Bitcoin Forum

When bitcoin was created, some of the side effects were not that well know. There is one that I find particularly interesting:

By giving individuals a choice to own an asset that is not printed, it generates a competition with all currencies across the world. Until a few years back, the people living in countries that had irresponsible monetary policies had to either live with it or try to exchange, many times in the black market, their local currency for USD or perhaps Euro at whatever the rate was in the street. That solution is much less valid now that US is also printing money like if there was no tomorrow and rising the debt ceiling to cope with an infrastructure programme.

However, bitcoin has now given the power to the people to defend themselves by holding bitcoin and - I am not sure how aware are governments about this - forcing the governments to either be responsible or get their currencies demoted to a secondary way of storing wealth. A sign of these is that it is only the most repressive and irresponsible regimes the ones that try, normally without success, to ban bitcoin.

This is not side effect, people were just ignorant in the past, while some people are still also ignorant of digital assets this time around, not kowing it is what is limited that people are using and supporting that can actually appreciate, be it physical or digital, and bitcoin has all the characteristics to make its intrinsic value appreciate.

It is just that bitcoin created an easy to access alternative and also more increasing in value than the decreasing USD, Euro and  Pound price. There is nothing that has changed about this USD, Euro and Pound to fiat in developing and underdeveloped countries, the fact still remain that the developed countries fiat price is also depreciating but the developing and underdeveloped countries are more dependent on developed countries in a way their governments have no option than to manipulate their fiat price which makes it more depreciative than that of the developed countries as a result of import dependency. Just that bitcoin is completely otherwise, it is appropriative over long term unlike the depreciative fiat. USD, Euro, Pound and others like that have been depreciating right from their beginning, this can be noticed if their past purchasing power is compared to more recent time, like comparing USD purchasing power from 1960 to 1970, from 1970 to 1980 and so on.

Governments do not have option while devaluating their fiat, it is because they want to preserve the foreign reserves or some other reasons, but it is common as a means of reducing the foreign reserves that is shrinking so that the reserve can later increase. About bitcoin, I agree, it is a means to help against money depreciation.

A competition with whom the government is at war. Crypto is stateless but can make any country feel threatened, some make peace and take an opportunity that will actually benefit them in the future. For example El Salvador is proof that when the government welcomes, what do they get now? not just praise but welfare without having to fear the dangers of inflation in the future. In addition, countries are still hesitant because they are afraid to monitor their debts to central banks, so maybe in their minds they want to immediately make Bitcoin a hero of value without any interference from any party. Just me and Bitcoin, nothing to do with anyone.

I agree with youeven government officials who don't understand speak as if they understand bitcoin by stifling and judging bitcoin negatively. They say that they just want to escape the reality of inflasi is fiat and state debt

I feel like with Bitcoins there are no negative or side effects, the whole thing just depends on the person who is using it. The security, volatility, possibilities of usage of cryptocurrencies is all dependent on us and therefore we cannot blame bitcoins perse.

When we talk about government printing money. The economic impact that it would have on the lives of other people, it's undeniably important to consider it for sure but at the same time getting security in regards to having cryptocurrencies like bitcoins is something not everyone has the access to.

Only some people of the middle class or the rich class can afford to invest in cryptocurrencies, therefore I do feel that we cannot just shrug off the importance of governmental bodies. I feel cryptocurrencies might give them quite a scare about loosing the investors and thus they invented CBDC's, when they should be focusing on what's important right now.

We have a new variant and it's a Virus, we are going to have many more variants for sure, what if things go worse ? Governments doesn't even have a backup plan now. That's why investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies should be taken as a luxury since we have something that can help us during this situation.

Well this really had been heralded as one of the promises of Bitcoin from the beginning so it is not a surprise. Being decentralized, it ensures that people everywhere can partake in a people's economy. That is the promise of P2P economy.

