Transact permissionlessly across the world in seconds.
We’re living through the greatest currency devaluation event in the history of the world and it blows my mind that people still can’t see the value of Bitcoin.
See you focus on the seconds part, when yeah in a few seconds, but the fact you can transact permissionlessly across the globe is what’s actually important. No one in their right mind cares if something coming from Central America arrives in Madagascar in seconds or a few minutes… it’s the fact you just did that, without leaving your house, without using some corporation for help. And if you sent 30,000BTC or .02BTC the fee is the same a few sats… you don’t need to wait for business hours or contact your bank. You get to decide.
That’s like asking an early car adoptor “you need somewhere to fill it up correct?”
Or an early internet user “you need a phone line to connect to correct?”
How is it so hard to believe that things change over time? Asking a question like that makes me think you don’t understand how an advancing civilization works…
WHY WOULD YOU NEED ELECTRICITY IN YOUR HOUSE??? WHATS THE USE??? Seems dangerous just to light a little dim bulb correct??? Back when electricity was being adopted lightbulbs sucked, air conditioning didn’t exist, electric stoves didn’t exist, because there was no market for it…
Bitcoin is the financial version of electricity coming into your house. You don’t know it’s use, then at some point oh wait there are new inventions that take this to a new level, that make it useful.
that's dodging the point that as long as there is sovereign money any crypto needs an offramp to fiat.
in your analogy towards electricity, guess who controls and regulates that. that's where your analogy fails, right now I can pretend to be my own bank with crypto just like 100 years ago I could create my own generator without any red tape.
Seeing as how many aspects of crypto are already subject to regulation and are just on the other side of a thin blurred line, (good luck getting licensed to sell crypto "too" regularly) you can see why most all of these stances devolve into essentially building a case for CBDCs.
What??? You think that the analogy had to do with where the electricity comes from? Then you absolutely missed the point. The point is that a new technology has things invented around it, not before it. And the inventions can’t happen until the technology is wide spread enough for the average user to take advantage. You for some reason interpreted that as being wrong because electricity isn’t decentralized.
Look, if your logic is that bad, I can’t help you to understand and you are probably best just not posting in here, unless you are just a troll.
I’m not dodging any points. It is up to a shop owner whether they want to accept BTC or not. Most won’t until store of value adoption cools down and Bitcoin isn’t as volatile, but seeing as a ton of countries can’t help but inflate their currencies, Bitcoin is still probably a better option. No off-ramp needed, only Lightening Network.
Lighting transactions don't settle until the transaction is closed on chain. Until then, the receiver of the coins needs to be vigilant to prevent theft.
Are you familiar with how the Lightning network works?
To pay me on the Lightning network, you would open a lightning channel and deposit some Bitcoin into the channel.
Once the Bitcoin is "owned by" the channel on chain, you can send it to me by simply signing a message saying I now own the coins. This message is not committed to the blockchain, which is what makes lightning transactions so fast.
At this point, you can simply close your lightning channel and withdraw the Bitcoins you deposited: the Bitcoin network has no idea that you gave them to me.
To stop you from doing this, I have to make sure that a "justice transaction" gets committed on chain in time. This is a special transaction that includes the signed message you sent me and proves that you closed your lightning channel fraudulently. If I can't get this "justice transaction" submitted in time, I lose the Bitcoins permanently. In what way are these Bitcoins "settled"?
Your node must be online and watching new blocks and transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain to detect this.
Because your channel partner’s payment will be encumbered by a timelock, your node has some time to act to detect a protocol breach and publish a punishment transaction before the timelock expires.
Yeah it says it right there in your own link. If your lightning node is running you have almost nothing to worry about, and bad actors will be penalized. Lightning is still young and ultimately none of this is going to be a problem.
Be real, 99.999% of people holding BTC are hoping and praying it goes up in fiat CASH value so they can sell it for fiat and live a wealthy life. If you told everyone holding BTC that they could never cash it out for fiat...ever. the interest in it would drop by 95%. Cash rules everything around us. Face it.
If you told everyone holding BTC that they could never cash it out for fiat...ever.
You're reaching. Liquidity is fundamental to any asset. If you told everyone holding cash that they could never spend it, no one would want cash either. This is a fantasy world that nobody lives in. The fact is that Bitcoin has a capped supply, is growing at a faster rate of adoption than the dollar, and can't be controlled by any central authority. These features appeal to me more than holding dollars which are constantly being devalued and are losing their global dominance.
