. Each account protected by the FCA up to 85k, so I keep funds in separate places.

Nobody can move my money, from any account without 2FA, I've deemed that more than safe enough, and could go safer if I wated to. The money in the bank is insured, and the bank is regulated by the FCA, nobody is breaking in and stealing my share of the banks cash. If someone writes their crypto wallet/ access codes down then it's a security risk, it's even a risk if stored on a computer or if stored in a encrypted file. The protection people have over their login info is a lot less secure than how banks protect their login info. How many have their crypto details wrote down on a bit of paper, my guess is most.

What happens if coinbase goes bust or whatever? Aren't the general public unsecured and not insured/ protected? What happened when FTX went bust? There seems to be a lot of crypto scams about, but there are scammers in everything.

$ get confiscated and frozen when crimes have been committed, that's a good thing. Not being able to do that with crypto is a bad thing, as it opens the door to illegal activity. Drug dealers would use it more if it wasn't so volatile.

You're using what is off our planet as an excuse that Bitcoin is better than gold (I'm not saying gold is a good investment mind)? The sum of every rock ever brought back to earth by man is < 500kg I think, ever, and all of that has come from the moon (don't think that has any gold). We've never sent anything to Mars which has came back, never mind Jupiter which is 7x further. If we got gold back from mars it would be the most expensive gold ever recovered, by a hell of a long way. Probably a million an ounce, rather than the $2,000 an ounce it costs here.

It's easy to invest a $ in the entire world (extremely diversified) and beat inflation by 6%.

Large bitcoin holders can really effect the price, 0.01% of them have 60% apparently? Nakamoto invented it and supposedly has a stash of a million bitcoins apparently, and nobody knows who that is do they?

Sure the US gov can print money, doing this comes in handy though times of struggle, this is a good thing. They can also take dollars out of the system, which can also be a good thing. Despite printing loads of $ during covid, the value of the dollar has remained pretty similar v other countries, largely as they printed money too.

If one main crypto does get some use then either the others will fail immediately as potential in the others dies, or they all go up and then later fail when people still realise they have no use. For them all to "win" they need absolutely monumental use. By win, I mean taking over major currencies in the world for actual use and there at least 10 currencies which are obviously massive and used daily all over the world. They're going to be harder to shift.

I thought the idea of smart contracts seemed good a few years back, for like with Ethereum, but the problem is they're too volatile for big ongoing contracts which have tiny margins. Also, what happens in a dispute or one person says they met the criteria and others say they don't? Project bank accounts often get used now with big contracts, like on construction etc, these can take away risk for one side, and not really increase the risk of the other, could be difficult to beat those.
 
But it's failing to account that it's not centrally held, and is in fact held in multiple places and with full back ups at each location, meaning the likelihood of the bank being unable to see what holdings you have is absolutely minimal (close to 0).

Of course a bank can go bust, but there's plenty of things that can go wrong with bitcoin too. You lose your log in, you may still technically have the £1m but you sure as hell cant access it.
It's not failing to account for anything. It was supposed to be a simple explanation, not a reason why one thing is better than the other. A full comparison would be that with bitcoin, every single value is fully accounted for on a single ledger that everyone has access to. With fiat cash HSBC only know what is in HSBC accounts, TSB in TSB accounts, Santander in Santander accounts. There is no agreement on what the total value is and there is no record that brings them altogether as well as all of the cash in people's wallets, houses etc. I.e. it is impossible to know the total supply and who holds it and there is a non-zero risk that some of it will be lost or damaged and there is also a risk that it is counterfeited and the accepted supply could increase. You are correct that the risk of HSBC losing their database is basically 0 so it wasn't the best example but I used it because it was an easy one to visualise.
 
It's not failing to account for anything. It was supposed to be a simple explanation, not a reason why one thing is better than the other. A full comparison would be that with bitcoin, every single value is fully accounted for on a single ledger that everyone has access to. With fiat cash HSBC only know what is in HSBC accounts, TSB in TSB accounts, Santander in Santander accounts. There is no agreement on what the total value is and there is no record that brings them altogether as well as all of the cash in people's wallets, houses etc. I.e. it is impossible to know the total supply and who holds it and there is a non-zero risk that some of it will be lost or damaged and there is also a risk that it is counterfeited and the accepted supply could increase. You are correct that the risk of HSBC losing their database is basically 0 so it wasn't the best example but I used it because it was an easy one to visualise.

So what you're saying is "I created a very simple scenario to try and demonstrate that I'm right, but in the real world that very simple scenario doesn't actually exist, and so I'm coming up with a new one now".
 
It's just an opinion, similar to what most investors who don't hold much crypto think.

