> Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system

Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek?

It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware.

The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all rose tinted theory.

In theory, bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. In reality it’s just another thing, akin to a collectible, that is bought and sold. Its value is based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what you can do with a bitcoin.

In theory, bitcoin is government proof, in reality governments all over the world place restrictions on trading crypto. It’s so difficult to trade bitcoin for fiat without going through some kind of bank, that governments still have enough control as to make the “government proof” argument moot.

Just look at the price of monero after being delisted from Coinbase in anticipation of US regulation.

At worst, bitcoin (and crypto) is a greater fools game. You gain bitcoin with the only utility being that its price swings so much that you can sell it for a profit.

At best, it’s just another payment system owned by very wealthy people. (Like ethereum)

There’s a lot of theoretical benefits to decentralized currencies and governance free economies, but crypto (at least the cryptocurrencies we have today) embodies none of that and practically is a vehicle for gaming and scamming, as we’ve seen.

Except when it's not, like in Japan which has had a growing money supply but near-zero inflation—and even bouts of deflation—over the last few years/decades:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PA7P

And in other places as well:

> In this paper I will argue why the common misconception that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” cannot be used to explain most historical hyperinflations. I will argue that “money printing” is often the response to exogenous and unusual events and not the direct cause of the hyperinflation.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102

> Currently, it appears impossible to forge or fake Proof of Work, the way governments can forge and fake new currency into existence with a few keystrokes, which again, is the ultimate cause of inflation.

Except it's not governments, or even central banks, that create money, it is banks through credit creation:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Further, all of this talking about inflation like it's a bad thing.

I think most people recognize that deflation, and the economic causes of it, are a bad thing, e.g.:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

As we've (re-)learned recently, "high" inflation (say >4%?) is also not great. So we're in the range of 0-4% to consider. It may be thought that 0% inflation is ideal, but that is impossible to achieve. You'd think that having a fixed currency supply would do this (e.g., gold standard) but this actually moves deflation as the 1930s showed:

> The initial contractions in the United States and France were largely self-inflicted wounds; no binding external constraint forced the United States to deflate in 1929, and it would certainly have been possible for the French government to grant the Bank of France the power to conduct expansionary open market operations. However, Temin (1989) argues that, once these destabilizing policy measures had been taken, little could be done to avert deflation and depression, given the commitment of central banks to maintenance of the gold standard. Once the deflationary process had begun, central banks engaged in competitive deflation and a scramble for gold, hoping by raising cover ratios to protect their currencies against speculative attack. Attempts by any individ- ual central bank to reflate were met by immediate gold outflows, which forced the central bank to raise its discount rate and deflate once again. According to Temin, even the United States, with its large gold reserves, faced this con- straint. Thus Temin disagrees with the suggestion of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) that the Federal Reserve's failure to protect the U.S. money supply was due to misunderstanding of the problem or a lack of leadership; instead, he claims, given the commitment to the gold standard (and, presumably, the absence of effective central bank cooperation), the Fed had little choice but to let the banks fail and the money supply fall.

* http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482

And if you think having a hard currency helps with stability, the historical record of the hold standard shows that is not the case:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...

So if <0% doesn't work, and >4% does not work, and 0% does not work, we're left in the situation of going for an interval of (0,4).

Further a fixed currency supply ties the hands of policy which leads to stability. You want to be able to create money when economies slowdown and private aggregate demand drops:

> I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:

> 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.

> 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.

> 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.

> 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0...

After the 2008 GFC it took many years for unemployment rate to go down in the US because there was no fiscal stimulus (due to GOP hampering it). Post-COVID, with giant stimulus the unemployment rate is the lowest its been in decades: that's what monetary flexibility gives you: options to help get the economy going again.

What it actually is a negative sum game and all such are inherently scams.

The only disagreement is about whether the differences to a Ponzi is insignificant or are significant and we have a new kind of scam, a "Nakamoto scheme".

It is in the interest of those who bought in to praise the game because the only way they can profit is by praising it and passing their loss to a greater fool.

And no, gold and stocks are not such. Gold has buyers who create value added products (electronics, jewelry and so forth) and stocks can create dividends. None of that happens for any crypto with transaction fees.

> Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless (third world citizens, political outcasts, people governments don't like are still able to use it without the government being able to cut them off)

It is not substantially more useful than any other transferable assets for those that need to worry about governments. At the end of the day, those governments still have the ability to jail or kill you. Bitcoin won’t help. Ironically, the more accepted and “integrated” with the financial system in the West it becomes, the less this holds true.

