Bitcoin Forum

China bans Bitcoin, then unbans, then bans. Then Argentina, Russia, Bolivia and New York do the same. At first the Bitcoin market reacted wildly, now not so much. Bitcoin is the economic battlefield of this century. Sovereigns are finding that simple denial won't make the blockchain go away. They want to do what governments do, and that is to regulate. Bitcoin says otherwise.

Sure governments can slow down adoption by banning its public use, but they are finding that more progressive nations are using that as an opportunity to gain advantage in the technology. Then comes the escalation. Oppressive regimes begin a series of doublespeak where they welcome Bitcoin, but attempt to undermine its development through propaganda. They allow banks to set government policy thinking it is in the best interest of the nation. None of them realize that Bitcoin was developed for people, not institutions.

The war will continue to escalate. More bans and more regulations will break the news, but meanwhile governments will be accumulating bitcoins because they know how the endgame is played. They know their power is threatened by Bitcoin and will tear each other apart over how to take that power. They will also tear themselves apart with internal power struggles.

This is just silly. The war analogy may appeal to the legacy financial system and Tsun Tsu fans, but Bitcoin is beyond the reach of those anachronistic social phenomena. Math is for everyone. It's not a weapon to be manipulated by bullies. This is the opportunity to develop decentralized lending and commerce. It's also the time to develop tools that can be used by the lowliest and poorest amongst us. The endgame is that Bitcoin is power. Let's make sure that power is decentralized and accessible to all.

be patient ... all banks will fail.
in Europe, it already in the way (greek, espagna, portugal, bulgaria, cyprus ... next is the italia).

in USA, you have many cities (aka. states) that it haves crash even with 80 years tresor bond ...  ::)

only country that really banned bitcoin is Ecuador. Not counting countries that have internet banned, like North Korea and Cuba, of course. Others only forbit its use as a coin, or make more dofficult to exchange them to fiat.


Bitcoin still a baby, the real war is still miles away, what we have now is barely a warm-up

you cant ban open source software and math ideas...
these bans are like a baby crying when they dont get their way, minor hiccups on the way to global adoption

There will always be a Country trying to ban bitcoin, they will never succeed though and will continue to throw their dummy out of the pram when they can not get their own way. I would not say that a cold war has begun just because a few Countries have or have tried to ban bitcoin, the war is still a long way off yet because bitcoin has a long way to go yet.

during the alcohol prohibition.. moonshine industry had a bigger profile and was making more money than coca-cola

Banks will not fail. Change? Maybe. Fail? No. Banks provide a vital service, you can hate the way they provide that service, but you can't deny that the service is vital and beneficial. They won't be going away any time soon.

There was a picture similar to this that I'm trying to find, but I can't seem to find it.

Banks will always try to be there, but it will get progressively more difficult to exist alongside decentralization. And bitcoin "banks" will start springing up, created by every day people, that will possibly have a better trust rating as opposed to bigger banks.

Bitcoin is set to succeed, it's almost no contest. We will flourish, they will collapse under their weight.

In the coldwar there were no winners.

In this war, there will be a winner, just not sure yet who it will be.

I will tell you a clue: It beggins with a BTC

BTCillionairs?

My point is: while everyone else seems to be focusing on how to get Wall Street billionaires to pump their Bitcoin wallets, I'll be focusing on getting the poorest to start saving in Bitcoin. It's like how the peasants fought back against the Samurai. Bitcoin is the ninja economy.

 ::) In the not far future , there will be no wars between countries .
The only war is between fiat corrupt gov and bitcoin believers

While that may be true, the pervasiveness of carbonated, sugared, poison water is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Interesting post, cbeast.  I enjoyed reading it. 

You can't stop math.

Thanks. You're one of the few that does read my posts.

Why do you use the word "cold"?

Nevermind, I see because China banned it and then unbanned it, etc.

around 50% of a banks service/function is made redundant by BTC tech.

Exactly. Bitcoin could be a powerful social equalizer and give to the poor the same financial freedom that the rich always enjoyed. See http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/prisco20140527

It looks like the Bitcoin manifesto

For sure :D

"Bitcoin is the economic battlefield of this century"

I want some of what you're smoking on.

"They want to do what governments do, and that is to regulate. Bitcoin says otherwise."

Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know it was the governments duty to govern. What bitcoin says, about 99.99% of the worlds population, at this point, does not care about.

"They know their power is threatened by Bitcoin and will tear each other apart over how to take that power. They will also tear themselves apart with internal power struggles."

You think they could build PRISM, but not decimate what you consider to be the bitcoin network in a heartbeat, if they really wanted to?

"Let's make sure that power is decentralized and accessible to all."

And this is where you lose it. Posts like this are the reason people are moving away from bitcoin much faster than they are coming. Get some fresh air, kid.

Missed the boat, huh? It's not too late. Maybe you should stop smoking and pay attention.

PRISM is a joke. Ask Snowden. If they could have destroyed Bitcoin either they would have sometime in the last 5 years or they can't. Maybe you think they don't know about it yet? Maybe this is why people are moving into Bitcoin faster than they are leaving.

I think it is sort of a cold war. As bit coin saps more of their power the attacks on it will grow. People will panic and we will see bear markets followed by bubbles followed by bear markets. We like to think we will see a triumphant march to dominance but they won't give up their power willingly.

I don't really see how this countries can stop Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is virtual currency, not paper, so they can't control it directly.
They can try to control Internet but this is very different story.
I think they don't like Bitcoin because they can't control it, can't collect taxes, check how much their citizens earned from it etc.
So, in this war they can't win, for sure :)

banks is a slow heavy structure. It's hard to get really new concept of cryptocurrency.

