BITCOIN

Scottex99

Only if you don't understand it.

It's ability to be able to split into 8 (?) decimals or 1 Satoshi doesn't effect the total supply which is always 21m. Just means it's easier to use/send.

It's not "supposed" to do or replace anything. Nobody is saying oh we have BTC now, lets burn every single fiat currency immediately as we've solved all financial problems. The static labels dont need to be there.

For me, it was designed as peer to peer digital cash and now has evolved into hard money, its only 12 years old, it could evolve again

Zola.

Another domino falls (maybe) 

https://twitter.com/BobMalakasPI/status/1504959615842271242?t=wsoCrbHe2m7uNyLtpidc2Q&s=19

User232002

Malthusian said:

It's still interesting that on page 190 a few people who hadn't been charged with any crime were having their accounts frozen and this was proof that everyone needed crypto. Now billions of dollars belonging to people who haven't been charged with a crime are being frozen, private assets like football clubs are being essentially seized and nationalised, and you can hear an NFT drop. Should private citizens have the right to keep their money outside the reach of governments and the courts or not?

Out of the reach of government overreach, yes. Nobody was ever arguing that people should be able to keep their assets outside the reach of courts. Which is why, contrary to some posts in this thread, most crypto exchanges are not banning Russian users. 

The Canadian truckers situation pointed out that individual bank accounts were non-sovereign. The US seizing $600BN of Russian assets has just made world governments sit up and realise that the 'assets' they thought they held are only held on the condition that the US approves of your actions; permissioned assets. The game has started and the eventual outcome is a neutral world reserve currency.

lozzy1965 said:

EDIT:  Ponder this.  A huge number of bitcoin are in the hands of a very small number of people.  A vast number of the world population currently have no Bitcoin.  How is that going to work out?

So firstly, a lot of the stats you read regarding wallet distribution are incorrect because the biggest on chain wallets are usually things like exchanges that are a collection of many users coins so you have to be very careful when looking at wallet distribution data.

Secondly, I recently read a paper which calculated the Gini coefficient of Bitcoin to be 0.65. That's approximately equal to countries such as Australia, Italy and Japan. Its better than the UK and far superior to the US. I've included the source below - I'd imagine the data in Credit Suisse's annual reports are somewhat reliable.

Notably, inequality (and the Gini coefficient) has been trending up in most developed countries for the last few decades, as you can also see in the table below. This is a natural consequence of a fiat based system, where entrenched interests usually benefit from the money printer at everyone else's expense - the Cantillon effect. It is in fact the opposite in Bitcoin; every metric you look at (Gini or wallets with > 1k BTC) is trending down over time. Its a fair system now, that will only get fairer in time.

Lastly, and this shouldn't need to be stated as its so obvious but given the questions you're asking it probably needs to be, there are basically zero people that bought BTC at like $1 and haven't sold until today. The idea that we will all be ruled by overlords that bought thousands of BTC at cents on the dollar is a myth. Most commonly, the people who bought at $1 sold at $10 and the people who bought at $10 sold at $100 and so on. And for those that bought early and held, they absolutely deserve their riches for being able to see the potential of something that was open to all from day one. I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, but I didn't hold on to most of it because I didn't see its full potential. Thats my fault, nobody elses. Many of my friends held on to a lot of their BTC after selling some chunk of it to realise a profit - I don't begrudge them their success nor does this mean the system isn't 'fair.'

lozzy1965 said:

Hmmm, sounds a little like inflation?

Bitcoin was supposed to replace money!

The trouble with Bitcoin is that every time I see a specific reason to justify it, I can't see how it solves that reason.

This is an incredibly silly argument. 

Suppose I have 2 pizza's, a plain cheese and a pepperoni, cut in to 4 slices each to share between 8 friends. This isn't ideal as although there are 8 slices, each friend can only choose one type of pizza. Instead I cut the pizza in to 8 slices each and now each friend can enjoy a slice of each pizza.

Creating extra slices did not result in the creation of more pizza. Divisibility and finite scarcity are not mutually exclusive properties.

