Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I use it to buy anything? It's gone up $700 in the last week; up $200 in the last 24 hours alone. I'd feel incredible silly spending bitcoin in a growth phase.
As someone looking to accept BTC for purchases, how do I do so with confidence that when I accepted $3400 today that by the time I cash out it's not worth $2700?
My confusion really comes from the buying/selling of legal goods; I can see the risk being worth it if you're operating outside the law. But really; if I'm selling something then there's a pretty good chance I'm buying my supplies with a fiat currency. I have hard and set costs I need to cover. If I accept BTC, there's a chance that when it's all said and done the BTC isn't worth what I paid and now I'm losing money.
Are businesses just expected to accept that risk? If so, how many businesses are actually willing to accept that risk? Or do we have to wait for the price to settle down before seeing more widespread adoption?
So it sounds like merchants accept Bitcoin and immediately convert to preferred currency based on the going BTC rate at the time of transaction.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_accept_Bitcoin,_for_small_...
The larger western exchanges offer leverage (and its other peoples funds earning interest, currently ~0.015%/day).
There is also mining contracts which are a form of derivative.
Also -- none of these deriv's provide any solution to volatility (possibly make it worse?)
It requires buy in from many parties - suppliers of materials to manufacturers, manufacturers of products, merchants reselling products, etc.
The entire chain can be stabilized with futures so then bitcoin doesn't need to be converted immediately to another currency.
The question of "who's buying, how many of them are there, how long do they intend to hold for, and how are they buying?" you can't answer for sure, but when the capital to buy starts getting more scarce and people start leveraging other assets to continue buying...you'll get to a point where market velocity surpasses speculative velocity and the leveraging ability of the buyer.
In the physical world, this is a vendor of widgets on the street and a buying frenzy. Buyers spend money on the widgets and turn around and open up their own widget shop as sellers to feed the craze. Eventually enough buyers are converted into sellers, not enough buyers remain and the price crashes.
Futures contracts are a form of credit in this model. Bitcoin's crashed 4 times in 6 years - don't think it won't happen again.
As far as cryptocurrencies are concerned, I personally view BTC as a good store of value; it's slow and expensive to transfer compared to other coins.
Why? If someone sends me 1BTC I'll just instantly sell 1BTC, it is tremendously unlikely that I'm gonna get screwed even if there's a 1-2 second delay.
>if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I use it to buy anything?
Because you want things and not numbers on the internet.
>As someone looking to accept BTC for purchases, how do I do so with confidence that when I accepted $3400 today that by the time I cash out it's not worth $2700?
By being smart and not waiting to cash out. Your maximum loss will be the value of whatever buffer coins you hold, and I guess you could hedge around that too.
Of course, this is possibly things like Litecoin are more stable as you can 'get in and out' in 15 minutes.
If its a bitpay to bitpay tx its all internal and likely didnt actually touch the bitcoin blockchain.
So buyer pays in btc, bitpay handle the transaction, probably sell the same amount on an exchange at that point, tx confirms and they pay out the USD. The BTC then goes into the bitpay reserve for the next merchant.
Do you spend dollars today wondering if tomorrow the Euro will be worth more or less? No, so why would you care what the dollar equivalent to a BTC is when everything you buy is priced in BTC?
This is long term obviously. The reason the price is "high" now is because there is a finite amount. ~21 million BTC is the max that can ever exist at once. So, theoretically if you replaced the world's currencies with BTC, having a single BTC would make you incredibly wealthy.
On a long enough timeline, won't lost credentials result in BTC that are functionally permanently out of circulation?
BTC is worth thousands of dollars, so if everyone starts using BTC will people pay irrational fractions of BTC for bread and milk at the supermarket? will there be some adjustment? How will other entities handle conversion and exchange? Will the general population have some compulsatory event to liquidate their own bank accounts into BTC funds?
Could this change asset valuation worldwide(Real estate, investment funds, etc)? If no government entity mediates currency value and printing can they tax your earnings if companies pay through some decentralized medium? What happens when nobody is paying taxes?
How about other cryptocurrencies, is there some kind of zero-sum game race to the top going on? Can they co-exist in the long term purist scenario?
Some of these questions are probably extremely stupid as I have little financial and economics knowledge and I am almost illiterate when it comes to Bitcoin, and I don't know how it works for the average joe if this purist scenario becomes true.
The arbitrary supply of and rules which define how minted coins are rewarded is an important aspect of each of these cryptocurrencies, and if the limited edition deflationary aspect was valuable then maybe we should all buy into that BTC clone with 42 coins in "circulation".
