The laws haven't changed in the last 14 years and they aren't going to change in the next 140 . Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive e.g. PoW. If it was easy/fast/cheap to create a node and certify transactions, the paradigm would fail.


I think the world will almost entirely stop using physical paper and metal currencies in the next 20 years. I think they be replaced by digital currencies. I think those currencies will not be powered by a blockchain-based architecture.


The FED will be just fine. They don't care how the money is transmitted, they just trade in value. Maybe you are thinking about the US Mint and the Bureau of Engraving? Those departments probably will shrink to almost nothing.

And as we discussed in another thread, I think the USD will stay around forever in the same way that the English language and the Metric System will stay around forever, e.g. as a measurement mechanism for value. People will stop holding physical paper and metal coins, and people will not store their savings in actual USD as much, and people will use various digital currencies to trade, but the USD as a concept will stay around forever, more or less. Even if we're trading seashells and amber, the value of those things will be translated to USD so people know how much value it is.

Quite the contrary, my 100 year prediction is that all other sovereign currencies fall by the wayside and only USD stays around, and only then as a measurement device so you'd pay for everything the world denominated in USD, and all digital currencies will have a USD exchange rate which most people won't even see because it's hidden from them by the software.


I don't think so either, and I've needed to qualify my original OP to say that by "survive" I mean "still be the biggest thing in digital currency". I think it will "survive" in the same way IBM mainframes have "survived". There's no reason people won't be trading Bitcoin forever. It's just that the ubiquitous means of digital transfer e.g. a digital currency that everybody uses on a daily basis will be some other non-blockchain-based thing.

Huh? Bitcoin transactions are reversible in the same way PayPal transactions are, or any other transaction system: you create a new transaction to counteract the value of the one you want to reverse. As for charge-backs, refunds, etc., the technical mechanism of the value transfer is an implementation detail. All of those things happen on top of whatever transfer mechanism you are using.

(And ten minutes for a transaction is an absolutely unthinkable amount of time for 99.99% of the world's transactions on any given day. Bitcoin transactions are only viable for extremely specialized purposes e.g. large-scale transfers. This is why it will never be "digital cash" as so many here keep saying Bitcoin was originally designed to be).

As for calling Bitcoin a "monetary system", well, I would... need you to define exactly what you mean by that before commenting on it .


Yes, but that's like saying a car has nothing to do with transportation. Clearly blockchain was meant to provide a means of transactions for entities who could not use the means they had at the time.

And I have asked here and elsewhere, in numerous times (with dedicated threads) for certified non-cryptocurrency non-NFT design wins for the blockchain architecture and thus far the answer has been zero. There's lots of hype around the technology, but nobody has actually delivered a clear customer benefit with the architecture outside of the realm of public crypto. (And why is that? Because blockchain's only unique benefit is that it thwarts government subpoenas into transactions, and that is by definition a problem that known entities cannot possibly have since they are... known). Hiding something from yourself is a pointless waste of time, which is why nobody uses blockchain inside of companies or governments.



I've been saying this as well. And given that most people own hold Bitcoin and other cryptos through a broker or an app, almost nobody actually cares about decentralization either.

Bitcoin is, in actual reality today, a meme investment instrument. There's nothing wrong with that, though.




The US dealt with this problem in the early 1970s with physical cash, and their solution was to put a dollar limit on transactions of $10,000. Anything under 10k cash and basically the government doesn't care about it. This handles most people's needs for cash, and aligns with the principles of the Anon Paradox, which states the most people want anonymity for "small" money and known identity for "big" money.

My point was that there was "digital cash" before Bitcoin, and millions of people happily used it. In that context, Bitcoin had to offer something PayPal did not have, which is the ability to thwart government subpoenas into transactions. If Bitcoin was just a slow, expensive, clunky and risky version of PayPal, then nobody would want it and Satoshi would certainly have known that.


