Perhaps this was the final takedown necessary to pave the way for BTC ETF approval.
They poured scorn then, but I'm up to my eyeballs in bagpipes now
It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?
Why would anyone bother with Bitcoin?
If you want to avoid financial regulations in transmitting value across borders or purchase black market goods and services, you're going to be caught since all/most Bitcoin is KYCd and impossible to keep private, unlike Monero.
If you want to avoid transaction fees, you're SOL since it's at $10 right now versus $0.06 for Monero.
If you want a store of value, it's poor because it's volatile, not backed, and theft is not reversible, unlike virtually any other regulated security.
If you want to make legal purchases with it, any transaction costs $10 and can take hours or days, and is not reversible if you are defrauded, unlike USD.
Bitcoin has no value proposition beyond being a speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme for early buyers.
- Unlike Bitcoin, Monero's monetary issuance is not auditable, which could prove a major problem in case of an attack, potentially leading to inflation.
- Monero faces blockchain bloat issues due to its ring signatures. It cannot scale gracefully.
- Privacy and transaction cost concerns with Bitcoin have largely been addressed by Lightning and potentially other upcoming layer 2 solutions. A lot of work is being done here. If you are technologically inclined, you can also participate: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
- KYC happens on exchanges. Buy your BTC on decentralized platforms like Bisq or RoboSats and be done with KYC.
- A private-only ledger can pose challenges when transaction notarization is necessary. Bitcoin lets you choose between a private L2 transaction or a public blockchain transaction.
That said, I love Monero and am glad it exists.
Yes, it still has some rough edges but it's now mostly usable. https://medium.com/coinmonks/lightning-network-2018-to-2023-...
Besides, about 80% of transactions within exchanges are actually off-chain, so this is nothing new.
But the whole thing is a distraction anyway. The majority of transactions happening off-chain means that Bitcoin is an utter failure at everything it ever set out to accomplish.
I'm not sure you've used Bisq or RoboSats if you think they're good replacements for exchanges. Barely anyone is online at a given time.
The press has tricked you into believing every coin aside from a few popular ones are scams. Dig deeper.
If I dig deeper, and determine that <some shit coin> is a scam, well, I am just looking at the wrong one.
If I dig deeper, and decide that it's not, and then get burned later, I should have done more due diligence.
'Digging deeper' in a minefield is, generally speaking, not great advice.
If you believe everything is a 'shitcoin' and you want to hold them forever then on your death bed you can look at the value and determine if it really was a shitcoin or if the media made me think everything was a shitcoin.
[1] And 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, ...
I'd be very happy if Monero somehow turned into the stable coin of crypto. It could just hover around $150-$200 forever.
Also, except maybe for purely digital there will be "on-off ramps" anyway, except it will be for real goods instead of fiat currency. The government can ban you from paying the gardener or buying milk with XMR.
Bitcoin and Monero have always been able to send transactions instantly and for Bitcoin, essentially free for over a decade with zero down time. That beats the pants off Visa and MasterCard.
Why use an inflationary currency that costs 2% to spend and takes 30+ days to settle?
“FTX and Binance are not examples of true crypto!”
“Soviet Union and Venezuela are not examples of true communism!”
you don't have be a believer in either to understand that objectively
True crypto does exist.
Bitcoin is true crypto.
When I mine Bitcoin, and I use that Bitcoin to buy something from someone else, that is true crypto.
When I sell something for Bitcoin, that is true crypto.
When I exchange fiat for Bitcoin at a centralized exchange, and I successfully withdraw it to a self-custody wallet. That is acceptably close to true crypto.
Same goes for Monero.
consumers choosing mismanaged companies are consumer discernment problems that have nothing to do with the sector they're involved in. specifically with crypto, centralized exchanges and brokerage experiences are not necessary parts of the crypto ecosystem and exist in parallel to other ways of getting fiat in and out of crypto, and other ways of getting exposure to the crypto ecosystem. many proponents of the crypto asset ecosystem have always sounded the alarm on those kinds of companies and actively track how much crypto is held by the companies or in self custody.
analogies compare dissimilar things with common attributes, what is the common attribute between observers of these two concepts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_20_years
So for a while there was an actual date attached to the constitutional goal.
I believe the deadline was quietly buried by his stagnation-oriented successors, but I’m not sure.
The Bolsheviks were a minority, but controlled key elements of the army. After months of civil unrest and violence, they staged an armed coup.
Basically: buy cheap BTCs, print shitload of tethers, sell BTCs for real USD to the tune of tens of billions and now store these real USD in short term US treasuries (they don't own chinese treasuries anymore) bringing in 5% and more.
They're claiming they now have excess money (!) to back their tether due to the fact that they collect 5% or more of interest on the short-term treasuries they have.
Put it this way: even if they printed $40bn out of their arses out of $80bn of tether, the $40bn of actual USD they'd have would still net them $2bn a year in interest. That'd still be a big hole but...
What if they printed "only" 10 bn out of thin air out of 80 bn: they'd have near 70 bn bringing in 3.5 bn yearly at the moment.
They don't give any of the interest back to USDT (tether) holders.