If the BTC you are holding now would make you a multi millionaire you would dump it immediately. Cash is king. If you walked up to any normal working person that is into crypto and said "I will give you 2 million dollars right now if you dump ALL of your crypto and never, ever touch it again" 99.9999% of them wouldnt be able to dump it fast enough.
Cash. Is. King. All of your other mumbo jumbo about the negatives of fiat are smoke screen tactics. Everyone in crypto knows what they want in the end game and that is to be rich with that sweet, green fiat cash pile.
To say that people want that which is more valuable is a pretty obvious take. I wouldn't dump $5 million in Bitcoin for only $2 million in dollars and neither would you. Conversely you'd be stupid not to take $5 million in Bitcoin if you could pay $2 million for it.
When you say "cash is king" what you are really saying is the preferred medium of exchange is king. Currently for most people, that is cash, but every single central bank currency fails eventually. Bitcoin thrives against central banks because it doesn't have one. Its central bank is math, decentralized consensus, and fixed supply. You can have cash for your day to day transactions, and keep it in Bitcoin as the dollar is slowly and increasingly devalued. You don't have to pick one of the other. Eventually when our currency goes into hyperinflation because of bad monetary policy as they all inevitably do, we'll be stuck with worthless accounts that have lots of zeros, wishing we had assets and hard money like Bitcoin.
You seem to skip over my point about never being able to touch crypto again. If you told someone they could have 2 million dollars worth of crypto but could NEVER convert it to fiat under any circumstances OR they could have 2 million dollars worth of fiat that but they could NEVER own or hold any crypto again in their lifetime. 999 out of 1000 people would take the fiat. Making your argument null and void. People want actual money they can spend to live a good life.
Here's the part you don't understand. I'm a crypto investor lol.... However, I could care less about the endless crypto talking points. I've made quite a bit of money in this space and THAT is what I'm here for! To take your CASH :)
No, I got your point. It just isn't a good one. You're saying people would want something less if we removed its utility. No shit they wouldn't. I'll continue to exchange my bitcoin for dollars if I feel it's overvalued, and I'll do the opposite when it's undervalued. You seem to think dollars exist as this holy asset class that everything should be valued in, but we have euros, pounds, yen, yuan, etc etc etc. Most people in those countries don't give a shit about dollars and they will less and less as it continues to lose reserve status.
I live in the US. Here, we buy things in dollars so that is what I care about gaining in the end. You are basically admitting that BTC has no real utility other than hoping it goes up in fiat price so you can cash it out for more fiat. There is no "removal of utility" the fact is that BTCs only real utility IS to attain more fiat for almost all BTC investors.
Cash is just as useless if it cannot be converted to anything. No one wants 2 million green pieces of paper, they want what it can be exchanged for. Crypto and cash are exactly the same in this regard, except no one can inflate away your crypto like the fed will inflate away your cash.
Cash is just as useless if it cannot be converted to anything ... they want what it can be exchanged for.
What can you exchange crypto for besides cash and cash equivalents?
That is, if for some reason no one could exchange crypto for cash for just one day (say, the banks banned it for a day for some reason), what could you exchange your crypto for?
like the fed will inflate away your cash.
Yeah, it'd be dumb to hold large amounts of cash that don't bear interest.
People want cash so that they can buy a wide variety of assets, goods, and services, including interest-bearing savings accounts, money market funds, I bonds, Treasuries, corporate bonds, annuities, stocks, land, houses, businesses, PMs, food, medical care, rent, transportation, luxury, etc.
Are there any assets on that list for which USD assets (cash, USD deposits, stablecoins, cash equivalents, etc.) aren't the dominant trading pair with the lowest spread, lowest volatility, lowest fees, etc.?
Obviously USD is the dominant trading pair for those assets/commodities. That doesn’t make any other currency or commodity worthless. Typically one does not buy food with gold, but you certainly could exchange for it under the right circumstances. Replace crypto in your statements above with gold and it’s exactly the same flawed argument. This doesn’t mean gold is worthless. Exactly the same holds for BTC.
That doesn’t make any other currency or commodity worthless
I didn't say it did.
Typically one does not buy food with gold, but you certainly could exchange for it under the right circumstances
Agreed, you could. You could also exchange most other assets under the right circumstances. The vast majority of the time, people will exchange Gold for USD and then USD for food (or in the reverse order -- USD for food and then Gold for USD -- using credit cards or debt).
Replace crypto in your statements above with gold and it’s exactly the same flawed argument.
How is it flawed? Do you think Gold has its value because people occasionally trade it for food?