The access to finance determines the opportunities available to a large swathe of world population. Countries erect barriers so that useful exchange of services or just collaboration cannot happen without them taking a cut. Bitcoin made it possible for people to have such an economy which everyone is free to join. It is more of a knowledge economy than a goods economy but still does make a difference. A lot of people like to say that other Alt-coins can play the same role but when you look at it from the prism of centralization and censorship-resistance, it becomes evident that PoW and Bitcoin's network cannot be replaced.

This makes Bitcoin precious and those who understand it have a disdain and hatred for anything that dilutes this, be it liars like CSW or peddlers of Alt-coins.

To this end I don't know if bitcoin has played the part of limiting direct exchange of fiat for dollar, pounds or euro and this exchange process is the big reason that so many less technical developed countries have found theirselves in a hyper inflation which has affected almost every aspect of the economy cascading down the family life and causing hardship since GDP has dropped.

If there were ways that every aspect of financial transactions can be done by choice through direct payment with bitcoin to countries including processing traveling documents and visa, tickets then the burden on fiat exchange would reduce and that will help the local currency to appreciate. The process of  purchase of currency for travels, export are really killing many economies.

The sad part about the fiat world is not the fact that it doesn't work, it is that it could have worked. The people in power made sure that they got all the rights, all the money, all the power and everything they desired, and all of their friends, or all the people who bribed them.

Sure we look at Saudi Arabia or nations like that and say that there are human rights violations, and then we look at USA and their "muh freedum!!" and realize that wall street bought both parties decades ago and they do whatever they want and people are overworked in horrible conditions with absolutely no healthcare they could pay and an endless rat race and we assume it is free because you could say "f**k biden" without a problem.

Unfortunately fiat is used for enriching the rich people all around the world with the exceptions of maybe scandanavia, haven't checked in a while but they seemed fine and popular about it.

The thing is, the majority of the world population - like 99.99% of people currently use and will continue to use fiat currencies in their every day life without bothering to ever get involved in cryptocurrencies. I think cryptocurrency serves a rather small niche in reality, which is being useful for large cross border payments on a personal basis. As it has no real traceability or charge back functionality, it is not particularly safe to use with merchants who might screw you over, which means the main real life use is sending money to yourself or family/friends while trying to avoid extortionate banking and currency exchange fees. For small scale transactions the fees, high energy usage and non-instant nature of it compared to existing payment processing networks is a large drawback.

The governments are aware of how powerful bitcoin is. That's why some of them that have understood it is starting to think of banning it if most of their people will get to see its true potential. This is the negative reaction that some governments do but, there are those that are very optimistic about it and don't follow those skeptical governments. As an individual, we've understood how inflation is going because of the continuous money printing by the government and owning bitcoin is completely a good counter to it to avoid.

There have been americans who held precious metals commodities like gold and silver, who tried to mint their own currency in the form of coins. It wasn't a scam on their part. They tried to mint gold and silver coins which could be used as legitimate forms of exchange, rather than use fiat currencies which might be vulnerable to inflation. They were prosecuted and are in prison now. But it is a thing. If people grow desperate enough from concerns relating to inflation, it could create incentive for those approaches to be tried again.

Years ago, when there were concerns greece would default on debt and the EU would fail. The value of the euro was expected to fall drastically. Europeans exchanged their euros for hard goods like big screen TVs expecting retail electronics to hold their value better than the euro would in coming months.

Its great that we have bitcoin, but there could be other approaches which could also be worth pursuing and hopefully people will be able to take whatever steps they need to protect themselves and their wealth from any recession or crash that occurs. If indeed events pan out that way.

I dont label BTC as hard money personally, its force on the world is not direct and its gains are most obvious by the depreciation of FIAT standards such as the recent 25% new dollar printing.  BTC didnt force that to occur or stop it or even discourage it really.   There are already alternatives to the dollar or other politically controlled national currencies like Euro, just holding commodities or shares is one of the most common and I consider BTC a kind of security commodity and so its speculative not at the base of Exter's triangle in my take.

Maybe not now but what if the value of USD falls more and more? People will choose some other asset to store their value for that they have Bitcoin and government can't enforce people not to choose it because its not under control of any hand so the only choice for the government is to protect the fall of value of their respective currency either it's USD or EURO.