My limited knowledge is seemingly proportional to your faith that they're going to get used in a meaningful way anytime soon. Like I mentioned, I've got a small amount of crypto though, as the greater fool thing does seem to work well.

That's the thing though, most people who hold crypto will have very little clue about what it is or does, that's not a good thing, and plays into the hand of those who can game the system/ volatility.

The table I quoted seems to have terrible knowledge of currencies and wealth stores we've been using for 100's of years.

The dollar is practically digital, about 0.000001 of my wealth/ cash is in the UK physical form/ £ etc. I've actually got about 10 more currencies in physical forms than I do pounds, as I intentionally do not carry or want cash.

Bank databases are backed up many, many times, in multiple places I expect, never mind the records that the individual can keep. I keep 7-10 years worth of statements, as well as all the records from trading platforms etc, I need these for self assessment so that's good enough proof for me. Each account protected by the FCA up to 85k, so I keep funds in separate places.

Nobody can move my money, from any account without 2FA, I've deemed that more than safe enough, and could go safer if I wated to. The money in the bank is insured, and the bank is regulated by the FCA, nobody is breaking in and stealing my share of the banks cash. If someone writes their crypto wallet/ access codes down then it's a security risk, it's even a risk if stored on a computer or if stored in a encrypted file. The protection people have over their login info is a lot less secure than how banks protect their login info. How many have their crypto details wrote down on a bit of paper, my guess is most.

What happens if coinbase goes bust or whatever? Aren't the general public unsecured and not insured/ protected? What happened when FTX went bust? There seems to be a lot of crypto scams about, but there are scammers in everything.

$ get confiscated and frozen when crimes have been committed, that's a good thing. Not being able to do that with crypto is a bad thing, as it opens the door to illegal activity. Drug dealers would use it more if it wasn't so volatile.

You're using what is off our planet as an excuse that Bitcoin is better than gold (I'm not saying gold is a good investment mind)? The sum of every rock ever brought back to earth by man is < 500kg I think, ever, and all of that has come from the moon (don't think that has any gold). We've never sent anything to Mars which has came back, never mind Jupiter which is 7x further. If we got gold back from mars it would be the most expensive gold ever recovered, by a hell of a long way. Probably a million an ounce, rather than the $2,000 an ounce it costs here.

It's easy to invest a $ in the entire world (extremely diversified) and beat inflation by 6%.

Large bitcoin holders can really effect the price, 0.01% of them have 60% apparently? Nakamoto invented it and supposedly has a stash of a million bitcoins apparently, and nobody knows who that is do they?

Sure the US gov can print money, doing this comes in handy though times of struggle, this is a good thing. They can also take dollars out of the system, which can also be a good thing. Despite printing loads of $ during covid, the value of the dollar has remained pretty similar v other countries, largely as they printed money too.

If one main crypto does get some use then either the others will fail immediately as potential in the others dies, or they all go up and then later fail when people still realise they have no use. For them all to "win" they need absolutely monumental use. By win, I mean taking over major currencies in the world for actual use and there at least 10 currencies which are obviously massive and used daily all over the world. They're going to be harder to shift.

I thought the idea of smart contracts seemed good a few years back, for like with Ethereum, but the problem is they're too volatile for big ongoing contracts which have tiny margins. Also, what happens in a dispute or one person says they met the criteria and others say they don't? Project bank accounts often get used now with big contracts, like on construction etc, these can take away risk for one side, and not really increase the risk of the other, could be difficult to beat those.
I don't have any faith in anything related to it being used in a meaningful way at any point. I'm merely dismissing your dismissals as misinformation because that is what they are.

Nobody can move my money, from any account without 2FA
Not true. You can have your assets frozen by your bank. It might seem like they are there to protect you but there have been plenty of people that have had account frozen incorrectly. Not just criminals. Your bank can go bust as well and then your money is gone.

That's the thing though, most people who hold crypto will have very little clue about what it is or does, that's not a good thing, and plays into the hand of those who can game the system/ volatility.
Most people don't understand how anything they own works. You don't really need to. People don't fully understand the banking system. I don't know how me pressing a keyboard makes these words appear. You don't have to understand something to own it.

What happens if coinbase goes bust or whatever?
Coinbase is essentially the same as a bank. It isn't bitcoin. Properly regulated though it would operate like any investment company which is required to hold customers assets separately from their own (unlike a bank that are allowed to take deposits and then give out loans on that money many times over).

So what you're saying is "I created a very simple scenario to try and demonstrate that I'm right, but in the real world that very simple scenario doesn't actually exist, and so I'm coming up with a new one now".
I wasn't trying to demonstrate anything being right or wrong. It was a basic example of how a distributed ledger is different to a centrally held one. Change it from cash and compare an inventory system or whatever. It's just an example for someone who asked what happens if the internet was switched off.
 
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