BITCOIN

Qyburn

darren232002 said:

I'm here to point out that Bitcoiners want to create a parallel financial system that will lead to better prosperity for all because the current system is broken.

For Bitcoin to act as a currency doesn't it have to have a stable and predicable value?  For example to pay salary, nobody would take a job based on so many BTC per year, as they would have absolutely no idea what they'd actually receive.

jimi_man

darren232002 said:

I'm also here, as I've said several times, to point out that you all had the chance to invest at reasonable levels and chose not to. So I hope you take responsibility for your own mistake later on and don't come asking for 'windfall taxes' on the people that had the incredulity to figure this out before you.

I'm not sure that 'mistake' is quite the right word here. That's a bit like calling it a 'mistake' that we didn't back the winner of the 3.30 at Haydock or that week's lottery numbers. 

Opportunity is probably a better word. 

uk1

jimi_man said:

darren232002 said:

I'm also here, as I've said several times, to point out that you all had the chance to invest at reasonable levels and chose not to. So I hope you take responsibility for your own mistake later on and don't come asking for 'windfall taxes' on the people that had the incredulity to figure this out before you.

I'm not sure that 'mistake' is quite the right word here. That's a bit like calling it a 'mistake' that we didn't back the winner of the 3.30 at Haydock or that week's lottery numbers. 

Opportunity is probably a better word. 

Oh dear …… did you not understand his point?  

Frequentlyhere

Good article here by Merryn Somerset Webb / Bloomberg as a fresh pair of eyes.

"Try to imagine a world without Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin and the like. I suspect you will find it easy.

That’s because it is in no way embedded in your life. You don’t use it, you don’t spend it, you don’t think of it as a medium of exchange or currency, it likely isn’t in your pension, and if anyone asked you what problem in your life it might solve, you probably wouldn’t be able to think of any. That makes sense. I can’t either"

...

"None of this matters, of course, if enough people are drawn into the whole thing. If everyone starts believing in the emperor’s new clothes, those clothes then become worth something. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs suggested that the price of a Bitcoin could hit $100,000 in five years, if more people adopted it as a store of wealth on the same scale as they do gold. This implies, though, that if fewer people see it as a store of wealth (and I think we can assume this is the case right now), the price could hit zero"

Malthusian

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs suggested that the price of a Bitcoin could hit $100,000 in five years, if more people adopted it as a store of wealth on the same scale as they do gold.

The small problem being that this sentence remains equally true if you replace the word "Bitcoin" with "GDB2222's farts in a jar". 

but Goldman Sachs says Bitcoin is going to $100,000! listen to the greedy bankers that Bitcoin is going to liberate you from!

jimi_man

uk1 said:

jimi_man said:

darren232002 said:

I'm also here, as I've said several times, to point out that you all had the chance to invest at reasonable levels and chose not to. So I hope you take responsibility for your own mistake later on and don't come asking for 'windfall taxes' on the people that had the incredulity to figure this out before you.

I'm not sure that 'mistake' is quite the right word here. That's a bit like calling it a 'mistake' that we didn't back the winner of the 3.30 at Haydock or that week's lottery numbers. 

Opportunity is probably a better word. 

Oh dear …… did you not understand his point?  

I'm guessing not.....

bugbyte_2

Darren simultaneously argues that BTC is going to the moon AND can be a stable 'money', completely ignoring the fact that the word 'stable' comes before 'money' for a good reason. Plus he is too cleaver to use any of the companies that have collapsed and we can all use stable coins anyway for unspecified reasons, but we are not going to mention Terra/Luna or USDD or USDN.

For Darren's predictions to actually work, three unlikely (i.e. not going to) things need to happen:

Firstly, Fiat money needs to fail. If it does fail, we can confidently predict that life as we know it has ended, and we are all in Mad Max territory.

Secondly, when you pop into your local Thunderdome Curry's, you will still need to be able to buy a smart phone, and be able to connect it to an internet provider. Therefore, despite the collapse of society and us all having to weaponize our cars, Samsung still needs to exist, as does EE, Kevin Bacon, Sothern Electricity and Amazon Web Services. Whatever apocalypse killed off the £ and $ miraculously spared these companies and infrastructure.

Thirdly, instead of reverting to a barter system where I will swap my firewood for your cabbage, or maybe even reverting back to exchanging precious metals / shells / body parts / whatever, we are all going to get our smart phones out and ping each other BTC. 

Alternatively, the economy goes through a rocky cycle, we all moan a bit but we keep paying for goods and services in £ and $. Taxes are still collected, and all the things that governments are meant to do gets done with varying degrees of success, and society does not collapse. At some point that song by D:Ream comes true and we have a few good years before the next cycle of crappyness happens. 


What sounds more probable?

Section62

bugbyte_2 said:

Darren simultaneously argues that BTC is going to the moon AND can be a stable 'money', completely ignoring the fact that the word 'stable' comes before 'money' for a good reason. Plus he is too cleaver to use any of the companies that have collapsed and we can all use stable coins anyway for unspecified reasons, but we are not going to mention Terra/Luna or USDD or USDN.