BTC isn't rare, it's just the AOL of cryptocoins right now. Slow and over priced. There are better alternatives.
> BTC is worth thousands of dollars, so if everyone starts using BTC will people pay irrational fractions of BTC for bread and milk at the supermarket? will there be some adjustment?
The block chain supports values as small as 0.00000001 BTC (called a Satoshi). More terms will be coined as more common denominations eventually are used to buy things.
> How will other entities handle conversion and exchange? Will the general population have some compulsatory event to liquidate their own bank accounts into BTC funds?
There will be no single event, over time people will simply not use their local currency any more in favor of BTC. Slowly, over time, the population will lose trust in fiat and gain trust in BTC. This may occur over decades or more.
> Could this change asset valuation worldwide(Real estate, investment funds, etc)? If no government entity mediates currency value and printing can they tax your earnings if companies pay through some decentralized medium? What happens when nobody is paying taxes?
I'm not sure about these. Right now if you sell things for BTC I'm pretty sure you have to pay taxes on the "fair market value" of the BTC, which I have no idea what that would be (maybe the average price at the time of the payment?). I assume people long on BTC are hoping laws will adapt by the point when it is widely accepted.
> How about other cryptocurrencies, is there some kind of zero-sum game race to the top going on? Can they co-exist in the long term purist scenario?
I mean, a cryptocurrency is only as valuable as the trust people have in it. So all the same rules/theories apply to other cryptos the same as BTC. BTC just happens to be the most popular at the moment, and therefore has the highest market cap (not even sure if this term applies).
>There will be no single event, over time people will simply
not use their local currency any more in favor of BTC.
Slowly, over time, the population will lose trust in fiat
and gain trust in BTC. This may occur over decades or more.
(Consider: is what they're telling you based on their current investments that they'll sell off after you've bought in? Now think of what happens when a hedge fund, or other early adopter who has acquired several thousand coins or if there's whales who've traded their way to now own %10 of the coin supply in the network. What happens if they divest and crash the 'value' of this coin 'investment'?)
The great thing about cryptocoins is you can create an improved protocol and if it's better then previous protocols, the users will migrate.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around because people are trying to spam their investments into their cryptocoin service networks which they've bought into (or engineered a marketing pump and dump scam, i.e. premined ICOs like antshares) in hopes that they can later sell at excessively inflated prices because of some arbitrarily limited "supply" which a programmer just typed into the software running their network.
"1 bitcoin" is a truly arbitrary amount, just like "1 pound of gold" is arbitrary. They're both divisible.
This is moot until/unless BTC undergoes significant changes. It's not suited for this kind of transaction at all, IMO.
But let's say confirmation times were orders of magnitude faster and we wanted to cross the threshold to supermarket transactions. I think we'd still denominate the purchases in the local fiat currency anyways. The only way this would change is if producers and distributors had their costs anchored in BTC. But this seems very unlikely to occur in the next decade.
There's a more pragmatic way to think about it.
Bitcoin can coexist just fine with national currencies, and with other cryptocurrencies, and with precious metals. Bitcoin doesn't need to "win" by replacing any of these.
Bitcoin is valuable because it's a secure way to store and transfer value between people.
If bitcoin is never used to buy your morning coffee, that's OK. If only 1% of the population finds bitcoin useful, that's OK, too.
Dollars, euros and yen are better than bitcoin in many use cases, and bitcoin can do things that dollars, euros and yen cannot do in other use cases.
The simple fact is that many people find bitcoin useful, and that's what makes it valuable.
I see it more like a decentralized PayPal alternative, and I keep seeing it pop up in more places that I buy stuff online and I've made personal transactions with it to other people, so it's providing value to me and seems to be on a reasonably successful path.
Maybe we need to leave Bitcoin alone and come up with another currency for low value transactions that happen frequently? I'm thinking like buying coffee or groceries.
What do you mean? People can mine with a gpu, but they won't make much because of the many miners using much faster ASICs. If you think Bitcoin should have been made so that ASICs weren't possible: a number of altcoins agree with that idea, but there's an argument to be made that optimized hardware is always possible, and by making it hard to make, it makes it more likely that a single small group who manages to make optimized hardware will be the only one to do so for a large time period, will be able to make huge amounts of profits funding more hardware, and at that point will easily be able to get up to >50% of the network hash rate (which breaks Bitcoin's decentralization and allows rewriting the blockchain). By using a proof-of-work that's relatively straight-forward to optimize means that when the possible mining rewards eventually incentivize development of ASICs, it's likely that multiple groups will be able to build them.
