There are so many new things we can do with crypto that it's going to take decades for people to discover them.
However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?
The benefit of BTC is that when your bank mismanages their assets a la 2008, resulting in a bank run, you know your assets are safe instead of having to rely on the Fed to bail out your bank. Your money is in your control, not in the control of someone else.
If you don't want that, it's easy -- just don't buy bitcoin. But don't discredit it by comparing it to a credit card which it is not trying to be. The strawman is disingenuous and shows how little you understand the topic.
The point is when we're looking at comparative energy use, you can't just point at the whole banking system and compare it to Bitcoin, as if it's an apples to apples comparison, because the banking system provides an embarassment of services that Bitcoin does not.
> The strawman is disingenuous and shows how little you understand the topic.
There's no strawman here and if anything this shows how little you understood the thread you're replying to.
(Edit: fixed a copy/paste screwup)
Sorry, this does not make BTC a bank.
As they continue to add more features, we will see what BTC will become and how it may be useful. But comparing it to a bank is silly.
I agree, Bitcoin is not a bank, that makes comparing its energy footprint to the banking system totally pointless.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
this is true. bitcoin should be compared with everything required to run or "back" USD. which is a lot more energy use than most states on this planet
I don't think that's true. Most companies providing services on top of bitcoin control the private keys, so they could do the same thing. You give up absolute control of your money to get access to a service, except now creating the money is terrible for the environment and consumes as much power as a small European nation.
You say that now, but it's the kind of innovation that will require some time to develop use-cases. I use it as an example of where crypto is just a lot more powerful than traditional banking. There's the ability to scale without "permission". Think a 12 year old opening an "account".
> However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?
Escrow accounts and merchant layers are in development. There's a lot of interesting DeFi (decentralized finance) services being developed on Ethereum.
Right, so that means that Bitcoin is not providing many of the services the financial system provides now, so comparing its energy footprint to the existing financial system is pointless.
That's the point I was making. You can't say "Bitcoin uses X electricity and Finance uses Y, which is bigger, and so is worse" when Bitcoin doesn't provide the same services or service the same size of audience as existing financial systems do.
But I'm glad we agree the comparison with the existing system is a silly one.
what about sending money to someone far away? ever tried? or just living in a bubble using a single fiat to buy coffee
your limited use argument is tiresome. you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat. most can not send money to you. you are not free
my grandgranparent sent money back home to Italy from the US in 1912...
my grandgrandmother had no electricity, no running water, could not read, but could use that money.
now do the same with bitcoins.
anyway this sentence
> you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat
is not true.
I don't know what bubble you live in, but the opposite is true: you can't send bitcoins to anyone you want.
> I don't know what bubble you live in, but the opposite is true: you can't send bitcoins to anyone you want.
the opposite to "you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat" is "you can send money to anyone you want with fiat". which is false. hence initial statement is true. there is no bubble here.
friendly advice. read more.
thanks, I am a software engineer with 30 years of working experience, still find bitcoins the most obtuse way to send money, first of all because bitcoins are not money, secondly because 100% of those I would send money to don't know anything about bitcoins (why would they care?) and last but not least because it's easier and cheaper to convert money to gold and ship the gold (assuming I don't want to send real money)
buying prepaid credit is also an option, it works everywhere bitcoins work and it's free, immediate and it's money, directly spendable on goods and services
hell, even shipping banknotes in an envelope is better than sending bitcoins!
bitcoins are useless for this use case to anyone who really wants to send money to someone they care about
> "you can send money to anyone you want with fiat". which is false.
it's not.
I can send fiat money to anyone I want (emphasis on I)
but to prove me wrong you can send a couple bitcoins to my mom and I'll show you she doesn't know what to do with them.
if you're interested in proving me wrong, I can give you her wallet address.
in the end ask yourself this: why North Korea is disconnected from internet, but allows bitcoins?
are bitcoins really pro people and against oppressive regimes?
p.s. as much as I don't care about burn accounts, yours is actually really suspicious...
If you need to do this, you can do it through the group at your bank called treasury services (or something like that). They have APIs for financial services customers and CFOs who need to do this sort of thing.
Anyone can do this now with HD wallets.
That’s moving the goalpost.
There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking. The use case is too narrow for it to be a widely-advertised service.
> There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking.
There absolutely is, there's no open API for this.
There is a difference between not being able to and not knowing how to. You can. There are no-minimum balance API banking interfaces. There just isn’t a common enough use case for them to be heavily advertised.
We can move the goalpost again to an open API, but that’s another thing once more.
Yes, easily.
It would take a phone call, since I haven’t set up the rails to do this. But “I need ten thousand sequentially numbered checking accounts with wire privileges” is a perfectly fine (if odd for an individual customer) request. (Almost any process requiring that many accounts is being done wrong.)
Granted, I have a private banker. But there are services who provide this to e.g. fintech companies setting up and destroying single-use accounts on the fly.
OP meant legal things.