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Comment by teatree | Hacker News Reader

I have asked this previously, asking again, believing bitcoin will become digital gold is believing - * US will let go of the petrodollar / reserve currency status. * China will allow a democratic process to control their currency / economy. * Other developing countries like India will give up the ability to control inflation etc of their own economy.

Do you sincerely believe these are possible ?

Also, if most of mining & hardware required for it is controlled by China and we are buying this digital gold via real currency, isn't a significant global wealth transfer happening to China ?

I don't know if India's decision is right or wrong, we do have a history of taking incredibly stupid "shooting oneself in the foot" decisions, but questions above do bother me.

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I don't think that's quite a fair comparison. The US Dollar and Gold coexist just fine. A new store of wealth doesn't threaten the US's economic dominance. Though this is colored by my own opinion that Bitcoin is not and will never be broadly adopted as a means of exchange, but rather only as a store of wealth.

As others have probably already mentioned, Bitcoin's transaction costs are very high and transaction time is quite slow compared to most other transactions. One major exception to this is international transfer of small amounts, though I don't think that's enough to threaten government backed currencies.

Do you think the Roman Catholic Church will give up the Geocentric status of the Bible? Like it or not, political power structures have no ability to impose their preference on rebellious reality.

Governments lost the war against information, cryptography, and money. The most charitable interpretation one can have for tyranny is that if you're going to talk about the tanks in Tienanmen, it's more costly to do it privately.

> Governments lost the war against ... cryptography

I don't think so. The vast majority of people communicating around the world today are doing so through backdoored platforms like Whatsapp or WeChat, and running backdoored operating systems or backdoored processors. Sure, there is a tiny population of cypherpunks who might really have good opsec, but at this point it is no longer a government's "war" against anything: the war is won and some ultra-low-level unrest doesn't change that fact.

While I agree that one shouldn't trust WhatsApp and I don't use it, I don't think it is fair to simply label it as backdoored without further proof. It uses Signals encryption after all, despite its drawbacks (i.e. single-client only or multi-client with a rather bad setup).

By default WhatsApp backs up everything to Google Drive in plaintext. You might turn that feature off, but the vast majority of a person's contacts likely won't.

wechat yes, but AFAIK whatsapp uses the signal protocol? Not to mention half of the US uses iOS which has imessage

Without proper (=widespread) key verification and with unencrypted backups to cloud (AFAIK, did not use WA for a while fortunately).

The only reason why the RCC has "given up" the geocentric status of the bible is that it has lost political power over the centuries, and newer more powerful political entities have ascended in its place.

Political power very much has the ability to impose its preference on "reality". That is exactly why it exists.

If you think all governments are tyrannical I guess you need to move to a failed state. They are all lovely places.

You are right in the short term. Most governments will fiercely fight Bitcoin and all true cryptocurrencies.

In the long term though, it is inevitable, like all technological progress in the World.

You can only contain it for so long.

won't governments be FOR blockchain tech... i mean, they can track all transactions and TAX them. There are so many unmonitored transactions that companies get away with.

The genie is out of the bottle really.

Agreed, but the suggestion that bitcoin is somehow controlled democratically is wrong. Central banks are controlled democratically, more or less. Bitcoin isn't controlled by anyone, it's ungovernable. And no one wants an ungovernable currency (unless you subscribe to some crackpot economic theory).

> I have asked this previously, asking again, believing bitcoin will become digital gold is believing - * US will let go of the petrodollar / reserve currency status. * China will allow a democratic process to control their currency / economy. * Other developing countries like India will give up the ability to control inflation etc of their own economy.

> Do you sincerely believe these are possible ?

"Possible" isn't the word I'd use, but "inevtiable". How long do we think that, for example, the petrodollar will last? 1,000 years? 500? 100? Shorter?

The real question is whether the adults and patriots within the state apparatus will see the writing on the wall and conclude that a better way forward for humanity is due.

I was thinking that India wants to be the new China in tech and manufacturing, this path would not get them there. Capital control would be history soon. Fiscal barriers may not allow innovation to blossom.

What is your expiry date of 'never going to happen'?

1 decade, it can be taken seriously...

More than that and we're in pure speculation territory..

China is now much more powerful now than it was in the last century and seeking more power everyday.

At the moment we have real gold and the petrodollar etc. So why does a belief that bitcoin will become digital gold imply a belief that the US will let go of the petrodollar?

Well, there's absolutely nothing democratic about controlling Bitcoin. But that won't make China any more interested in giving up control to it.

Also, Bitcoin is not technologically capable of getting anywhere near close to functioning as a global currency on large scale.

China has about 65% of the bitcoin mining capacity online at the moment, it already controls bitcoin.

Why not both?

Party officials can be very nationalistis, communism forever, death to Taiwan. But their family is in western country and 60% of their assets are out of communist shithole their call home.

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