There are several other ways of transacting in Bitcoin outside the main replicated-everywhere-forever blockchain, Lightning perhaps being the most well known (with the defining feature of instant transactions).
Most of these systems are hard to implement without unmalleable txids, so interest will likely pick up now that we have segwit on the main chain. Those systems never left the idea stage while transactions were free but there's significantly more interest now. There are lots of interesting developments going on.
We'll see whether someone will ever come up with some system satisfying them all...
Moving the analogy a bit: everything we buy is priced in Reais. However, we still care if tomorrow the Dollar is worth more or less, since it does impact the price of several kinds of goods. For instance, the Dollar increasing in value will lead to computers getting more expensive.
In the same way, even if everything were to be priced in Bitcoins, the exchange rate between Bitcoin and USD would still be significant, unless and until the USD ceased to exist.
Just to clarify: it's not that there can only be 21 million BTC 'at once'...unless there's a big change in its design that the majority support.
There will only be 21 million BTC ever. If the keys for 1 million of them are lost, then those will never be replaced.
The rules can and have changed with just majority (of compute power) consensus through forks. They could be changed to make it inflationary.
Actually, yes; there's plenty of countries where they use the USD or Euro instead of their local currency because the local currency suffers from high inflation or instability. There's other countries where the currency is tightly linked to the dollar. Both because the dollar is a stable currency, one that isn't influenced by supply / demand like BTC is - BTC is a finite resource, dollars are theoretically infinite.
While there is a large number of LTC, BTC and ETH exchanged for fiat (USD, EUR, RMB, KRW); Most of the trades are between BTC and alts - https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/
Why do you spend any currency when you can buy Bitcoins instead, let it grow and then sell them back into the original currency?
Any reason you can give applies to spending Bitcoin.
The reason why you spend any currency instead of buying BTC is because you need to. Not because you're willingly buying something unnecessary to forsake potential earnings in the future.
But the idea that "the reason why you spend any currency instead of buying BTC is because you need to" is just plain wrong. You're essentially saying that people spend strictly what they need to live and save every penny beyond that, and can only wonder whatever led you to that conclusion.
And for good reason.
Is it a currency? Yes and no.
Is it a store of value? Yes and no but sure is volatile.
Is primary use case illegal transactions? Definitely, sometimes.
Is it a anarchist mechanism to shelter wealth and detach from any nation state? Yes absolutely, probably most of the China money that drove the last price bump was getting cash out of China.
Is it a pyramid scheme? Absolutely in many cases, ICOs are making this way easier.
The answer I've arrived at, and why I am compelled by crypto is that in each use case above it has the potential to be the BIGGEST, at a scale never recognized before.
EG
Crypto could be the biggest currency. All it takes is adoption and figuring out scaling. Way easier to transact in a flat-world with a portable currency.
Crypto could be the biggest store of value. The beautiful math behind bitcoin (and others) is self-limiting creating real scarcity. With mass adoption will come stability.
Crypto could drive the majority of illegal transactions. If they figure out privacy more completely it's the perfect mechanism.
Crypto could become the "people's" wealth vault, and undercut nations ability to tax & control markets by truly privatizing wealth. All it takes is MOST of us to decide.
And finally, because it's entertaining to think about, Crypto could drive the biggest pyramid scheme the world has ever seen. There is absolutely no SOFTWARE of structural limitation to running a $1 trillion dollar end game pyramid on Crypto. In fact you figure out the privacy side, add in mass adoption and you could just leverage the current ICO structure for it.
I love crypto because it's boundless.
You have to have some imagination and blind faith to believe any of the use cases above will become true.
But the fun part is there is no limiter on any of those things becoming true.
But the minute you realize the use case around privatization of global wealth / taxes and/or pyramiding you can begin to underwrite its probability.
I think mass adoption - tied to the use cases I illustrate - has a high probability because people act primarily in their self interests.
Crypto is pretty neatly aligned with self interest.
Until we devolve into total anarchy of course ;)
Couldn't Crypto itself be the big pyramid scheme? It might never get adopted enough to become the defacto currency (can you imagine the gov't accepting BTC for tax payments?). In the meantime the SEC, or Congress, or maybe some big, multilateral "anti-money laundering" international agreement might do something that threatens it enough to start a run on the "bank", driving the exchange rate to nothing. Those who bought a ton a long time ago and who since cashed out would then be the winners. No?