If you are talking about "most people" then you definitely aren't talking about rich people who have the money and the wherewithal to use offshore banks. Millions of Americans get paid physical cash every day for things like tips and service jobs. And the US government doesn't go after them because they don't have a specific reason (which they would need to take to court) and it's not worth their while to go to this trouble just to tax some hard worker person's... tips.




But this is very specific: they want anonymity and confidentiality from valid court-ordered government subpoenas. The US government is actually supporting privacy against criminals, marketers and fellow citizens through various privacy laws.



I certainly agree that a system that allows people to evade the terrible effects of oppressive regimes is a very useful thing: but this is a very narrow audience of a few thousand people across the world, and not a problem most people have. Most people don't need to or want to go against their government--and most in the democratic world are happy its there to protect them from criminals.



Maybe, but Venmo originally touted an option to share every transaction you made with your friends, and this feature was very unpopular.

And you can create transparency much easier/faster/cheaper/better without blockchain.



Abandon? No. Did we "abandon" IBM mainframes designed in the 1980s? Not really: they are still in use today. But as a mainstream consumer phenomenon, I am predicting that the blockchain architecture will fade away.  People will still use digital currencies more and more, but they won't be based on blockchain.

You misunderstood. My point was that Bitcoin's purpose--the reason it was invented--was to allow people to trade value who couldn't use an ordinary bank or credit card because they would get in trouble from their government if they did so. I wouldn't call this "anti-government" any more than using a radar detector in your car is "anti-government".

My point was that only a small number of people want to evade their taxes, for instance. People pay their taxes mostly because they fear what happens if they don't, but some also feel loyalty to their country or they are just personally against that sort of thing).

And to be clear, I'm not saying that Bitcoin was designed to evade taxes per se, and I am absolutely not saying people today buy Bitcoin to evade their taxes (since almost all buy through a broker, that shows that they don't want to). This is actually my whole point: today, 95% of Bitcoin's users don't use it in a way that it was intended to be used, and don't make use of its core unique feature that blockchain provides. They are instead using a product that would better serve them if it were based on a centralized architecture because it would give them the same value (speculative investment instrument) but better, faster and cheaper.

The people here crapping on Elizabeth Warren are just Republicans looking for an excuse to crap on their rival party, and they won't even look at any of the facts of this situation because of that. It wouldn't matter if Warren secretly hated Bitcoin (she doesn't), they only believe that she must hate everything they like since she belongs to the rival tribe.

I find it very stupid to make business decisions based on politics, which is what they are all doing.

But if all you care about is the value of your Bitcoin going up, then yeah, vote Democrat.

Bitcoin went up 500% after Biden was elected. Vote Democrat.

1. "Transparent" is a bad thing when it comes to preserving privacy.

2. "Decentralized" is just an implementation detail that is supposed to accomplish a benefit. But it's a waste of time if that benefit does not materialize.

3. "Trustworthy" does not describe thousands of blockchain projects, and in fact they are the opposite. Bitcoin is trustworthy because it is carefully governed, supported by many, and has been around for a while. But that all has nothing to do with the blockchain architecture per se.


Yes it will, and in fact it will most likely get slower and more expensive over time. Blockchain was designed to be intentionally slow and expensive. This is a feature and not a bug. As such, it will not be "fixed".


Bitcoin has been around for 14 years now. It's not going to be fixed.



Almost any digital currency architecture will "eliminate the middle man". Services like PayPal have been around for 15 years before Bitcoin--and PayPal is today far cheaper and faster than Bitcoin for a transaction.

Blockchain was a complicated solution to a very complicated problem--but it's a problem not many people actually have.



Using banks/third parties is faster, cheaper and easier. Why would you go to all of this trouble to make a digital currency that is slow, expensive, and complicated, as Bitcoin is? It was because Bitcoin was designed to solve a problem the existing services could not solve, which is resistance to government subpoenas.

In other words, this problem did not exist, Bitcoin would have never been invented.

Several posts here have made the point about whether China would want to do this, but that wasn't my question. My question was whether they could, and the answer to that question is yes.