> non-inflationary (inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon - the result of too many units of currency chasing too few goods and services, almost always a result of rampant currency debasement, not possible with bitcoin's hard-coded 21 million cap)

There’s been an infinite number of arguments written about inflation and why we moved to fiat currencies in the first place, I won’t rehash them. Instead I’ll put forth my pet definitions.

Money is the ability to get work done. A country’s money supply should grow with their ability to get work done, otherwise the pressure is deflationary as the economy becomes more efficient and capable. We know all the reasons deflationary currencies are bad.

> universal (every country can trust it because no one country can control it) currency.

As long as they can control you access to the internet, they can control your access to your crypto.

> currency

This is where we diverge most. Bitcoin isn’t a currency and the network will not support it becoming one. It is, as bitcoiners love to put it, a store of value. Which makes it like any other commodity, except it has no intrinsic value which makes it a purely speculative asset and it’s price is directly correlated not with usefulness but with capital seeking (higher risk) returns. This becomes more clear as institutional money goes into bitcoin, not for the purpose of transacting, but to seek gains/hedge other areas of the market.

Ironically, the more people invest in bitcoin, the worse it is as a currency, and the lower the value is to me.

> This enables a framework for the working class to start saving in ways government cannot steal back from them through inflation.

There are other assets for this.

> This enables trustless

This is the one that drives me nuts with crypto. Somewhere in a transaction, something has to happen in the real world. There is not interface between the blockchain and the real world that is truly trustless. You must depend on reality being correctly reported on.

In fact, almost all of the rent seeking in our existing system is built on adding buffers based on the amount of trust in the transaction.

Everything in the real world either depends on either trust (and the associated systems to manage risk) or power (where the whole government institution part of money comes in).

> It's worth acknowledging in good faith that these computational costs have electrical load costs, which often do have carbon emitting costs, too.

Kind of downplaying the sheer size of the carbon emitting costs here…

This is no more true for PoS than it is for PoW. A 51% miner can't directly steal people's money, because users will reject a chain that does that, even if it's the longest chain. Same goes for a 51% staker. The attacker could double spend in both cases, but with Ethereum the attacker could only do that once, and then would lose all its stake.

And with Ethereum there are no particular "core wallet developer accounts." There's a protocol, an open research community, and a bunch of independent client teams which all have to agree on any changes. Their meetings are public. Ultimately, just as with Bitcoin, it's up to the users whether to run any updates or not.

With large percentage ownership, I agree. Namely board positions and votes. Failing that though, honest question, what is the value other than speculation (and the belief that asset will yield a greater return than other assets, or will serve as a hedge, all of which really are speculations with no greater value other than the countert value in USD). Hence, could you expound on what those other values are? (In the common case of someone that owns less than 1M shares)

You can argue what its value should be as a material alone, but it’s not entirely speculation.

Gold is a finite resource that has to be extracted and processed, ecoins are made out of thin air (mining them is a superficial analogy) and speculation.

It’s the difference between owning a farm and a gold bar.

If you're referring to investing $1,000, having it be worth $1,500, and then selling off $300 to pay for groceries, which a Coinbase/whatever account would let you do with Bitcoin while it appreciates.

Practical example, credit/debt card processors almost universally have banned/are banning many adult content sites, but those sites are starting to accept stablecoins.

While stablecoins can be tracked, transactions cannot be universally controlled, especially not by private entities (depends on the exact stablecoin of course).

Prices are set on the margins. Not at the absolute values.

Its about that simple now. Whether or not that's good for the country (IE: does anything useful) is irrelevant now.

As far as i am aware nobody uses memory cards as a medium of exchange so looks like my logic holds.

How so? Have you ever tried to buy anything with gold? Or store it?

Bitcoiners think BTC can be used for the same purpose.

In contrast, crypto is designed (qua permissionlessness) to evade regulation. Since it's fairly crappy technology, it's also slow and inefficient and cumbersome. So, it is better suited to illegitimate transactions than to legitimate ones. Lastly, crypto is entirely dispensable.

I guess that would be not much different than Moody's lying about debt ratings prior to 2008.

1 Ringgit = 1 Ringgit

USD/EUR isn't necessarily a good reference either because they could be headed the same direction - an aggressive POTUS could be viewed as bad for NATO. Even gold, because that gold is going somewhere physical.

But there's not much other evidence that the USD is weakening after the election.

If you want to learn how pricing works, you might want to start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_pricing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_(finance)

In fact, it's precisely to try to correct misconceptions such as yours that a lot of financial instruments put the disclaimer "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Because it's so easy for people who don't know any better to imagine otherwise.