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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't have to be "magic" that causes it to go up forever. People need a way to put large amounts of money in places that are difficult for governments to get to and /or easy to move across jurisdictional borders. Think: money launderers, people that are worried their corrupt government will seize their assets, people hiding money from someone they owe like a spouse in a divorce. These all seem to me to be reasonable use cases for bitcoin.

All the things that make bitcoin a pain to buy a pizza are irrelevant if your goal is to hide $100m in your shoe. Nothing can do that better than bitcoin and there is a demonstrated need.

If you assume the reason to use bitcoin isn't going away and the wealth of the world goes up-- while the supply of bitcoin is pretty constant-- it can keep going up without magic.

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But that doesn't distinguish Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. The thing that distinguishes Bitcoin is fame, pure and simple. Everyone has heard of it.

Also nobody can premine it, no coalition of big stakeholders can lock you out of your coins, a 51% attack is less likely feasible than for any other PoW coin, the bandwidth needed for its blockchain is smaller than most alternatives, and it's less likely to conceal unknown cryptographic weaknesses. It's kind of shitty in some other ways, though.

And eventually the math will be solved and every bitcoin will be worth zero.

While that's conceivable, Merkle-graph systems like Bitcoin are surprisingly resilient. It's been almost 20 years since MD5 was thoroughly broken, but still nobody has published a second preimage attack. For SHA2 and SHA3 nobody has even published a collision attack. And SHA-256 (what Bitcoin uses) is post-quantum-safe (Grover's algorithm still needs 2¹²⁸ time) though AFAIK there isn't yet a post-quantum cryptosystem deployed for signing transactions, which will require a hard fork.

Presumably if quantum computers (or better DLP algorithms on classical computers) start breaking keys, that will become a priority.

So I think there's an excellent chance that even if the math is solved Bitcoins will retain their value. Perhaps even without many of them getting stolen in the process. This is a big difference from many other uses of cryptography; if someone breaks IDEA 20 years from now, they can decrypt your PGP messages from the 20th century, and there's nothing you can do now to prevent that.

To me its inevitable. And just a matter of time. Any year there could be a breakthrough that quickly leads to missing math.

We still don't know if P = NP. You seem peculiarly certain it is, which is odd given that most of the people who study the topic strongly suspect otherwise. They could of course be wrong, but what makes you so sure?

Assuming P != NP we still don't have any proof that sha-2 etc can't be reversed (obviously there is a loss of data). It's implausible for now but someday I guarantee we will have the math that makes it trivial. It does not require P = NP.

They would just patch the software.

You can't patch the rules for the existing bitcoins. People would have to move them to new rules.

That is not necessarily how this works. The only thing required to happen is that a super-majority of the miners running the bitcoin software voluntarily update to a new version. This is how changes have been done to BTC before.

Fame is part of it, but it's more that it's IMO probably the only truly decentralized cryptocurrency. Not just in terms of the nodes and miners being well spread out between organizations and parts of the world, but also in terms of its development and governance. Sure, there's a relatively small group of core contributors to Bitcoin, but they don't have much fame or personality cults around them like Ethereum's Vitalik does. They are really just restricted to maintaining and adding well-agreed-upon new features to Bitcoin. Eg when Segwit happened, a lot of miners held out on supporting it for a long time becasue it was a bit controversial. Meanwhile with Ethereum, if Vitalik really pushed for some controversial change, it would probably happen. Once you go further down the list than Ethereum, things get really bad, with many cryptos' development being entirely driven by a small group of people in a for-profit company, with miners and users that will blindly update to the newest version regardless of what's in it.

Eth famously forked and reversed txns due to someone getting scammed.

the fact that eth classic was created from this incident and still exists does inspire some confidence that ethereum's governance is somewhat decentralized also, to be fair.

And IIRC it wasn't a "scam", it was a bug in a smart contract.

Yes a smart contract bug. Hacked might be a better word. Or outsmarted?

ETH forked because the contract was poorly written and they didn't want to honor the contract because their buddies would have lost a lot of money and the project would have gotten an egg to their face.

Fame and security. Bitcoin is the hardest crypto to attack socially and economically.

That's true, but you could say the same thing about a Van Gough painting. There are lots of old pretty paintings. But if you paid $xxm for your Van Gough you can be pretty sure its still worth a lot in ten years. There are no guarantees. But that's not just true of Van Goughs and bitcoins.

Here's one good use: I looked into leaving the US to become a citizen elsewhere. I have about $15MM in my retirement. I would have to pay a penalty on my taxes for early withdrawal, and be taxed when I renounce my citizenship. In theory I could cash everything out, buy a huge amount of BTC, move to another country (within a week, or quickly!!), and then cash it out in their currency. Of course, all sorts of alarm bells would go off if a normal schmoe like me tried to move that much money out of my investment account, because I'm not rich enough to break finance laws like people worth 10x, 100x or 1,000x more than me can do without going to jail. And I'd be terrified that the other country would OOPS my deposit like in the film Blow with Johnny Depp.

So your one good use is... tax evasion. Huh.

It's not illegal to move money out of your investment accounts, it's just reported so that yes, you can have a tax liability.

I too, would like tax-free investments and funds.

Yes! That's my one good use! :)

Seriously, that's all I got.

I think the government is figuring this out and has access to a lot of info about BTC from the Binance settlement. That's just speculation on my part, it may not be true.

What I think a lot of people don't realize is that the US government is not very interested in going after people who do tax evasion in the $5-50 m range. People like that can afford lawyers and representatives, it will take years, and never get any headlines. They love to go after people for $5-50k evasion because they just get paid.

And it doesn't work unless you buy your bitcoin peer to peer, as any exchange will just leave a log relating your buying to your wallet, and liquidate it peer to peer as well. Any transactions with regulated institutions will doxx your wallet and then it's over, you can't use those funds anymore without being tracked (or at least trackable) by the feds.

One man tax evasion is another man escape from illegitimate capture.

Money laundering, tax evasion, and alimony avoidance. Yes there is a demand for those I suppose...

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