But it would gain a lot of users who would actually use the coin like a currency, the way it was intended to be used. Right now it ant be used as a store of value because the purpose of saving is to be sure the value you save is there when you require it, which necessitates a predictable value. Bitcoin's value isn't predictable, so it can't be used for saving. If you lost all the people treating it as a gambling tool, the underlying predictability of the value would increase. That's a net benefit.

There's no reason the price has to support miner profit. The price is dependent on supply and demand in the market only, not on whether or not the miners can make a profit mining. If they can't, miners who operate inefficiently will be forced out of the mining market and the difficulty will adjust downward. But it will not interrupt supply of Bitcoins, which will continue to be produced at a constant rate. This is why the price of Bitcoin is not dependent on what miners are doing, because the same amount of btc will be created regardless of how many miners there are or if they're making a profit.

This is not as big of a benefit as people claim. All this does is shift all the power from the consumer to the merchant with no mediation in the middle that exists in the current system. Now merchants can rip off consumers by sending them faulty products and leave consumers with no recourse. The reversibility of payments in the current system allows for mediation for disputes, which will wholly disappear under a system where there is no reversibility. People who scam the current system get banned from the payment platforms. It's not perfect, but it's better than a system where there is no mediation required like Bitcoin would usher in.




This is a legitimate benefit, although I would expect KYC laws to apply to Bitcoin. There's no benefit in allowing pure anonymous transactions, we don't live in a world where that will turn out well for anyone.



Nope. Not only is the value in a long term down trend, but it is highly volatile on the way down as well. Volatility hasn't leveled off. The unstable price is the biggest detriment to Bitcoin being used a currency. Even appreciating value is bad for the economy because it incentivizes people not to spend and reduces economic activity. Bitcoin isn't a suitable currency, and it probably never will be, for commerce.


Quick, yes. Cheap, sometimes. There was a one year period where it wasn't even competitive with traditional wires, and because Bitcoin hasn't even solved the scaling issue, wider adoption will bring back the cost issue. Plus, the more halvings we have, the more fees miners will demand to process transactions to keep their revenue up, so unfortunately it seems cost of transactions is only going up over time.

Nobody should waste any time thinking about such a stupid conspiracy theory. All the sources posted are garbage websites that peddle nonsense to idiots who are too stupid to think critically. Society was moving to a cashless system far before crypto was ever conceived, let alone implemented, and nobody is even using Bitcoin on a large scale compared to actual cashless fiat systems. If the gubment wanted to acclimate people to cashless society because [insert evil conspiracy theory] they would come up with something far more useful than crypto and something that people actually use to conduct transactions.

You seem to be completely oblivious to what happened last time Bitcoin tried to reach consensus on an important issue. You know, that whole blockchain size that nearly ripped the community apart and resulted in a last second folding by one of the parties to prevent an irreparable schism from tanking Bitcoin? Bitcoin's "innovations" have been outside the consensus mechanism for the simple fact that consensus on important updates is nearly impossible. I don't have any confidence that Bitcoin is nimble enough to adapt to changing conditions. It's like trying to steer an oil tanker around an obstacle course. There's just no reasons to expect it will happen or even be possible.

Google only announced that the ban on March 18. You clearly didn't pay close attention to the announcement because they said the ban would go into effect in June 2018. Ads are paid for in advance and run on a contract, so it takes time to clear out the prepaid inventory of ads that were already slated to run, which is why there is generally lag time in between an announcement of a ban like this and the implementation of it.

Tax already applies to anyone dealing in bitcoin. Revenue is revenue regardless of what form it comes in. No company is exempt from paying income tax just because they accepted bitcoin payments, just like to company is exempt from paying income taxes just because they took cash payments. People ascribe a lot of government hostility to bitcoin that either doesn't exist or exists for reasons that aren't at all reflective of reality, like this post trying to say that nobody pays taxes related to bitcoin transactions.

Any shortsighted review of the price chart could make you think so. Bitcoin has been on a very large, very consistent downward price trend ever since it hit the all time high around $20,000 last year. Every time it bounces off a new recent low, people want to proclaim the bloodbath to be over only for it to soon continue dropping to fresh recent lows. It happened around $12,000, it happened around $10,000. It happened around $9,000, $8,000 and now $7,000. Zoom out a little bit and there's no reason to think it's done now. People have to face the realization that the market was a bubble, the price was out of control and it was not sustainable.

