unhashable

I do not know how much gold is in the earth’s crust or in passing asteroids, but I do know how many Bitcoin there are: 21 million.

https://aidaily.co.uk/articles/artificial-intelligence-and-s...

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

- George Box

Miners block rewards will be reduced in half from 12.24 BTC to 6.12. In theory this reduces overall sell pressure on BTC in a key time when Bitcoin's narrative is maturing and adoption is moving forward with institutions.

When Central Banks throughout the world are printing unlimited fiat, there is no better time to hold the universe's scarcest asset.

Update: Fed just committed to unlimited liquidity injections through money creation. USD debasement is now a guarantee.

Welcome to the new normal.

https://twitter.com/apompliano/status/1238463895095869440?s=...

You missed the point.

Holders of gold maintain custody at risk of physical confiscation.

Holders of Bitcoin maintain custody (of the password that allows spending said Bitcoin) and are cannot he compelled one way or another. The bitcoin moves when they say so.

You might find this long-form article attempting to make an argument against “bitcoin has no intrinsic value” skepticism:

https://medium.com/coinmonks/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-...

You think the internet is going to be compartmentalized before USD is devalued?

Fed is printing $4T this week!

You just described every single investment.

:)

Batching by definition consolidates the throughput to fewer transactions. That's what I mean with that (unprecise) example.

Bingo.

Populations tend to the hardest money. Bitcoin cannot be undiscovered.

This is wishful thinking.

I will be surprised if central banks don’t use the ushering in of the next monetary system as an excuse to go full-stop 100% digital.

I get the sense you think this is a far off and unlikely event. I think it’s much more likely and impending than that.

So which is more likely: severe debasement of USD or the devolving of the global internet (ala an increase of firewall-ism by nation states)?

Obviously $1T is meant to by hyperbole. Still, it’s not that outlandish.

$500M transferred for less than $400 on 7/29/19 - https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1155808847908544512?s...

There are many of these, and they are increasing.

Cashing out large sums is done over the counter, not through regular on/off ramps (as in your ATM example). Bitcoin is legal in the US, so I'm not sure how suspicion plays into it.

The rich play by different rules than you and I.

Does it feel like I’m arguing that point? I’m not.

Speculation is by definition gambling. Investing is also speculation. You have a thesis, and you make returns if that plays out. You lose capital when you are wrong.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "insiders" - most of the world can purchase Bitcoin, the software is OSS, the network inspectable, and the evolving thesis and narrative is fully available online.

Bitcoin is the people's money.

Bitcoin would work similarly, but with far less trust in centralized institutions.

Today, central banks acts as a final settlement later upon which the rest of the financial system is built (banks, credit, etc). This makes it impossible for the financial system to “shut off”.

In a Bitcoin world, the main ledger would act as a final settlement layer, and local lightning networks act as the layers on top providing payments, loans, and credit. All transactions would be batched and only get settled so often (once an hour, globally, for example).

This gives you similar local-affinity that today’s financial system offers without relying on governments to award permission to engage in commerce.

This is an interesting scenario worth thinking through.

If Bitcoin is forced to go split-brain temporarily, the network could coordinate to rejoin after the fact. Or, it could stay split in two.

Regardless, infighting over which network was “the real Bitcoin” would ensue. See Bitcoin Cash and friends.

Single points of failure? Bitcoin is decentralized, like the internet. It’s designed to explicitly avoid points of failure and trusting of node participants.

Lots of Bitcoin has been lost. Good key hygiene should not be taken lightly. What is unfortunate for those losers is fortunate for Bitcoin. As the supply of lost Bitcoin increases the overall scarcity of the asset increases.

There is good chance that narrative re-emerges as Bitcoin proves to be consistently non-correlated. I can see that.

This is true.

Bitcoin is more of bet that Keynesian monetary policy fails. It doesn’t hedge for Armageddon.

Planning for a collapse of world order involves small coins, farmland, prepping pantries, home schooling, and firearms.

Hey, I’m all for individual sovereignty!

Absolute financial control of citizens is a hell on earth type of dystopia we must resist, thwart, and avoid at all costs.

We must not go silently into that dark night.

Love that meme: https://www.xkcd.com/538/

So true too. At the end of the day, digital security must be reinforced with physical security and good opsec.

Totally. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange (cash). It’s not useful for payments. Bitcoin is currently a bet that digital scarcity will bring back the concept of saving (SoV) so that people don’t have to invest in equities just to protect their purchasing power. Only the people making this bet will be affected if Bitcoin fails. The monetary system will keep moving forward unaffected. If Bitcoin succeeds, eventually the price will slow down and it can be used for cash. That will have to occur many decades down the road, if it ever occurs.

As for backups, the Bitcoin ledger is likely the most durable dataset that has ever existed. Backups are made daily at every layer across the world and there is no central point of failure in the network.

Shutting down the Bitcoin network would take a world war, and even then the network would survive through backups and the will of network participants to bring it back.

Physical cash is not long for this world. We are rapidly moving towards always-online and fully-digital ledgers controlled by governments and central banks.

You will not be able to get a hair cut unless you are an outstanding citizen and have your governments blessing.

I wish this were a joke.

What do you mean it can disappear and nobody will even notice? I can think of a few things but I’d rather not assume. Can you spell it out so I can better reply?

I see: you’re concerned with a future where the concept of an internet ceases to exist? I’m afraid money will be the least of our problems then.

Holding Bitcoin is not a semantic backflip. Do you hold the dollars in your bank account?

Also: gold can easily be confiscated and it has been before - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102.

How much gold do you think you can travel with? Think the TSA would allow even $100k of gold to be carried on your person?

Given golds limited supply, why has the price been relatively stable in dollars (which are unlimited)? Because the gold market can easily be manipulated because central banks and Govs hold most of the supply and they can, and do, suppress with targeted market supply flooding.

Are you actually taking issue with the fundamentals of my argument or just annoyed by my equating USD to a virtual currency?

Yeah, I missed the point about trusting the math that enables a decentralized network. Addressed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22559645

To address your point more directly: many think that Bitcoin isn’t tangible because you have to trust that the network of full nodes are verifying transactions, and if they stop then Bitcoin ceases to exist.

Full nodes have financial incentives to run and they do so today at a scale that rivals the internet. It’s not a favor to Bitcoin, it’s a business. They would only stop if the financial incentive ceased to exist. I can’t think of a reason node operators would cease to care about their own financial well-being. That’s baked into our species.

Note that your reservations apply equally (and potentially more so) to fiat. USD is a virtual currency. Cash is on the way out. You will not be able to spend your USD offline. USD is based on a network of centralized banks. You cannot spend your fiat without a computer asking permission from these centralized systems.

The world stops if the internet stops. That’s not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin actually improves on the state of things by replacing encumbant authorities and centralized computing systems with math and a decentralized network.

I’ll add this. It’s not the current state of the world, but there is a very real chance Bitcoin can be made available off-internet via a satellite network. This would prevent state-level censorship like what we see when authoritarian regimes cut the internet.

https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite/blob/master/README....