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Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

There are $5T of foreign exchange transactions per day.

Btc is already getting traction in the developing world as a reliable currency and that is likely to grow under de-dollarization.

The entire crypto market is about $1T right now of which btc is about half.

There is so much space for Btc to grow as an option for international settlement, it's already working and trusted as much or more than many sovereign currencies. As it becomes more trusted it will increase in price which will decrease its volatility.

If Btc just takes a little slice of the FX market it's an easy 5-10x. I wouldn't bet everything on it, but it does seem rational to have a corner of your portfolio in it.

The Feds and the bankers hate it because it's a direct threat to their business model. There's no room for a middle man to fugazi in btc.

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> The Feds and the bankers hate it because it's a direct threat to their business model. There's no room for a middle man to fugazi in btc.

Crypto has spawned their own classes of middle-men.

At best, you have a changing of the guard - new boss, same as the old boss. At worst, you have traditional finance buying a stake in crypto and ending up in the exact dominant same spot they were before. And of course, all of these people have to do business on the terms of their host countries.

Crypto does not herald a new set of rules, it merely aims to be a new mechanism by which value is transferred, which by most objective measures it's very bad at doing.

Yes, but the blockchain can be publically audited, unlike the current regime.

> At best, you have a changing of the guard - new boss, same as the old boss.

At best you send some of it directly to someone else with no trusted middleman, which is impossible to do over the internet with any other kind of system.

At worst you have a changing of the guard.

> At best you send some of it directly to someone else with no trusted middleman

This is impossible.

If you trade crypto, at some point that money has to become fiat for you to pay bills, pay taxes or cash out. If the currency _is_ crypto, you either have to transact on-chain where it is inefficient and slow by design, or off-chain, where you are trusting a middle-man by definition.

Either way, you are beholden to the currency controls of your country, and unlike you, they have the resources of a nation-state and can de-anonymize and use violence to force you to bend the knee.

> If the currency _is_ crypto, you either have to transact on-chain where it is inefficient and slow by design

Not slow or inefficient enough so as to be unusable.

> Either way, you are beholden to the currency controls of your country, and unlike you, they have the resources of a nation-state and can de-anonymize and use violence to force you to bend the knee.

Everything a person does is beholden to law. I don’t see how that’s really relevant.

> it merely aims to be a new mechanism by which value is transferred, which by most objective measures it's very bad at doing.

What objective measures are you using? Over $3 Billion in value is transferred over the Bitcoin network every day. There has never been any downtime, nor has it ever been hacked, and fees are flat and transparent (just a few bucks to transfer unlimited value across the world).

one objective measure: speed. another: efficiency + energy demanded to maintain

"The entire crypto market is about $1T right now of which btc is about half."

How much of that do you think is Tether-related? If Tether were to, say, turn out to mostly own Chinese real estate bonds that are worthless (no idea if this is true, it's just one suggestion we've heard), and that portion of BTC volume which is related to Tether purchases goes away, how much impact do you think that would have on the price of BTC?

Tether is a problem. It's one of the reasons I would not go all-in on btc, but it's not insurmountable. There are plenty of use cases that do not involve USDT.

Do you think crypto will remain dominant over a more traditional digital banking solution once established players recognize there's a market? If so, why?

The established players already know there's a market.

The reasons they don't service it are regulatory, not technological, and so an unregulatable Option will eat their lunch.

You obviously haven’t dealt with banks in the eu lately.

It doesn't need to be dominant. It's such a small sliver right now that it could go 10x and still not be anywhere near dominant.

There are a lot of places where the government is not strong enough to maintain a reliable currency on its own. The USA was the global currency up till now because it was universally trusted, but that's changing. The people who have profited from the international dollar are maneuvering to keep their monopoly.

So you're saying 10x the usage would stabilize the currency and also increase the value by 10x or was the 5-10x in the previous comment only about usage?

A 10x on price would mean a significant shift would be much more expensive, as whales would have to be much bigger to cause a substance movement.

Btc isn't just crypto, its the block chain too. So not only can you pay/collect, but it's publicly available and things like smart contracts are easily possible in an open environment.

So we can do things like say: send x btc to y address if weather.com reports it's 50 degrees in Des Moines on May 8th at 9am, or whatever, all sorts of settlement problems are solved with no middleman who can stop it.

The crypto market was almost 3T two years ago. That’s a 65% decline from ATH two year ago.

And it has so much lower to go after Tether, Binance, and Coinbase collapse.

Crypto eats itself. Bitcoin will never reach its true potential because every centralized exchange is a scam.

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