Some of the people who started calling it digital gold a while back got it right. Using Bitcoin is more like using gold (not necessarily physical gold) to pay for stuff. Gold's value also fluctuates significantly over one year's time.
[1] - https://medium.com/@cburniske/why-i-like-the-term-cryptoasse...
There's thinking that the winning crypto(s) currency will be both gold + currency.
If it takes a $100 million fund raise article for you to ask why everyone else isn't crazy, c'est la vie. People look for validation all manner of ways.
Coinbase also has merchant services that allow for immediate cash outs. This is probably one of cryptocurrency's smallest markets.
Are the vendors that accept BTC pricing their goods based on the current exchange rate for 1 BTC? ie. I price product A at $1500USD, I then say I accept BTC, so when someone puts it in the shopping cart it converts $1500USD to BTC and charges them that amount?
Sorry, just not familiar and trying to figure out how it works. I haven't came across anyone that accepts BTC (although I haven't looked either).
Stripe and Coinbase give the options of automatic conversion to the cryptocurrency exchange rate when displaying it.
Some merchants, usually more established ones like Microsoft, Newegg, Namecheap, typically won't show the bitcoin price until you chose that option and they generate the timed invoice.
If it goes up so much, isn't it incredibly silly for you to not buy any? See, the reason why you haven't bought BTC yet is the same reason why BTC is still used to buy things. BTC might go down tomorrow, so why not spend it today and get more bang for your buck now.
Case in point: I've personally spent ~100 BTC over the years (buying domain names, Steam games, paying my CPA, buying on Newegg, eating at Charlie Shrem's bar in NYC, etc.)
So the liquidity is weird, I can turn less than $15K into USD in a few moments, but $15001 will take me two weeks and is scary given volatility. I would argue this intentional as in this is why coinbase isn't very useful for drug money laundering.
I once bought a commemorative Swiss Army knife with Debian Linux branding and spent like $200 on nickel and time fees to buy a $100 knife. The numbers are only slightly exaggerated. Transferring money is incredibly expensive.
This is done because Bitcoin is extremely easy to launder through "tumblers". Unlike, say, paper currency, an individual 'unit' of Bitcoin (insofar as that exists) is not tracked with a serial number.
Additionally, in the US, the IRS is underfunded and prolific sellers are smart. Unlike banks, Bitcoin does not inherently have names attached to accounts/wallets, and so it is much easier to evade taxes than with typical currencies.
More generally, you'd outsource those risks to dedicated finance companies and handle USD: Exchange rate risk, fee calculation risk, confirmation/double-spending risk, etc. Just like in how there is an entire shell game of risks being offloaded between companies when you accept credit cards, and no merchant directly accepts credit from an unknown customer.
You can accept BTC and convert it to cash instantly upon acceptance if you want.
2) money itself is useless, people like spending it
3) why would you buy computer/phone today if you can buy it next year for half the price?
For people who want to buy, I would recommend Kraken - they have much higher volume and sane pricing. There are others too like Bitfinex, Poloneix, etc.
Buying/selling directly on Coinbase is merely for convenience, and obviously you're going to pay for that convenience. I'm glad that Coinbase offers that option, because there are a lot of people for whom the fees are worth the ease of use.
But if you're one of those people for whom the fees aren't worth it, and you want to get your hands dirty, by all means use GDAX and pay no fees at all.
[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/#gdax [1] $100M * 0.0025 = $250K /day, or almost $91M per year.
(note, large customers get a discount on the taker fee, so I went with 0.25% on average)
I don't think that is true. From everything I've seen they only charge a nominal fee of 15 cents to do an ACH transfer.
[1]: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/210...
ACH deposit to USD wallet is free. Converting that USD to BTC or ETH is where the fee comes in. (Why one would want to deposit USD at Coinbase and leave it there, though, is another question...)
coinbase.com - 4.8 million monthly unique visitors from the US
4chan.org - 5.3 million
chase.com - 47 million
Let me repeat that again: The largest bitcoin exchange has 1/10 of the traffic of the biggest general banking site in the world.
That is huge.
I also heard that it is such a big issue that some California attorney is advertising heavily in top 5 states to gather traction for a class-action lawsuit regarding this problem. Unfortunately I haven't stumbled upon his advertisement yet, but wouldn't be surprised if judge will give it a green light.
At a company of ~200 people, that's not an unreasonable number to have. It feels mean to say they have none.