China or some other country or entity with similar resources could absolutely take over Bitcoin if they wanted to. Decentralization makes a network resistant to a take-over, but no network is takeover-proof.

Then you are misunderstanding the basis of Bitcoin, and thus the blockchain architecture.

If you didn't care about the government, then why not just use a plain old bank? Without the ability to evade government subpoenas, what actual added value does Bitcoin have? What can it do that other means of transfer cannot do? Trillions of dollars in payments go across borders every single day. This is not something that is unique to Bitcoin.



Well, it looks like Bitcoin is no longer decentralized because almost all of its holders use it through a broker or an app, and with chain analysis it's not very "censorship-resistant" either, and they are being cracked down on.

To be clear, Bitcoin is absolutely, positively going to "survive". Nobody is questioning that. The only thing to question is whether it's going to stay in the hearts and minds of millions of consumers such that it's market cap remains over one trillion US dollars.

And the other question is whether other digital currencies, which are not based on blockchain and not decentralized, will become more popular among millions of people than Bitcoin is today.

Personally I think the products that are built for a mainstream audience tend to win out in the marketplace in the long run .

Bitcoin, i.e. the blockchain architecture, i.e. decentralization was invented to solve one problem, which was to provide a means of value transfer for parties who could not safely use an ordinary bank.

Only a tiny, tiny fraction of people have this problem. The rest, who do not wish to oppose their own government (either out of honesty, loyalty, or out of fear of prosecution) don't have any need for a system that makes it impossible for a government to subpoena their transactions.

Hence almost all users of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies today use it in a way that is not decentralized, e.g. through an app or a broker.

Bitcoin today is, in actual practical reality, just a meme investment.

The digital currencies of the future will use centralized architectures that scale correctly to handle consumer demand. We will one day look back at the whole "p2p" and "decentralization" thing as yet another technology fad like so many before it.

This is called believing everything the right-wing media feeds you on a daily basis...

"They" don't hate Bitcoin. They hate countries who use Bitcoin to skirt international sanctions.

You are mixing up the three uses of a currency:

1. As an investment instrument.

2. As a means of performing a transaction.

3. As a means of measurement.

Those things are independent of each other. US dollars are used as all three right now, but I suspect #'s 1 & 3 will decline over time. I don't see the world getting rid of usage #3 though. The most important thing about Bitcoin today is it's value in US dollars. That's way everybody thinks of it. If I asked somebody how much something costs, and they replied "42.5 quatloos", virtually everybody would immediately translate that to US dollars in order to understand how much value that was. They can figure out how much of their savings this item would require, or how much work they would need to perform in order to earn it. The world needs this regardless of what happens to the US dollar itself in the other categories.



The US doesn't have a CBDC, and I suspect that project will never get off the ground. Non-government digital currencies will probably make CBDCs a moot point, I suspect.

As for the difference between a digital currency and PayPal/credit cards/banks:

1. A digital currency can provide anonymous transfer, e.g. like physical cash (there are technical problems with things like Bitcoin for this because of chain analysis, but other digital currencies solve this problem in other ways, starting with simply legally promising to not divulge your privacy for any reason barring a government subpoena, e.g. like VPN providers work).

2. A good digital currency (I'm really trying to do this without self-referencing here ) will have an extremely low transaction fee. Say, $0.005 for instance.

3. A good digital currency will be extremely fast, on the order of 10ms per transaction, which is ~500x faster than today's credit cards and PayPal et. al.

4. A good digital currency will be suitable for high-scale realms like games, wherein they could use "real" external currency instead of internal currency because the transactions would be fast enough to keep up.

So yeah, I think "good digital currencies" are the wave of the future and will replace most of today's physical cash transactions and many of today's credit card transactions as well.

Bitcoin is no longer "censorship resistant", by which we mean something that can be safely used by those breaking the laws of their government. It hasn't been for years. (No Bitcoin user values "permissionless" and they don't know what that means or care).