This has been discussed ITT already. 

Scottex99

https://cryptohayes.medium.com/energy-cancelled-e9f9e53a50cd

Injecctt it

lozzy1965

darren232002 said:

lozzy1965 said:

Hmmm, sounds a little like inflation?

Bitcoin was supposed to replace money!

The trouble with Bitcoin is that every time I see a specific reason to justify it, I can't see how it solves that reason.

This is an incredibly silly argument. 

Suppose I have 2 pizza's, a plain cheese and a pepperoni, cut in to 4 slices each to share between 8 friends. This isn't ideal as although there are 8 slices, each friend can only choose one type of pizza. Instead I cut the pizza in to 8 slices each and now each friend can enjoy a slice of each pizza.

Creating extra slices did not result in the creation of more pizza. Divisibility and finite scarcity are not mutually exclusive properties.

This has been discussed ITT already. 

But how does the fact that your 1 unit of currency, which has been split into 2 units now so that 2 people can own it, prevent the pizza seller telling you that your 2 pizzas now cost more?  It's supply and demand.  Bitcoin will not remove inflation.

Adyinvestment

lozzy1965 said:

But how does the fact that your 1 unit of currency, which has been split into 2 units now so that 2 people can own it, prevent the pizza seller telling you that your 2 pizzas now cost more?  It's supply and demand.  Bitcoin will not remove inflation.

You are getting a little confused here, no extra Bitcoin is created and the Pizza would not cost more.

It is the same as a Pound - this can be split into 50p, 20p etc, but at the end of the day 1 Pound is still 1 Pound regardless of how many smaller coins are used.

Malthusian

lozzy1965 said:

But how does the fact that your 1 unit of currency, which has been split into 2 units now so that 2 people can own it, prevent the pizza seller telling you that your 2 pizzas now cost more?  It's supply and demand.  Bitcoin will not remove inflation.

It will remove inflation but perhaps for a different reason than you are thinking.

If the money supply is fixed (as it is for Bitcoin) and the production of goods and services increases (which it will, forever and ever amen, unless the world enters a new Dark Age), then the result is deflation. Actually "result" is the wrong word, production expanding faster than the money supply is the definition of deflation.

Deflation is fatal for economies because instead of spending or investing their money, people hodl it waiting for number go up. Falling spending and investment -> prolonged recession and mass unemployment. It doesn't matter whether an economy runs on fiat cash or Bitcoin, deflation has the exact same result for the economy.

But I won't dwell on that further because it was already done to death on page minus several hundred.

Subdividing a currency is not inflation. If the smallest coin in the economy is currently one silver sesterce which is also worth one pizza, and to make small transactions easier I mint a load of bronze asses and decree that 1 sesterce = 2 asses, one pizza still costs 1 sesterce or 2 asses. Same applies if it's digital tokens rather than metal.

lozzy1965

Yes, thank you for the above two replies.  I wasn't really meaning to imply that goods will go up simply because you subdivide the lowest currency unit down.  I was running with the previously given example and ended up talking utter nonsense
My point was intended to be, and not made very well, that there is a limited supply of Bitcoin which is not spread very evenly across the world population and that somehow, my gut feeling was that may lead to inflation.  Unfortunately I'm not clever enough to work out why   And moreover, the deflation explanation made by Malthusian (above) does seem more plausible.

Scottex99

There are whales for sure. The genesis wallet owned by Satoshi is untouched and has something like 900,000 BTC in it (including some associated super early wallets).
Any individual whale or group of them (pod, lol) could in theory all dump in coordination to try to nuke the price but generally it doesn't seem to happen often and the only real reason for doing that would be then to buy up the market again lower which in theory just pushes the price back up.
In short, there's always going to be an uneven spread, depending on how early you got in or how much you invested etc. Same as some oligarch having $100m and some homeless kid having $1 in the current world.
A good target for a normie is to get to 1 BTC in their lifetime

mooneysaver

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220323006002/en/SafeMoon-Appoints-Three-New-Members-to-its-Leadership-Team-as-the-Company-Moves-to-Next-Stage

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