I guess when someone steals your wallet you don't chase them, because that would be mean and not a behavior of a gentleman.
Please point me to Linkedin verification page - you know, where it says that whatever people put on LinkedIn is always true, because so far my experience is contradictory. I worked with many people and they LinkedIn profile is nothing like they responsibilities were.
I used my library to write an automated trading system that's running on Gemini (not open source, obviously). I like Gemini much more than it's competitors.
Its extremely risky to hold client keys that hold money. Making a CryptoBank is like making a regular bank on hard mode.
Back in "the old days" bank security was based around metal vaults and guns. That I would also consider doing banking on hard mode.
Coinbase just needs good specialist engineers and a good insurance policy. Not much different from a traditional bank.
At least Coinbase has an advantage over traditional banks. Good engineers would probably rather work at Coinbase where they get to play with cool Bitcoin tech, rather than a stuffy old banking system which still limits passwords to 8 characters...
What if there just isn't enough bitcoin in circulation to cover the loss (there is a 21 million cap on BTC).
Bank robberies don't usually leave the bank with nothing :-) Exchange gets rolled, it might not even afford the claim.
Agree about advantage as being a great place to work vs traditional banks. They will attract better talent for sure.
It's being defacto established that when a cryptobank gets robbed, the funds are repaid to customers using local currency, not BTC, priced at the time of the loss.
So, from the underwriter's perspective, it's just insuring whatever total USD value Coinbase currently holds, with consideration given to Coinbase's ability to prevent theft. Not any different from a bank insuring itself against loss due to cybertheft.
In order to become the de facto home for crypto payment/trading, what does that mean? Does it mean they need to help make the adoption / use of cryptocurrencies easier and more widespread? I am curious as to how this money gets spent.
Yep - I'd say they need to push into tech to allow mainstream adoption. Being the backend layer to convert crypto to real funds for businesses or payment processors. Talent, partnerships, probably regulatory issues etc...
The total market cap of coins traded on their platform would need to be magnitudes larger to justify this valuation unless they can somehow either continue to justify their high fees amidst competition, or they would need to totally monopolize all future cryptocurrency banking, something that could certainly involve large amounts of competition in the future as well.
Plus, numerous complaints about missing bitcoins. And the potential headache about not honoring BCH balances (which they may be legally sound on).
If I am plunking down $65k, then that is almost $1k in fees. In comparison, if I buy stocks, I pay around $7 in commission. I know that it is not a direct comparison cause there is currency conversion fees involved.
Are there any better alternatives? How do you guys invest to avoid fees?
Thanks
Other exchanges have similar fee structures so if you don't want to pay the 1% brokerage fee you really need to learn how to use limit orders regardless of what exchange you ultimately use.
It seems to me a lot of it is tied up in speculative investment. But there are some vendors who accept it and some countries (eg: Japan) where it's more popular and widely accepted.
https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/08/10/ultimate-2000...
If you don't want such a verbose story, Ars Techica follwed it well too[2]
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/07/20/alpha...
Silk Road was the first to bring forward the notion of how cryptocurrencies can be used for something much more malicious than coffee. The news it made, and with a face to the organization made it a bigger story, and with Federal Officers involved in a related crime, I will maintain it is a much more important story than AlphaBay.
On a sidenote, AlphaBay isn't the all secure operation you think it was, the 'admin' used a clearnet personal email address for some sort of welcome message, and several other stupid mistakes (check out the document posted a couple days ago in detail and a link to a forum in the comments).
There will be another market which will be bigger than AlphaBay. Currencies with more privacy oriented features are coming baked in, so it will be harder to catch them too.
I did not say that at all. Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
>I did not say that at all.
You didn't, but I said that to show that it didn't earn it's place as the bigger competitor, it was just bound to happen no matter who braved it.
>Though since you brought it up, the FBI and Dutch Police's explanation for how they busted the site is very suspect. It does not sound legitimate at all, it's much more likely they cracked the site in another (more illegal/unethical) way and used parallel construction to hide what they did.
Mostly agree. But I don't think there's anything illegal about cracking the tor network, AlphaBay's servers or one of its admins' computers. There was probably a warrant for whatever they did, especially since it was at the international level involving multiple agencies. It might also be a vulnerability in the tor network, but I bet we would most likely never know.
Why exactly is downvoting my statement warranted? It's factual.
I have also used it to transfer money to friends, because being able to do that in-browser without involving Paypal seemed pretty great. I would like to get my family using it for this reason too, but most of them are not tech savvy enough to handle it (and some probably would have trouble with Coinbase's verification).