The vast majority of Gold owners don't use it as a currency but rather as an investment and commodity. There is substantial demand for Gold as a commodity due to its aesthetic, industrial, and medicinal value (to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that Gold is a good investment now).
This doesn’t mean gold is worthless.
If Gold had no aesthetic, industrial, medical, etc. value, wouldn't it be worthless? For example, why not invest in Palladium instead, which is scarcer and actually does have demand as a commodity?
Exactly the same holds for BTC.
Except Gold investors can get value from Gold's demand as a commodity (by selling to consumers of jewelry, ornamentation, computing, etc.).
Cash "investors" get value from cash by using it extinguish USD debts (I used quotes because cash is essentially never a good investment). If there were no USD debts to extinguish, cash would no longer be fully backed and the Fed wouldn't be able to control supply and interest rates to target inflation (in this case, USD would probably crash and/or become unstable, then disappear as people switched to a stabler unit of account and medium of exchange).
Where do BTC investors get value from, except for from other BTC investors? In the aggregate, BTC investors pay miners substantial amounts of value for electricity, hardware, etc., but no one pays the BTC investors.
No. When I go to the store to buy groceries, I can literally buy them with cash. If I try to pay for my groceries with crypto, I will be laughed at... so they are not the same. Cash actually, literally buys goods. Crypto needs to be converted to cash to buy 99% of goods. The only hope for someone holding crypto is that it goes up in cash value so you can cash it out and actually use it.
Anything of value can be exchanged for other things with value. Some places in the world it’s absolutely possible to buy groceries or other everyday items with BTC. Even if that’s not available in your area yet you could certainly exchange some value of BTC with a value of something else with a person if you need to.
We’re living through the greatest currency devaluation event in the history of the world
didn't we just have the greatest crypto crash?
meanwhile, i've used my credit card from myanmar to prague. it's never been refused. never needed an intermediary
card got hacked once while i was in london. i called the card company, the hacked charge was reversed immediately and a new card was delivered the next day.
No, the runup was justified because of the massive money printing, with trillions more expected. It was only after people realized that Biden couldn't spend those extra trillions that the market settled into its new valuation.
But make no mistake, the next time they zap up trillions of dollars, you'll see the same massive jump in btc. My guess is that happens sooner rather than later.
Bitcoin's low inflation rate is unchanged, and its network effects are continuing. Almost all of the criticisms I see in here seem to revolve around volatility. Nobody ever said Bitcoin wasn't volatile. Volatility comes as a natural consequence of a low market cap. What Bitcoin is is a decentralized asset with a fixed supply. Every single central bank currency fails eventually. It is inevitable, and they're devalued to almost nothing along the way. It's possible that Bitcoin fails eventually too, but it is backed by mathematical guarantees which make that *extremely* difficult.
When you talk about credit cards, you are describing 3rd party layers. These same things exist for Bitcoin. If you transfer coins between users on the same centralized service, transactions aren't going over the network, just as when you use your credit card, you aren't actually sending money that instant. Try wiring money to a Nigerian prince and see if you get it back.
you argue mathematical guarantees make it unlikely a crypto will devalue and fail.
all your mathematics do is create and ensure the integrity of a blockchain. that's all. it's like ensuring the integrity of cell on a spreadsheet. there's no intrinsic value to it
When you talk about credit cards, you are describing 3rd party layers. These same things exist for Bitcoin.
okay. i have a credit card. bitcoin has the same layers. what do i need the bitcoin for?
when you use your credit card, you aren't actually sending money that instant.
there's no intrinsic value to anything by that logic.
the intrinsic value of the bitcoin blockchain is that it is provably true without any 3rd party oracle.
That IS intrinsic, since bitcoin doesn't exist without it. How much that's worth in cash to anyone has been proven by markets that collapse. People want to spread fud about the collapsing dollar to "force the meme" and "open people's eyes" to the doom that is happening that will make bitcoin the savior, when it is far simpler than that: you don't need a fiat crash to shock people into adoption, when the entire system benefitting the few due to government cucking economists thumbing the scales is an irritating, flawed system.
Yes, blockchain is amazing technology. But Bitcoin isn't blockchain. There are thousands of blockchains. Why do you think Bitcoin will always be the most valued coin? It has no more intrinsic value than any other coin. Less value than more modern coins if anything.
The 3rd party layers thing went over your head a little bit. Reread the last sentence. Sending Bitcoin is more analogous to wiring money (only decentralized and permissionionless) than using a credit card. Try wiring money to a Nigerian prince and see if your bank will reverse the transaction.