Well, Bitcoin should not compete with the fiats for citizens even though it's OK if does that without becoming immoral (or worse than fiat). It's voluntary and alternative way people around the world can store and transfer values with one another. I'm more interested in seeing Bitcoin benefits the Nations currencies in a good way. The benefit should be mutual, assuming fiat has something good worth copying or benefitting from.

Bitcoin become an opportunity of most people to become their own financial institution. People no longer have to be imprisoned with the idea of having only fiat money and other things that are controlled and manipulated by the government. Bitcoin paved way for people to become more aware of societal issues and become one of the ways to achieve financial independence.

Government has its own role which is to provide the betterment of the economy of their country. However, most often than not, they do the other way around. The excessive printing of money and unregulated spendings on unnecessary projects are the few ways how the government is slowly destroying the state and the citizens as well. With the economy declining and inflation rate increasing, bitcoin become the safe haven for most people because it offers so many features that the government related organizations can't really provide.

However, we must also take into consideration that while bitcoin can provide so many benefits to most of us, we can't also deny the fact that it still remains both a privilege and a luxury to own any amount of it. There are still areas where crypto isn't much really used, known and still illegal. Hence, they still rely on the traditional ways provided by the government. In which we can say that the government funded and related things are still useful. It just boils down on what we prefer and how we will use it to our own benefit together with our responsibilities on it. Regardless how much useful bitcoin is, we still have obligations to uphold as an account holder and as a citizen as well.

The government still does not aware of much about the power of bitcoin because they see the volatility of bitcoin price can give losing to those who held bitcoin and most of them are new investors who want to involve in bitcoin investment. But people who rely on bitcoin will still use bitcoin to save their money from the inflation that can happen anytime in their country. If more people see the benefits of bitcoin that can be a safe haven, they will move from the bank into bitcoin.

But I do not think that the government will not do something as they want to convince people that everything is okay and still under control. But unfortunately, as OP said, people have their own choice of how to save their money, whether still use the banks or start moving onto bitcoin.

This is why countries hated the gold standard, the gold in their vaults limited the amount of currency they could put in circulation and they felt constricted by it, this is why they did everything they could back then to try to blame the gold standard for the Great Depression so people were open to the idea of central banks printing more money, at first by allowing them to print more money with some limitation until eventually all currencies around the world became fiat and had no gold backing them.

So it is natural that governments are going to hate bitcoin as it has the same effect, because if they keep printing money at this rate then more and more people will wake up to the fact they are losing purchasing power and will try to find a way to protect themselves.

When Bitcoin was originally created, it didn't really steal the public's attention, even the government itself never realized it. Up until now they may have regretted letting Bitcoin roam around. But that's what we hope for, because then the government can't finally do anything about what has grown due to the presence of Bitcoin in everyone's sector of the economy.

As in the beginning, Bitcoin was born to offer a solution to inflationary concerns that would later trigger a slump. However we see it today. During the pandemic, all Bitcoin users were fine, but the government was busy printing paper money without realizing that after the pandemic repairs were carried out everywhere without satisfactory results. This is a great example when the whole world is confused about jobs being put on hold due to switching to online jobs. While Bitcoin is already 1000 steps ahead.

The volatility of bitcoin beats the inflation of our nation. Even with this fall, we are still doing strong, sure a small loss but not as much of a loss as dollar because we also lost value in our fiat due to inflation and that means we had a smaller loss. This is the type of thing why we are not dealing with fiat and instead using crypto. I have to say even though sometimes life could get very hard, even though in these days I am in big problems and having bad days, very bad days, I am still incredibly thankful to crypto.

I have to say without crypto I wouldn't be able to survive this hard part of my life and I would be in shambles, thanks to crypto, I am surviving it okay, not doing great obviously since it is horrible days but thanks to crypto it is looking better at least in the future. Government can't provide me the same amount of trust to future and hope that bitcoin gives.