Perhaps it doesn't mean nothing but it certainly doesn't mean anything meaningful. In short, blockchain adoption doesn't mean Bitcoin price appreciation. Bitcoin uses a blockchain, but that doesn't mean that every blockchain that gets used is good news for Bitcoin. Blockchain adoption will probably continue to increase, but most of the blockchain applications going forward will have nothing to do with Bitcoin. That's why the two things are independent and blockchain adoption doesn't necessarily mean good things for Bitcoin.

You cannot escape the traditional banking system in any meaningful way when dealing with large amounts of Bitcoin, so money laundering isn't going to be very effective. When you use an exchange to turn fiat into btc, there is a record because the exchange operates within the traditional banking system and complies with the current KYC and AML laws. When you exchange Bitcoin back to fiat, the same thing applies. For any exchanges currently not abiding by the laws, they will be driven out of business either by people refusing to do business with companies that break the law or by regulators shutting them down and criminal charges following those who refuse to comply. The risk for noncompliance is not low, and it is only going to continue to increase.

This just isn't true. Plenty of governments have tried to make their currencies have value and aren't able to do so, so it's not because the government forces you to use a fiat currency that gives it value. Look at Venezuela right now, the government is forcing people to use the currency and the currency is worthless no matter how much the government says it is worth. A fiat currency has value then not because the government says it has value, but because the people believe it has value. The difference between the USD and the Bolivar is only that people believe the USD is valuable and they do not believe the Bolivar is valuable. In both instances, the governments have said this is the currency and it has value, but it only actually has value in one of these cases, which proves that it's not because the government forces people to use it that gives the currency value. The key element is confidence in the currency. People don't trust the Bolivar, but they trust the dollar, therefore they consider the dollar valuable.

But cash and digital cash are fungible and completely interchangeable already. You swap one for the other every time you interact with an ATM, either putting money in or taking it out. Cash and digital cash don't compete with each other, they function interchangeably. (Unless by digital cash, you mean Bitcoin/crypto, which isn't digital cash at all. Crypto is a competitor to digital cash.) But otherwise, I agree that eliminating physical cash entirely has drawbacks. If all currencies were denominated in an electronic format (only), I don't think it would have much impact on buying/selling crypto, because virtually nobody exchanges crypto for physical cash anyway. It's almost entirely done with electronic cash right now.

Taking for granted that the price has to go up from here seems to be risky. It's not a given. Too much can change technologically for you to just say, "well, in 5 years it has to be higher than it is now because adoption will be so much higher." First, not even that is a given. This could prove to be an unsustainable fad. Second, there's too much potential for technological disruption in the crypto space to take things for granted over a period of years. Crypto adoption may be higher, but that doesn't necessarily mean Bitcoin. Bitcoin could lose preeminence, another crypto could be more useful or more secure, or faster or cheaper. There's no shortage of ways to beat Bitcoin. Sinking a fortune into Bitcoin at these prices because you're sure the future is bright if you just wait long enough is risky play.

The act of saving is delaying gratification or consumption in the present for larger consumption in the future. I don't know how Bitcoin teaches this. You can save to buy Bitcoin, but once you buy it it teaches you something else: gambling. Watching your savings rise and fall rapidly in value doesn't do anything further to teach you about saving. People who want to learn the art of saving should probably stay away from Bitcoin.

This pattern leads to the volatility that we are used to seeing with Bitcoin. It's not a currency so much as a speculative instrument. People are drawn to it more by the opportunity the volatility presents than by anyone wanting to use it as a currency. For that reason, speculators don't want a stable value, and interest would be much lower if it maintained a stable price.

The problem is that nobody is interested in a currency with less utility than the USD, which is what Bitcoin ultimately is as a currency. In the beginning, there was a very small group of people who wanted Bitcoin to be a currency for idealistic reasons, kind of in the mold of Satoshi because they view fiat currency as too manipulable. That's a niche group of a niche group, and was never going to be enough to actually make any sort of impact. The only reason Bitcoin specifically (and crypto generally) spread beyond this idealistic group is that some people made easy money in the beginning. When you could spend $10 and pick up hundreds of bitcoins, the price only needed to fluctuate a fraction of a penny for you to flip it and make a profit. This snowballed over time so that the new people coming in were drawn in by the speculation and the gambling far quicker than people drawn to the idea of a useful currency. The more people who came though, the higher the price and the bigger the price swings, and over time speculators built a bubble that drew in more and more speculators. Then the lambo crowd was born, and when stories of lambos and millions to be made got out, the media started to get in on the hype, drawing more attention to Bitcoin. But the thing that didn't change with all the new attention is who was being drawn in, and it was always speculators drawn to the gamble or get-rich-quick dreamers desperate to find an easy score. That's where we are today, a bubble that couldn't sustain itself and now sits at less than half of what it topped out at. But all the people left are still speculators, and all the people who will come in the future will be speculators. Bitcoin will probably never be a currency because the only thing it's known for by the vast majority of people is as a speculative asset. This, I think, is irreversible at this point.

