Then you are not the target audience. You want additional safety at the cost of giving up your autonomy. Good luck with that
That's not how currency works, people have to want your coins for you to spend them. At best, having this perspective relegates Bitcoin to be nothing more than a speculative asset/investment. But if you want it to be more than that and you're just scoffing at normal people who point out why they don't want to transact with you, well then... surprise, they won't want to accept your currency for transactions.
Popularity actually matters for a currency.
If your perspective is that Bitcoin isn't going to be a ubiquitous alternative to the USD for general purchases until after the government collapses and no longer has the political power to prop up the dollar, then I have bad news for you about your currency's usefulness as an anti-authoritarian weapon/tool.
Before that, gold and silver were often used as lowest common denominators internationally. See The power of gold: the history of an obsession by Bernstein for that. However metals weren't used everywhere: e.g., China used paper currencies for many years, and giant rocks where used in Micronesia:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Money: the true story of a made-up thing by Goldstein has a good pop-history overview.
Power often didn't come into play for currency choice, and neither did things "implode" as opposed to a gradual shifting in preference amongst currency users.
Power comes into play as to dictating what currency people are forced to use. That the old coins had to be handed back in or dictating the adaptation. They implode when there is nothing backing it what so ever. At its core its Greshams law at work, with currencies or with other store of values.
If i am not mistaken Graeber has quite a few examples of this mechanism.
The year is 2011. Visa and Mastercard have denied everyone the ability to donate money to wikileaks, despite the fact that they were not charged with any crimes.
And yet, back then, I could still send them bitcoin.
So yes, actually, even though only a small subset of people actually used bitcoin (especially back then!), it provided a very real and immediate usecase, for people who wanted to achieve that usecase of sending money to a charity that broke no laws, that the credit card companies were block payments so.
Everything that you are saying, is immediately counteracted and proven wrong by actual real world examples of people using crypto currencies.
A point that's been raised multiple times elsewhere on this page is that Bitcoin has no backup strategy for when exchanges start getting targeted. It's not a good anti-authoritarian tool because the ability for it to be converted into a usable form exists at the pleasure of governments, who are increasingly looking at regulating exchanges.
Sure, you can send Bitcoin to people who want Bitcoin. Great. The question is, who is going to want Bitcoin under an authoritarian regime if it can't be easily converted into a spendable currency for real goods and services? Does Bitcoin survive when it has to be spendable on its own? Because at that point it's not just Wikileaks that has to accept it, the people/businesses that Wikileaks is buying from and transacting with have to accept it as well.
There's a difference between a currency and transfer mechanism. Bitcoin right now works (somewhat, kinda) as a transfer mechanism because exchanges exist and because people trust it as a transfer mechanism for other currencies.
Involuntary adaptation historically leads to drastic inflation with the trust in the purchasing power degrading. If you are forced to accept it despite low trust, you are motivated to exchange it for any other store of value. And are reluctant to produce stuff for which you have to accept a degrading currency. Both of which harms the actual economy.
Right, and the issue here is that Bitcoin is not spendable without first being converted to a better currency that normal merchants like your grocer will accept. That's Bitcoin's weak point, you clamp down on exchanges and suddenly it can't be used with most merchants.
> Involuntary adaptation historically leads to drastic inflation with the trust in the purchasing power degrading.
I don't mean to jump between threads here, but didn't you just finish telling me elsewhere that Bitcoin would be accepted once people had no better choice of other currencies to use, and that's why it didn't matter whether or not it was a currently attractive currency for my local grocer?
That sounds a lot like involuntary adoption to me.
To the other point, i described the mechanism of adaptation. If the current mechanism of transfer stops working people historically fall back to anything else that works. They have to use something, trade must go on so they choose the next best thing till something better emerges. The involuntary pressure on the value then starts over when that emerging currency is blocked by force again.
Its all just the description of peoples behavior. People dont like loosing money and will act to prevent it.
It's not completely clear to me that Bitcoin would even work for drugs or ransomware if those people weren't then converting Bitcoin into local currencies. This argument really undervalues the role that exchanges play in this process. I can earn a dollar, spend it on something, and the person I give it to as payment can spend that same dollar somewhere else. It never really needs to be converted. Sure I can convert that to other currencies if I want or if I'm trying to bridge the gap between economies in different countries, but importantly there's a rather large section of the economy that works just with dollars.
That's not really what's happening with Bitcoin even on the drug market. People pay Bitcoin for drugs, that gets mixed up to try and preserve anonymity, and then it gets cashed out into other currencies.
> To the other point, i described the mechanism of adaptation. If the current mechanism of transfer stops working people historically fall back to anything else that works.
It seems odd to simultaneously say that Bitcoin will be adopted because people won't have any other options (not because they like how it works), and also that people needing to use currencies that they don't trust leads to inflation and economic harm. Do you expect drastic inflation to happen if Bitcoin becomes the only viable currency for people to use?
It might boil down to the same in the big picture (people having to use it) but people react differently in the two described situations. One is somebody trying to tax you through inflation, one is using something that is tiresome to use. You will be a lot more motivated to find an alternative for the former then the later.
To the other point, bitcoin being exchanged into other currencies is caused in the expectation of what will in the future be exchangeable for goods and services. IE Adaption. At the end of the day its the transfer of credit. Me paying the supermarket in fiat doesnt speak for an intrinsic value in the pieces of paper, but the expectation, that i worked for those tokens in the past or promised to work for them in the future. Thats all currencies are, what we use is determined by force (government pressure), ease of use and adaption.
I hope we are not talking in circles here, i am trying to get across that its important to look at what actually drives peoples behavior.
1) Inflation is inflation expectation, which just means a loss of trust. You expect to get less for it in the future and if everyone does, it happens.
1a) No individual wants to hold their savings in devaluing stores of value. There is a fear of value loss that drives behavior and Greshams law sets in
1b) Nobody wants to produce for a loss. If you pay more then you can expect to get, you might not do it if you are not allowed to raise prices.
1c) Forcing people to accept it (ie price dictates) doesnt really work, see 1b.
2) You need some transfer medium. Our economy works by me having worked or having promised to work for what i buy in the supermarket. Just because one currencies is buged or exploited doesnt mean i no longer have to buy stuff. Adaption is then driven by market chains. I pay the supermarket in those tokens they pay their suppliers who they in turn can exchange for what they need. Those tokens are generally the ones the government wants for taxes and forces people to use, but if governments fuck up to badly, people still have to eat. Same story over and over again.
Currencies are a con game. They are the best thing we have to keep tab of who gets what in what we produce daily. If it gets exploited (me promising to work in the future every day in the supermarket while never doing it), people tend to realize that sooner or later. If you cant cut off the individual doing it the currency gets devalued over time which triggers psychological effects. Modern monetary theory is the assumption that while you cant force people to use it, it wont devalue if people have no other store of value to flee into. I think thats very optimistic if you look at stock prices (another store of value with even less practicality for daily exchange).
At the end of the day, all crypto needs to be is something any market chain can fall back on once the current one is broken so baldy that the chain halts. (Producers stopping to produce)
Governments trying to ban exchanges falls into the same category as dictating that a farmer has to accept fiat for his stuff. If its not profitable, the farmer will stop and i will still have to eat. Adoption of literally any other functioning store of value then gets forced Which leads us to the second theory behind modern monetary theory. That we are technologically far enough to prevent off book transactions. Which would however still trigger the dont produce for a loss part.
In short, printing money wont work forever, as it only works as long as people believe it to. That sets a mechanism in motion that requires another means of exchange. Who ever has something working will get the job to keep the economy running. All crypto have to be is less bad then trust people have in the governments ability to manage the currency.