Miami is banking on cryptocurrency and New York wants in | Hacker News Reader

Miami is banking on cryptocurrency and New York wants in

bbc.co.uk

22 pointsastoor10 comments

One of the major factors that has made it difficult for cryptocurrencies etc. to get past toys, speculation, and outright scams (as many on HN are so quick to point out) has been the barriers erected by institutions and governments to serious experiments, not least because allowing them to happen involves accepting less control.

So it’s incredibly exciting to see things like this start to take shape. I hope they’re able to deliver something meaningful.

No, Bitcoin just died the same deflation death that the gold standard died from.

It's just that Bitcoin's supply was even less flexible than gold so everything happened much quicker. After all, when the economy got bigger, people dug out more gold which kept the supply of money slightly above the bare minimum necessary to run an economy. That wasn't always possible in the short term. If people literally hoarded gold then miners wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand leading to a recession over the short term.

Meanwhile the Bitcoin economy is in recession for at least a decade. The only part that is still alive is the Bitcoin mining industry.

Wikipedia: “a recession is a business cycle contraction when there is a general decline in economic activity.”

That… is not how I would describe Bitcoin activity over the last decade.

Bitcoin has only been around for 12 years, and went from 0 to 69k dollars. How has it been in a recession for the last 12 years?

That’s deflation — the value going up. Most people buy Bitcoin to hold Bitcoin, not to use it. And even some would-be entrepreneurs have, in the past, decided to just buy and hold Bitcoin instead of starting a company. The only person I know using it to positive effect is a freelance developer in XXXXXXX country in the midst of a civil war who uses it to work around bank freezes. And that’s great — escape from central control is its core value proposition and it’s working.

Bitcoin is the tip of the iceberg and I didn't mention it intentionally. That is an interesting take, not one I tend to agree with, but also unrelated to the point I was making about the technology more generally.

Recession? Absurd. We have never had anything like BTC before. I can buy more widgets with BTC this year than the year before, and repeat. I expect that I will be able to buy more widgets in future. I see no recession.

You don't want to run uncontrolled and high risk experiments in large cities first, given the number of people who would be negatively impacted if things go wrong. And in this case, with cryptocurrencies involved, it is more a case of when rather than if things go wrong, given all the potential points of failure, e.g. price crash or theft or state sponsored attack or coding error or whatever.

Sounds more like you don't want to do that.

I am comfortable with the amount of risk in this experiment and would love to see more like it.

The only way would be the removal of the NY bit license. It prevents many NY people from engaging with many markets and services.

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