More like digital gold. Calling it a currency is really not an apt description.
Not digital gold, but pharmaceutical grade gold as Saylor put it in a recent Odd Lots pod, and it's hard to argue that...also quoted from the same pod..[not a perfect transcript]
"...so that took us to cryptos and we looked at 6500 cryptos and we found that BTC is the dominant network. its 25x bigger than the next closest thing that looks like it, and has more than $200bil monetary energy in it. it is basically Facebook or Google for money.
and this is the nuance that most people haven't realized yet..what you have is a dominant digital network that has been engineered to host a safe haven treasury reserve asset superior to gold in all respects.
it's pharmaceutical grade gold [love this line]. if God [blurb] gold as a treasury reserve asset to hold for 100 years, he would create 21mil gold coins, he'd make it impossible to make any more, he would make it possible to audit it from anywhere on earth from any node every 10 minutes, make it unhackable and make it an open architecture where you could build it into an iphone or into Square or paypal or any other exchange without permission, and he would distribute it everywhere on earth with these crypto SHA256 miners so hat no company controls it, no CEO controls it, no country controls it, and no regulators control it..."[0]
[0] https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/6b8b72d0-455c-11eb-b9ed-377...
I feel like this whole pitch makes sense until you get to that part.
Do you care who owns your real estate before you buy it? Or who mines your gold before you wear it? Probably not.
Yes I suppose there is some political aspect to that side of it, but the crypto itself...it's about as apolitical as it gets.
This hinges entirely on control of mining, in fact you could argue who mines it is one of the most important questions to ask.
Cryptocoins are subject to majority attacks and rules that can change at any time based on the miners preference. Who mines it is very important.
You would also care about who owned some real estate before you buy it if it was some company known for dumping toxic wast into land and then selling it. Those things are not as apolitical as they look like in an organized society.
If I decided that I could profitably use toxic-waste laden land, then yes of course I would still buy it and, yes of course, still not care because that's what due diligence is about.
Your liquor store sells alcohol that kills more people under the age of 30 than any other way...why aren't you standing in front of it demanding it shut down?
They get to censor transactions, they get to decide what makes it and what doesn't, they get to double-spend if they want to. That's how authoritarian government works.
This is a natural consequence of the proof-of-waste system employed. The hashpower goes to the place where waste would be the cheapest, and that's China.
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/65-of-global-bitcoin-hashrate-conce...
Let's say Dalai Lama decided to follow MicroStrategy with a 400M purchase.
His BTC could be near unusable if China were to control some amount over 50% of mining capability.
How could that happen? The blocks you mine you simply not process any of "undesirable transactions".
If any of the lesser miners find a block and try to add a transaction to the ledger you perform a double spend attack.
The Bitcoin Cash fork and Litecoin made scaling choices that make it better for payments.
But they made it deflationary and a good currency needs to be inflationary otherwise you just hold onto it instead of spending it. Which had made it more like a digital gold.
It has totally failed as a system for payments for this and other reasons. It is also too slow and too expensive per transaction.
Contrary to what many people who only recently discovered Bitcoin probably believe, it was not created in a vacuum as some Ponzi scheme. Instead it was a concept that had been iterated on for decades until Satoshi discovered the right combination of cryptographic technologies and economic incentives to make a so-far-unstoppable decentralized digital currency.
> Instead it was a concept that had been iterated on for decades until Satoshi discovered the right combination of cryptographic technologies and economic incentives to make a so-far-unstoppable decentralized digital currency.
You know how that sounds right? Like religion, not clear-headed thinking.
My opinion is neither of those is a religion. The development of Bitcoin in particular sounds more like following the scientific method to me, but you're entitled to your own interpretation.