For Darren's predictions to actually work, three unlikely (i.e. not going to) things need to happen:

Firstly, Fiat money needs to fail. If it does fail, we can confidently predict that life as we know it has ended, and we are all in Mad Max territory.

Secondly, when you pop into your local Thunderdome Curry's, you will still need to be able to buy a smart phone, and be able to connect it to an internet provider. Therefore, despite the collapse of society and us all having to weaponize our cars, Samsung still needs to exist, as does EE, Kevin Bacon, Sothern Electricity and Amazon Web Services. Whatever apocalypse killed off the £ and $ miraculously spared these companies and infrastructure.

Thirdly, instead of reverting to a barter system where I will swap my firewood for your cabbage, or maybe even reverting back to exchanging precious metals / shells / body parts / whatever, we are all going to get our smart phones out and ping each other BTC. 

Alternatively, the economy goes through a rocky cycle, we all moan a bit but we keep paying for goods and services in £ and $. Taxes are still collected, and all the things that governments are meant to do gets done with varying degrees of success, and society does not collapse. At some point that song by D:Ream comes true and we have a few good years before the next cycle of crappyness happens. 


What sounds more probable?

But Bitcoin is different to everything else. (all those other cryptocoins, fiat, metals/shells/body parts etc) That's why it is so good.

Exodi

bugbyte_2 said:

Samsung still needs to exist, as does EE, Kevin Bacon, Sothern Electricity and Amazon Web Services. Whatever apocalypse killed off the £ and $ miraculously spared these companies and infrastructure.

Thirdly, instead of reverting to a barter system where I will swap my firewood for your cabbage, or maybe even reverting back to exchanging precious metals / shells / body parts / whatever, we are all going to get our smart phones out and ping each other BTC. 

This is where I get confused about the use case suggested for Bitcoin in third world, corrupt or war-torn countries.

The general view being - their own currencies are extremely volatile for one reason or another, so they should transact in something less volatile, like bitcoin maybe...

Yet there's obviously a base requirement that residents of these third world/war-torn countries require ready access to power and internet. Even in El Salvador, where bitcoin has been forced into the hands of the citizens, only about half of the population has access to the internet. Seems to be quite a big issue that's often avoided.

Plus it's also unlikely to be adopted by older people, who are not technology savvy - especially if they don't have the incredible  foresight that darren has in knowing which multi-billion bitcoin exchanges will collapse in the next few years.

User232002

bugbyte_2 said:

For Darren's predictions to actually work, three unlikely (i.e. not going to) things need to happen:

Oh, I see you decided to ignore all the counter points previously mentioned and just make stuff up now. Its an interesting choice of argument that I hope intelligent people would see for what it is.

bugbyte_2 said:

Firstly, Fiat money needs to fail. If it does fail, we can confidently predict that life as we know it has ended, and we are all in Mad Max territory.

Err... Nope.

I haven't argued this. I've explicitly stated here before that fiat will exist in parallel with bitcoin because the plebes will always need something to transact in. The Argentinian peso has failed as a SoV even though it still exists and society in Argentina continues relatively normally.

bugbyte_2 said:

Secondly, when you pop into your local Thunderdome Curry's, you will still need to be able to buy a smart phone, and be able to connect it to an internet provider. Therefore, despite the collapse of society and us all having to weaponize our cars, Samsung still needs to exist, as does EE, Kevin Bacon, Sothern Electricity and Amazon Web Services. Whatever apocalypse killed off the £ and $ miraculously spared these companies and infrastructure.

Thirdly, instead of reverting to a barter system where I will swap my firewood for your cabbage, or maybe even reverting back to exchanging precious metals / shells / body parts / whatever, we are all going to get our smart phones out and ping each other BTC. 

Err... Nope.

Again, I haven't argued this, nor do I believe it to be true. Here is what I posted on October 20th 2021;

darren232002 said:

Linton said:

Let's consider BTC as a store of value.  One of the key features of Gold, which for some people outweighs all its disadvantages, such as volatility,  is that it is difficult to destroy and will survive the worst disasters barring the end of the world.  It is really the one thing that could be exchangeable for the basics of life in the event of a global apocalypse. Can BTC?  What happens if the power or just the communications networks go down?  Are your BTCs of any value? Would you be able to you sell them for a tin of beans?

I don't think you've really thought this through.

1. Humanity has nuclear weapons. If there is an apocalypse, you or I probably wont see it through. 
2. Definitely not the main reason people buy gold. Most gold is bought and stored by custodians. If the world goes full mad max, a paper claim on some gold in a vault thousands of miles away is worth precisely zero.
3. People have forgotten how brutal the world used to be. If by some miracle you survive and happen to have physical gold, an alpha chad isn't bartering with you for beans. Hes going to kill you with his friends and take it all anyway.

This is another strawman. I'm not buying Bitcoin because I want to survive an apocalypse. 

And yet new posters emerge in this thread continually to spout the same old tired and regurgitated arguments.

bugbyte_2 said:

What sounds more probable?

You see, these if/then type arguments rely on the 'if' actually being a position held by the other side of an argument.

Making stuff up isn't a valid argument I'm afraid. Its childish.