Gold is used to make things.
You can argue what its value should be as a material alone, but it’s not entirely speculation.
You can argue what its value should be as a material alone, but it’s not entirely speculation.
Mathematical properties don't provide economic value.
The demand for bitcoin is almost all speculation, and a tiny bit is for purposes of making clandestine payments, paying ransoms, and such.
Probably incredibly little. I have not in the slightest looked into it, but based on bitcoins properties, I'd guess that it doesn't suit 99.9% of Africa. They use cash and frequently use mobile phones for transferring cash etc.
To be maximally effective you'd need to mobilize enough attackers and enough windowless white vans to reach the entire populace within probably a day, so let's say 3 million attackers and 3 million white vans. That's when things start getting more expensive than the sql query.
i would guess that percentage of people with wallets would be very small and a relative small team could with a relative small number of white vans and wrenches could get every single one in relative short time..
and for countries that heavily monitor internet usage, like china, i bet they could have a list with pretty good assumptions on who has crypto that they can target for further investigation before sending the wrenched goons..
i bet the analysis for that is all automated by now and built into their systems, making it much easier to go after the average individual.
On the other hand, government can sieze funds from your bank account by seeking a court order or whatever legal instrument is needed in your jurisdiction.
The problem with crypto as a hedge against government overreach is with fiat exchanges. I hope more businesses start accepting crypto and you won't need to go trough an exchange that often.
In cryptocurrency's defense (I am not a Bitcoiner), it not as easy for them to do that, because they can't just order a bank to transfer it/freeze it....assuming the owner is going through a lot of elaborate, inconvenient, and easy to footgun security measures. If you have a Coinbase wallet you're in exactly the same situation as if you had cash in the bank.
HOWEVER, the cost people pay to get that is stupidly high. For every suave international drug dealer who's kept their money out of the hands of the evil government with Bitcoin, you probably have 1,000 dudes or more, who lost the keys to their wallet somehow or got their Bitcoin stolen in a hack.
So you probably shouldn't be worrying to much about duh gubbament.
And then, the obligatory xkcd about crypto: https://xkcd.com/538/ / https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/forget-hacking-this....
[1] Also, keeping your money in a bank account almost certainly product you from those controversial civil forfeiture situations.
Another case is when a foreign government puts you on a sanctions list and freezes your assets in the banks under their jurisdiction. This has happened to a lot of Russians and Russian companies in the last few years. (It also happened to the foreign reserves of the Russian central bank, but Bitcoin is not liquid enough to be a significant international reserve asset.)
Another case is when the government suspects you of some kind of wrongdoing but can't physically find you, or can find you but for whatever reason isn't willing to torture you. For example, two and a half years ago, some truckers in Canada staged a protest for misguided reasons, and the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau froze not only the truckers' bank accounts, and the organizers' bank accounts, but even bank accounts suspected to belong to people who were suspected of donating to the protest: https://www.cato.org/blog/emergencies-act-after-two-years https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-... https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/bureaucrats-who-froze...
> In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.
Earlier this year, a court found that the government's actions at the time were illegal. https://freespeechunion.org/trudeau-government-not-justified... explains:
> In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
And of course it's well known that, when Wikileaks was targeted by the US government for their journalism, Visa and Mastercard cut off their donations despite apparently having no legal requirement to do so, while Bitcoin donations were able to continue. This was crucial in enabling Wikileaks to support Snowden's escape from the US when he revealed the extent of the US's illegal spying on its own citizens.
Bitcoin specifically, with its multi-trillion dollar market cap, is built up that high purely on speculation. It is a very fragile store of wealth, especially the higher its market cap becomes.
You'd be much better off using the US Dollar. Even if it's through a bank like HSBC.
Those things alone do not hold up a $1.5T market cap. I would say they don’t hold up a $1.5B cap either.