Before I discovered Bitcoin, The US dollar was the option for me, and I always use it as a way to save value for myself. The currency of my country has been losing its value overtime, so USD has been an option for those who really want to save value so that in years to come they wouldn’t be holding a currency that has lost so much.

Imagine holding the same currency in your bank account, and it keeps on losing value, in some more years to come and you will see that the whole money that you have packed up are just nothing at all. Coupled with inflation and everything, you will find it difficult to cope. But when I discovered Bitcoin, I knew that there was no other better option than to choose it. And it has been working for me for years now, no regrets.

And this made sense back then, after all those that promote gold argue that it is better than the dollar at storing your value, and they have a point about that, however gold has its fair share of issues that makes it way more difficult to use than the dollar under those circumstances, but bitcoin due to its characteristics is way better than gold at being a store of value with almost none of the flaws, so we are slowly seeing a shift on the preferences of the people on those countries with high inflation.

You are quite right but not all governments are like this. They are not all evil. Look at El Salvardor. That country fully adopted bitcoin. If Bitcoin was bad for all countries and governments, El Salvador wouldn't adopt it. That means Bitcoin is good for at least some countries/governments if not for all. You did too much generalization there. There are good governments and there are bad governments. Not all governments are the same.

The most challenging part of Bitcoin that always competes with fiat is decentralization and volatility. A government can't control that even they hardly try it. This isn't a side effect exactly, this is challenging and competitive. To me, there is no side effect of Bitcoin, this is a blessing for us who believe in financial freedom. If I keep my fiat in Bank, they ask questions during withdrawal why do I need to withdraw and where will use that. That means I don't have freedom with my funds. Here Bitcoin works for us. We can store even millions in my wallet and no one can ask me a question. Although it's quite hard to liquid Bitcoin day by day it's becoming easier.

This concentration of power is something that will happen in every system over time. First those with power are generous about it. Then all the plebs start getting excited about it and want a share of the pie. To keep them grounded, those in power start erecting barriers. I don't think even Bitcoin is immune to this. There is definitely a class of Bitcoin elite who would love more than anything else to tell everyone else what has value and what doesn't.

This elite effect has already been amplified in case of the Alt-coins, particularly Ethereum. The less said about NFTs the better. They are, by definition, a closed club that the crypto elite have made for themselves. I don't think anything is immune to this except empowering people more and more and ensuring decentralization of information. Truth helps. That is why Bitcoin is useful.

LOL..True words brother. The work culture in US promotes this mindset that if you "hustle" hard enough, you will make it. If you didn't make it, that means you did not make good use of your opportunities. While this maybe true for some cases, i'll never understand that why the richest country in the world has a homeless problem, a drug addiction problem, A "kids shooting kids with guns" problem and a healthcare problem. There definitely is something fucked up and almost all the evidence points to the usual suspects.

El Salvador is a special case because long ago they abandoned their own currency in favor of the dollar, this means they do not print their own currency, and they just picked as legal tender the one that was the most commonly used around the world, but then a forward-thinking politician like Bukele saw in bitcoin an opportunity, however most countries that print their own currency are going to have problems doing something like this as they will see their interests being affected, so the number of governments that will do something similar to this during the short term is kind of low.

Actually, Bitcoin is not about responsibility of governments and not about forcing governments to something. BTC is about non-inflationary transparent money-system that is free from governmental influence and borders. It became money that can be easily used all over the Earth in the world without banks. It’s a pity that when Bitcoin became valuable and interesting to all the people, big corporations bought up the huge amount of it. This quickly pumped BTC’s price but a lot of the poor investors had lost their moments to buy some BTC for themselves by low prices. Today 90% of BTC is already mined and only 10% are left (to mine for the next 120 years). Governments are trying to forbid BTC or provide laws to legalize it not because they are responsible but because they try to find ways to control BTC.