So if they printed "only" 10 bn out of their arses, in less than three years they'd have these 10 bn for real on interest alone.
It's still criminal (I guess) but it may not be "0% of tether are backed".
People have tried to run the maths on how much money entered the cryptocurrency world (with Coinbase giving a huge hint).
Centre (Circle+Coinbase) has really $24 bn backing their USDC coin (they publish the individual US short term treasuries bill number).
USDT (tether) is much older than USDC.
Did they cheat? Most certainly.
Did they "fake it 'till they made it", helped, by sheer luck, by interest rates going like crazy?
I think it's possible.
1. Make Tethers out of thin air and sell for BTC
2. BTC price goes up because crypto boom
3. Sell enough BTC for USD to back the fake Tethers you made up in step 1
4. Balance sheet now looks legit, and you even have BTC to spare to buy yachts for everyone.
Coinmarket cap shows the USDT market cap going up by about $2 billion during that weekend, but it's not clear if they were using this strategy. (which would have profited ~1-10% of that figure).
[1] or, depending on how much risk they wanted to take, traded them for USDC and DAI! Those were trading for as little as $0.90.
Why else would the US allow the largest counterfeit money printer to continue for long?
Incompetence.
Are you taking about tether or the fed?
Others would like to buy it via retirement plans and having an ETF makes this doable.
Those that want to hold BTC incase the US dollar collapses will hodl their own BTC.
Those that want to hold BTC incase it really appreciates will hold it via an ETF in a tax advantaged account so they don't have to pay taxes on their gains, depending on the account type.
Also, CZ (pleads guilty to money laundering charges): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38366729
Many financial institutions do not care about decentralization, but they do care about investing in an asset where they do not have to worry about managing the asset (in that regard, similar to REITs). Having the asset insured against various types of malfeasance is also a requirement for investments by many institutional funds.
But now the speculators have taken over, and all that really matters is what BTC is worth in dollars.
Commodities are similar. People might invest in pork bellies even if they don't personally eat bacon.
Somehow I doubt that. That would mean someone invested this in a save and independent way with enough return to keep it inflation save and apparently has no other idea on how to invest that even more magical.
How is tether really pegged safely?
I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?
The interesting ETF will be for Ethereum because a custodian can possibly stake it and earn yield. ETH can earn within the basic protocol.
Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.
Also, securing physical assets is much easier than securing digital assets.
If you haven't written down your seed before generating your private key and also lost your private key, your money is lost. Thank you for this sacrifice for the common good, but you will want to educate yourself better next time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgans-nickel-bags-turned...
For the everyday purchases, a Lightning wallet on a smartphone is enough.
Gold is hard to transport, easy to confiscate and hard to divide, thus difficult to use as a currency. None of those apply to Bitcoin. Well, unless someone is dumb enough to leave his money on an exchange.
https://decrypt.co/97795/blackrock-handle-circle-usdc-cash-r...
'BlackRock will become "a primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves"—the fiat currency backing the Circle-issued USDC stablecoin.'
It's the institutional version of their Vault feature: https://www.coinbase.com/vault
> 98% of digital currency is stored totally offline, in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes and physical vaults.
The ETF then takes out an insurance policy incase the custodian loses they BTC they hold on the ETF's behalf.
Now they do have to design redundancies for the keys. eg. they should not lose access to the assets because say they made it too safe and cant find the keys anymore :p
It's funny because it happened with Prime Trust a crypto custodian. But I'm sure a company like BlackRock can and will do better.
Coming to the security and safety part. In theory, BTC was made with a intension to be easily usable and accessible. Once you understand it, its pretty simple and straightforward (even easier than using a bank's service). No level of hardware wallet failure will compromise the funds because the funds are not in the wallet rather the record of the funds are in 100s of thousands of BTC nodes that is being run by miners and other enthusiasts. The real threat may be letting people that share OTPs to scammer handle their private key and seed phrase. Thats where custodians like coinbase comes in.
And to the point of how to make sure the fund held by ETF/Custodian is actually there or not, This can be easily verified. Tt is a public ledger and anyone with the public key can see how much funds are held in the wallet. This aspect of transparency is one of the key selling point of BTC.
I would recommend a short and interesting read - "Inventing Bitcoin".
This means rich late people will never migrate or buy BTC ETF ever.
It's like always buying at the increase
Late adopting rich people might still get into BTC ETF for its ability to maintain its value in the long term, as simple as that and doesn’t matter at what price they buy.
BTC is made 1 per 10 minute.
BTC is not gold
But gold or any other precious metals for that matter still has a flaw of having unlimited supply. Yes the supply is limited on earth but we are only couple of decades far from mining asteroids like 16 Psyche.
Flood the market with gold, it will drastically lose its value and this will indeed help its consumption like manufacturing of electronics etc but gold as an asset would be pointless.
This cannot happen in BTC, which is programmed to have finite supply.
Its domination will just change / already has.
I bought weed with BTC for years, I never cared how much it's worth I just used the current dominator value for 10g weed.
Not sure what advantage fungible should be? Even bills are fungible.
And there is no reason to assume BTC is less prone to inflation. BTC right now is not even stable enough to be deflationary or inflationary.