You can see what most consumers want by observing that almost all Bitcoin user use centralized wallets, which are no different than bank accounts.


I never said that BTC can be stopped by the government--no world government wants to do that because there would be no point.

When I say "blockchain" here, I mean the blockchain architecture and I mean it's use in new projects going forward. There's no reason to use blockchain to create the next Bitcoin.

Yes, Russia is a major trading partner with Iran, along with a bunch of other countries who stand along side them in wanting to eliminate the United States.

Remember these economic sanctions are something we do in lieu of physical war. If we didn't have this tool, a lot more people would die.



I've been asking this question here for several months now, and it's a very important topic.

The fact is that Bitcoin has failed at censorship resistance, and things like chain analysis and plain old financial regulations easily kill that.

The only reason Bitcoin is still around is because only about 1% of Bitcoin's users care about "censorship resistance" and the rest care about their investment increasing in value and nothing else.

Bitcoin works just fine as a meme investment, and that, defacto, is all it is anymore.

And this is true for all blockchain-based currencies and NFTs. Blockchain is a waste of time and resources, since you can accomplish this goal with a centralized architecture far better.

Yes, and the reason you need p2p cash--or p2p anything, for that matter--is to evade government subpoenas. If you don't need that, centralized architectures are far more efficient, secure and convenient.

Bitcoin's original purpose was to create a method of transacting that could not be traced by governments, and could not be stopped by them.



No, what I meant was that governments are getting good at cracking down on "absolutely anonymous" transactions that the government cannot trace. It's clear that kind of "privacy" (as opposed to privacy from criminals and marketers and other citizens) is going to be much harder to obtain, and will probably be reduced to very small networks and very obscure coins--which will necessarily be very risky since they will be such so small. This could effectively kill the entire ability of people to transact in a way that cannot be traced.

But yet the only reason to use blockchain in the first place is to create these kinds of transactions. So why use it?

I guess you can "imagine" absolutely anything, but the clear pattern since money laundering laws were first put on the books in the early 1970s is to go after criminals who cannot account for large amounts of money legally.

The US at least, millions of Americans are paid every day for their work in untraceable physical cash, and there are no laws against it all of these years later. The only time the authorities get involved is when it is a lot of money where it's clear the money wasn't obtained legally.

Identities per se are not on the blockchain, but chainanalysis allows people to "triangulate" where a transaction came from, or where it went. It's not exact, but I'm pretty sure it works well enough to make it so that criminals no longer use Bitcoin, or if they do, they use a mixer.

And while authorities won't go out of their way to track you down unless they have a reason to do so, criminals and marketers will use it to try to steal or sell something, or otherwise bother you . In this context, using Bitcoin these days isn't very safe...

Exchanges that were complying with the law have not been "attacked". Binance broke some specific laws, and was charged accordingly.

It's perfectly legal to hold and trade Bitcoin in the United States. It's perfectly legal to have an exchange for USD or other negotiable currencies as long as KYC and other rules are followed.

The world is not out to get you .



It's implied in the entire paper. It's the entire reason Bitcoin even exists. Otherwise, why not just use a credit card or a bank?

What the whitepaper did not anticipate is chain analysis which makes Bitcoin actually very very unprivate . That's why follow-on products like mixers and Monera came about.



Using blockchain centrally is a complete waste of time and the dumbest thing ever. It's basically adding some code to a project that doesn't need it, and makes the project more expensive, slower, less secure, and more cumbersome to use. It would be like using an HTTPS/REST network layer to add two numbers together instead of just writing "a += b;". I mean, it's theoretically possible, but the only reason you'd do it would be to impress your boss that your project has some catchy buzzwords in it (and a good development manager would tell you to stop that and just get the project done ).

It's still legal to hold and trade Bitcoin in China. All they have done is precluded their banks from holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

China still contains a sizable percentage of worldwide Bitcoin mining, so it is by no means "banned" there.

And even if China hated Bitcoin, that doesn't mean they wouldn't attempt to take it over.