Bitpay allows you to use bitcoin with a VISA card https://bitpay.com/
Some merchants accept it, Overstock being a famous one.
Also I think your missing the biggest use case, abet one that isn't frequently discussed, and it is that crypto currencies are by far the best digital payment solution when it comes to the time it takes for transactions to clear. There is no dispute process, and there is no waiting on the fed for their ACA system to clear your transactions. However, I think a lot of people prefer credit cards for cash back and to have the option to charge back, but certainly cryptos are better for sellers (and potentially will give discounts to those who use them in the future).
Isn't paypal much faster than crypto currencies at doing the same? The normal banking system is quite slow (in part for good reasons) but the digital currencies that came before the crypto currencies are much better at this already, and better than bitcoin will ever be.
PayPal transactions never really clear. You can probably reverse a 3 year old PayPal transaction...
But Bitcoin payments are irreversible after only 1 hour. There are no other systems that accomplish that online.
You're correct: if crypto currencies were digital currencies there would be no advantage. However, crypto assets are decentralised & resistant to censorship. The power shifts away from the nation state (& Trump), & toward individuals.
How would a non-digital cryptocurrency work? While signal scramblers, an analog equivalent to digital cryptography, did exist, I have a hard time imagining an analog blockchain.
It being digital is just its encoding. An analog cryptocurrency could be carved into trees or anything.
Just to be clear. I do agree with the argument above that "cryptocurrency" is a much more fitting term than "digital currency".
I suspect there are chemical compounds that when reacted can perform analog arithmetic. If you used that to create signing, hashing and propagation logic I dare say analog cryptocurrencies could exist.
Many of us haven't even started !
Monero (https://getmonero.org/) is a good example of a cryptocurrency which focuses on getting these things right.
If you don't understand what it is, you may buy the wrong crypto asset. I think it's fair to say it's a good idea to know what you're investing in!
He has to have been lived somewhere, gone to school somewhere, studied, worked somewhere, left some track somewhere about who he was.
Neither Kraken nor Bitstamp do :(
Maintaining confidence had greater consequences than not.
All about those user numbers, or attracting other people attempting to exploit the same glitch. Pretty efficient market in that regard.
Could raise even more money with zero actual equity dilution.
You say that like its an admirable goal we should strive for. Taxes built the roads and bridges you drive on, the crystal-clean water that flows from your tap, the lines that your internet runs over, and the (admittedly glacial) bureaucracy that prevents your city, municipality, province and country from descending into unorganised chaos.
The minute you realize the use case around privatization of global wealth you can begin to underwrite its probability.
Because the crypto platform provides the OPTION for that to happen at scale.
And crypto gives people globally the opportunity to make the decision and vote with their personal wealth (and mining power).
Taxes on capital gains are a 70 year old concept.
Just recognize the amorality of it. It can only be billed as a "duty" for "roads and schools" when pandering to the lower classes who have no choice in the matter, while recognizing those classes have the numbers to get you in office. But "taxes" are not an absolute on the concept of how a government can fund itself. Governments have to balance the consequences of how they attempt to raise revenues, by being competitive amongst other countries, as their ecosystems primarily rely on attracting or incentivizing investment.
>Crypto could be the biggest store of value. The beautiful math behind bitcoin (and others) is self-limiting creating real scarcity. With mass adoption will come stability.
Currencies should never be used to store value. No one should hold large amounts of wealth in Euros or Dollars and almost no one does. You hold wealth in actual productive assets like land, stocks, bonds, etc. That we price these in Euros or Dollars is irrelevant and we can price them in Bitcoin just as well. Nothing the central banks that control fiat currencies do changes the underlying worth of these assets even if they can generate temporary valuation swings.
>Crypto could become the "people's" wealth vault, and undercut nations ability to tax & control markets by truly privatizing wealth. All it takes is MOST of us to decide.
This to me sounds even riskier. People shouldn't be going out and buying bitcoin to do any of this when there are plentiful cheap instruments out there to actually invest in assets. Go buy ETFs of broadly diversified asset classes (stocks and bonds would suffice but real estate ones also exist) and leave the innovation in crypto currencies to sort itself out.
Without cryptography, we may fall into 1984 -- or something like that. Cryptography grants us privacy.
That claim seems to require the ability to know the future. Bitcoin may eventually be superseded by a superior alt coin, and disappear into history.
One could say startup investing does too.