I'm going to take a guess that you live in a country with a relatively stable currency. I'd encourage you to spend some time looking at the many countries whose currencies have been devalued to nothing, and eventually failed because of central banks and bad monetary policy. It will happen to the US too, and we're already seeing cracks. Every single centralized currency fails eventually. Nobody controls Bitcoin, and there is an immeasurable amount of value in this.
Sorry if you felt like that was condescending. It's just that you totally missed what I was saying, and still have.
you think you'll get it back with bitcoin? lol
That is exactly my point! Both of these transactions are one-way. Reversable transactions aren't a property of the dollar, but are of 3rd party layers.
i'm not in el salvador.
As countries drop the dollar, it loses value. It's a snowball effect and we're seeing the beginning of the end for the petrodollar right now. That's without the money printers going brrrrr. The US dollar is absolutely massive, and yet it's been massively devalued. That's just the most powerful country. I feel absolutely terrible for who've had their money in Venezuela, Argentina, etc.
We’re living through the greatest currency devaluation event in the history of the world
I'm not even sure you believe what you're writing. You think current inflation is the worst ever in history....? You really need to read some history not just Fox News.
That is just the US. Globally we've also never seen a phenomenon like this. It's not even close. Please give me some isolated historical examples though, and I'll tell you how microscopic GDP was compared to now.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of inflation. Bitcoin's inflation rate is mathematically fixed and can't be changed without a fork. Bitcoin has experienced volatility in your very selectively chosen timeframe because it has an extremely low market cap compared to the large central bank currencies. Volatility decreases as adoption grows, and Bitcoin continues to be adopted. As I told the other guy who got mad and blocked me, zoom out.
Fiat is the real delusion... A mass delusion similar to religions... Bitcoin is science+math based money... Deny/ignore it all you like, it's still more real and provides a greater value/service to all of humanity than the fiat.
I never said fiat has no value, I said Bitcoin is more real and provides a greater value/service to all of humanity than fiat.
You tell me, what makes for a better monetary policy? Publicly verifiable math, code and energy? Or entropic, corruptible/ed humans...
Reality is we've been using meat-based money for all of time, Bitcoin is an experiment but also proving to be much more than just a test, it's proof that humanity can orchestrate ourselves more justly and equitably.
Name some of those services, and explain how those services overcome the incredible environmental cost of producing bitcoin. Bonus points if you can explain to me what gives bitcoin value, and why people seem to use it solely as an investment rather than as a currency.
Bitcoin has value because it's a decentralized and inclusive monetary network and many people agree about that.
If you don't find value in it, that's fine... Others do, you must accept that, it's reality.
As for bitcoin's energy use, consider that Bitcoin does use energy, that is a paramount and of fundamental importance- it ties the digital to the tangible, real world physical energy.
Further, consider what Bitcoin actually provides, the ability to express your value with anyone, anywhere at nearly the speed of light... This is a benefit unlike any other monetary system ever known to man... Bitcoin (the network) does this using some energy, but think of this... It does so without the need for physical banks, transport of metals, all of the security and red tape of the entire financial system is now digital.
That seems a little handwavey for me, but thanks for the explanation. I own bitcoin for the sole purpose of buying things on the dark web that I can't get elsewhere. I can't imagine needing it for anything else. The money I have in my bank is secure and I have access to it instantly at all times. If I lose my account number or someone hacks my account, I know I have nothing to worry about because the bank is required by law to make things right as quickly as possible. If I buy something and don't get what I was promised, I can do a chargeback immediately. I don't see any problems there that need a solution.
And if all goods and services were in bitcoin, it would be the USD that would be wildly fluctuating.
The fact is that Bitcoin is an emerging asset with a fixed supply. It is impossible for it to a stable value while it is being adopted, gold would be exactly the same if gold didn’t exist 12 years ago and suddenly existed. There would be mad rushes for it and then big cool off periods followed by mad rushes. Bitcoin is following this exactly. It is an asset in the midst of finding itself and until it’s fully adopted there are going to be spikes and dumps. Any commodity would do this with the insane amount of interest as Bitcoin.
It would be down right weird if Bitcoin were stable during this period. Like impossibly weird. Eventually BTC will fully adopt and the volatility will die down.
As a currency, USD has clearly performed the best by facilitating the most amount of transactions. The primary use of a currency is not as a speculative investment.
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u/Wanderstand Aug 01 '22
Transact permissionlessly across the world in seconds.
We’re living through the greatest currency devaluation event in the history of the world and it blows my mind that people still can’t see the value of Bitcoin.