A lot of governments around the world has not been doing what they are supposed to do, and as a result, their currency has been losing its value overtime. Right now, even the USD does not interest me that much, because I know that holding it is still the same thing with holding my own native currency – the only difference that the both have is that my native currency would lose value faster than the USD, but at the end of the day the both of them are going to suffer from inflation and Bitcoin would have more value more than them.

This is why I try to invest in bitcoin as long as I have the money to, and I know for sure that I wouldn’t be needing that money anytime soon, so I just move it into bitcoin or any good crypto.

Yes fiat is fiat likewise cryptocurrency and inflation is a breaker to fiat. You can't compare fiat value in the future from the past because of inflation as it has undergone some policy that it purchasing power won't measure up but cryptocurrency has no such effect on it directly by inflation. It only losses value in volatility, volume.

Much better to go into bitcoin first before proceeding to another cryptocurrencies. Nothing bad if you want to move into another one as long as you've got your own stash for bitcoin already.

As long as you're in a free country and they're not prohibiting you doing it, you must do what you have to do. And some countries are too strict and prohibits people owning bitcoin, yet, there are still those that does it and says that nobody can stop them even if it's the government.

I agree with what you op. BTC did shake up world governments once its price went through the roof. This created a domino effect which led to many other cryptocurrencies rising in value.

So many people started investing in popular cryptocurrencies in droves primarily due to the ability to execute financial transactions online without any sort of government interference.

But paxmao was talking about Bitcoin as enforcer of responsibility, not just about the price. That is why the initial reaction of governments was very negative, and since they realized that they could not put an end to it, they ended up regulating it.

I would only add that I think we are yet to see the profound effect of Bitcoin on society as more and more people use it.

Your ideas all make sense, but one thing we must understand is that the government do not like individuals to have the sort of financial freedom Bitcoin offers, it's crazy, but that's just the fact, they prolly seem worried by the idea of Bitcoin changing the entire financial sphere and making individuals banks (cause you're your own bank in the network). Fiat currencies have been subjected to inflation and hyperinflation for quite a long time now, and that's why even institutional investors want to keep some of their reserve funds in the Bitcoin network; the advantages of Bitcoin absolutely outweighs it's cons, and the government knows that, but all they do is, use the media to spread negativity about Bitcoin.

Of course, there will continually be efforts by the government to discourage and dissuade people from using Bitcoin, they can try to ban it, but they know it'll only be futile, as for sanctions and regulations, they can only have an ephemeral effect on the network, after a while, everything goes back to normal, it's obvious Bitcoin is gearing and growing towards mass adoption, and that time the government will have no choice but to either leave it completely alone, or to join in the network.

To be honest, even though I live in a nation that is "little" dictatorial, not like north Korea nor china or something like that, not like many African nations with dictators, my life is decent compared to those but not as democratic as many west European nations neither. Even in a nation like that our government doesn't care about crypto and doesn't create laws against it and doesn't seem worried about it at all.

I am not saying that governments love it, but I do not think that they are worried about it neither. All they had to do would be put up some regulations, if you follow regulations then they will be in charge and if you do not follow regulations then you will be punished and that is it. I do not see any problems for governments in this regard, which is why I feel like there is nothing to worry about at all regarding this situation.

It would be a huge achievement for Bitcoin if governments are somehow nudged or perhaps forced to transform the status of fiat into a better state because of how Bitcoin is. That would be a subtle yet big way of saying Bitcoin is the standard.

Anyway, fiat currencies couldn't be "demoted to a secondary way of storing wealth" because they are not storage of wealth in the first place. They are designed in such a way that they are to be spent as soon as possible.

Turkey is a great example for having an irresponsible monetary policy.
The Turkish lira collapsed a lot and many people in Turkey sold their lira for Euro,US dollars and Gold.
Unfortunately,I don't know how many people in Turkey sold their devalued national currency for Bitcoins.
AFAIK,the Turkish government and the central bank are extremely anti-Bitcoin,so not many people have decided to buy BTC.
Anyway,I don't think that Bitcoin can force governments and central banks to become financially responsible.
Countries like Venezuela are still financially irresponsible,despite the fact that many people are using BTC.