281 karma · joined January 2, 2014
You perceive it as unstable because you're using USD as a unit-of-account. As a thought exercise, if you were using BTC as the unit of account, what you would perceive unstable is the US dollar. And what you would see is that the USD value would be trending down against BTC, especially if you choose a time-frame equal or higher than 4 years.
So yeah mate, nothing to see here, keep holding your cash.
This concept applies to custody, not to fiat-to-crypto exchanges. Because a fiat-to-crypto exchange is an on/off ramp into/outside crypto. And as fiat cannot be held in a trustless way, the most "trustless" way to make a swap without the exchange holding the fiat amount is by using an escrow system. If the escrow system can only be moved to party A or party B during a trade-dispute, then it's the most trustless thing you can get, my friend.
PS: Your 2nd link seems to suggest that you're saying "DEXes are better than p2p exchanges!", well, DEXes don't have fiat-to-crypto pairs, only crypto-to-crypto. Nice try.
Did you miss the part where I recommended an exchange that doesn't hold user's funds?
> And Bitcoin absolutely tanked with rising interest rates, just like the equity markets.
Right, and where's the value of it 4 years after each value-tank event?
You know what, this narrative is funny, because 99.999% of the time in which "crypto" is used to evade taxes, it's the kind of taxes that would need to be paid because of capital gains on the crypto assets because their value increased. But most of the time, they are unrealized gains, which means that tax evasion didn't actually happen. But anyway, let's now think of the cases where the person sold the crypto back to fiat: how easy is to evade taxes at that moment? Not very, because most exchanges report trades to authorities.
And anyway, the fact that their crypto balance increased is due ultimately to politicians doing QE! So they tax us in a hidden-way via money-printing, and after the scarce assets increase in value because of this, they want to tax us again.
There are bitcoin-only exchanges, e.g. Bitaroo. There are also P2P exchanges that don't hold user's funds, like LN2bot (this one is very handy because it supports Lightning, so fees are ridiculously low, and trades very fast for not being a SPOT exchange).
> I can't afford to mine it anymore.
Right, it's a professional industry now; hobbyists can still do it, but at a loss.
> What if I want to buy some more? Or sell some of what I have?
See the aforementioned exchanges above, in my first answer.
> What can I spend Bitcoin on?
Anything, really. For example you can buy flights & book hotels with travala.com. Or buy things in Amazon with a discount thanks to purse.io .
> What does Bitcoin solve for me?
Not being affected by events like SVB closures (or worse: smaller banks that may not be bailed out[1]); not being affected by QE in the medium-long term (e.g. put your savings in it and forget about for 4 years[2]).
[1] If you don't believe it, watch this: https://twitter.com/Stromens/status/1664977520750370816
[2] Try to find 2 points in the historic data of a BTCUSD chart, which differ by 4 years, the oldest point is never higher value than the newest point.
There's almost zero part-time job offers for sw engineers, but I have one. If you're interested DM me (same username in twitter or telegram).
The only way to fix this is to ban fractional reserve banking (FTR: we have now something even worse than fractional reserve banking because now the deposit guarantee required is 0%, which means it's not even a fraction anymore). Good luck with that.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?