Volatility means change in value over time, so you could say that a constantly falling value constitutes volatility, although in most senses people refer to volatility to mean rapid price changes over time and generally in both an up/down motion. So it's already a stretch to call the dollar volatile within the most accepted meaning of the term. More importantly though, you have to zoom out 100 years to make an argument that the dollar is not stable. Over years, the dollar is stable. Over decades, the dollar is fairly stable. In both cases, the stability is great enough allow long term planning and storage of value and for people to be reasonably certain what their stored value will be worth for long periods of time. By contrast, Bitcoin is not stable and it does not allow for long term safety of value. To even try to compare the two is to start with a ridiculous premise.

More to the point about the dollar, these charts always show devaluation over longer periods of time than anyone holds physical money, so it purports to show a loss of value that has never actually happened to anyone. If you had a physical dollar 100 years ago, it would be depreciated, yes. But, you didn't have a dollar 100 years ago because you weren't alive 100 years ago. And the people who were alive didn't hold value in cash currency for 100 years. In short, nobody has lost 95% of their stored value due to depreciation of the dollar.

More importantly, there is no such thing as perfect money. What we have in the USD is stable over long periods of time and due to the nature of value and an inability to reliably store it in this universe, that's the best you're ever going to get.

Remember, money itself isn't value. It's a representation of value, meaning it represents real things that are produced and consumed that people want/need in the present. This is the key point here: You cannot possibly store more value than what can ever be consumed in the present, so expecting a representation of value that was created 100 years ago to hold perfectly for goods that will no longer exist when it is to be spent is unreasonable. Money depreciates necessarily over time unless we can perfectly store all the value ever created, and we cannot, because we constantly destroy value by consuming goods or through depreciation of real assets over time, and likewise, money has to lose value over time for the same reason.

Most money in the world is already digital and it has nothing to do with bitcoin or crypto. Digital fiat is how the majority of things are paid for and how the vast majority of money exists in advanced economies. Crypto is just a subset of the digitalization trend that has been underway for several decades already. Ever since checks started transferring money from one bank account to another without necessitating the movement of physical fiat, digital money can said to have been in existence. It's just now that the digital system is much faster and larger, with ACH, credit/debit and other forms playing into the system. When you consider that these are more stable mediums for transferring value, I sometimes wonder why there is so much hype around crypto. Crypto may edge it out in fees and perhaps speed, but the risk of massive price swings is a huge detriment to me.

It's far easier to hack an exchange or business that holds bitcoin than it is to hack a private key. When you say "is bitcoin immune from hacking" but then you talk about exchanges being targets, you're not talking about the same thing. Bitcoin is considered virtually impossible to hack with current technology (future technology is another question) because the private keys are secure enough that current resources couldn't be mustered to crack the cipher that makes it secure. Hacking an exchange is something else, and it probably far easier because there are multiple fail points and the bitcoins held inside an exchange are only as the weakest fail point. But that's not compromising bitcoin itself, just a central point where there happens to be a lot of bitcoins.

Point 1 is a fair approach, but the evidence on this topic is so straightforward and conclusive to me that there's no point in considering an opposite viewpoint on this at this point just because a lot of people happen to believe protectionist policies happen in a vacuum and will work the way ultra nationalists promise they will. In fact, we've already seen things follow the exact expected path, with Trump carving out all kinds of exceptions because other nations threatened proportional responses to the steel tariffs. On point 2, I wasn't intending to criticize, just trying to give a justification on why I haven't gotten involved with the other thread. There's nothing in there for me at this time. Point 3, since your thread is already dealing with those issues, I don't see the point in bleeding them in here and essentially duplicating the same discussion and moving this one of its original track.