I think the real purpose of banning is not "kill" Bitcoin just get some more time to rebuild their own structure. May be few years later there will be some banks in Bitcoin world.

They can't control bitcoin, just people trying to legitiamtely use it through exchnages etc. I don't think they can even controll the internet though. There's always ways around censorship.

There were a ton of winners in the cold war - everyone alive who had a hot war prevented.

Bravo to the OP, for a great post.  :)

QFT, and a great analogy for Bitcoin. Everyone alive is a winner, even if you still have 0 BTC when it hits 100,000 $ / bitcoin.

Everyone is a winner because bitcoin is the end of nation-state sovereignty, and therefore the end of nation-state violence.

This is about more than money - it's about life.

I am looking forward to the day when interplanetary trade becomes a factor. I'm kinda writing a science fiction story based on the idea that interplanetary traders will have very little patience for the old moribund financial systems of Earth and will insist on cryptocurrencies as payment. They'll kinda force the issue of over-regulation and Earth will face a choice between giving up the old systems to allow cryptocurrencies free rein or facing economic collapse.

I've thought a lot about that myself. Entangled wallets and quantum ASIC Dyson Sphere mining. Bitcoin can be a universal peace dividend.

Bitcoin won't work in that scenario. It takes a radio signal between 4 minutes (which might be alright) to 24 minutes (won't work) to travel from Earth to Mars, depending on each planet's position on its trip around the sun. We'd need some other currency with a longer block time, or we'd need to deal with an overwhelming proportion of double spends.

He was talking about science fiction.

As long as the bank are to big to fail there will be bitcoin waiting  and winning.  You can take that to the bank and yes pun intended

We defo live in a really intereting time period regarding the struggle of world finance.
I would love to see traditional banks struggle and close. This would be good for consumers in the sense that most banks are predators.

They push debt on everyone and discourage savings.
What happened in Argentina, with banks seizing fiat currency in peoples accounts...truly unbelievable.

The global decentralization of money is simply the cornerstone of true freedom.

Banning things that cannot be actually regulated makes them more popular.

Prohibition anyone?

Heroin in the middle east?

Murder, Plutonium, singing "My Way" at karaoke. There are things that *should* be illegal, though they are still popular.

ask and ye' shall receive
https://i.imgur.com/6MCSQiw.png

it's not just the wall streeters, it's the people with portfolios, retirement plans, IRAs, or whatever.. it would make some rich people richer, sure, but if the bitcoin ETF were opened up, a lot of regular folk would be investing it in as well.

no . its possible but i think hard to believe , bitcoin has beeen reach about 500 now . thats will effect with demand and another reason.

A longer block time would not solve this problem. Since a block can be found at any time regardless of the target block time, there would always be a possibility of a double spend. In order to spend coins when the blockchain is both on Earth and Mars, 3 TX would be the equivalent to 0/unconfirmed. It would also be impossible to mine on both planets as the planet with the lower hashpower would have a huge amount of orphaned blocks, regardless of target block time.

Bank/Government can't delete bitcoin because Bitcoin is open source & there lot people believe in BTC
Bitcoin can't destroy Bank/Government because Bank/Government have big power

This "cold war" won't end soon, i think

ban and reban,not unban.

 seems more and more powerful when bitcoin was baned and rebaned.

Banks may not fail with all there goverment bailouts but people will loose more trust in them. We have all grown up beliving we can trust banks, we have now found that not to be true. We need the future generations to grow up trusting the blockchain, when that happens bitcoin could become world standard.

Thats probably when a war would start, what's happening now is just stick fights,l.

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/245562/file-537780212-png/Blog_Images/katana-bitcoin.png?t=1406563384699

exactly my point of view, the rich will eventually embrace bitcoin once they see there's no way out, but the thing that will really get bitcon to thrive is when the poor save what little they have in bitcoin, and they'll be richer for it.

The only time the public has ever won anything is when the country is too badly manage to a point when just about anything stop working.

This include the internet which bitcoin is depended on.

I liked the OP and related points that you can't ban distributed networks or math.  The thing countries can, and have been banning or at least clamping down on, is the conversion of bitcoin from and to their local currencies, e.g. the USD.  I don't even think the banks have to all fail to solve that problem.  Even if people just start to use bitcoin to buy and sell a little bit, it can work in conjunction with local currencies.

Bottom line, unless it blows up due to some unforeseen flaw, bitcoin wins.  Though its victory would be helped if some problems like the ever growing blockchain, security, and risk of something like Ghash.io acting opportunistically were solved.

Good Luck!

I think that it will need to have some kind of MARSCoin running on Mars and Bitcoin running here on Earth, two separete blockchains.
If you are on Mars and want to move your funds to Earth you would simply buy some Bitcoin.

Or, this could open up a great opportunity for innovators and capitalists, as the invention of light-based communication would be highly valuable in a scenario like this.

Or, with a delay of a few days, Mars residents would communicate with companies on earth, and said companies would buy the BTC for the client.

There are a lot of things that would have to be done in order for this to work, but it could hypothetically work.

two separate blockchains. one per planet, thenexchange them like two currencies.

Right you are! At this point there is a lot of development going on with the technology, but not so much with adoption.  I think the key is to get satoshis into the hands of the poor. That way when Bitcoin does blow up, there will be a transfer of wealth that is long overdue.

When most folks think of a revolutionary insurrectionist, it's someone with a bandana and a rifle. Today's rebel carries a smartphone.

A very good point very well put.

Watch_Doges?  ;D

I agree with you, however. A rebel doesn't have to be a 40-some dressed in camo with an assault rifle.

It's easier to be a rebel than ever before, to be honest.

I don't think that is a good comparison ("cold" war)

Why?