What those 14% are going to understand is that the value of their holdings increase by 500% under Biden.

Obviously there are a lot of people who will simply hate Biden for the typical reasons of polarization these days, but if all you care about is your crypto going up in price, Biden is your man.

What "government" called [cryptocurrency?] a "ponzi scheme"? Can you give us the citation where this assertion came from?

And yes, the government taxes profits. This is nothing new.



Again, where did you get this? For the purposes of collecting taxes, the IRS usually just wants to know how much money you made so you pay a tax on it. This is in no way being "against" said investment.


Yes, I'm confused too. Again, please show us where you are getting this information about a new program to tax crypto earnings.



Well, state and federal governments have been taxing energy since we have energy bills. I guess you can debate whether they should do that or not--and in what form. But it's nothing new.


Huh? That makes no sense. How does simply moving the current US dollar to a digital format change anything? We already effectively have digital transfer in the form of credit card payments. This clearly hasn't affected Bitcoin's rise to $1T+ in valuation. A CBDC wouldn't affect Bitcoin one way or another.



Again, where are you getting this? The ETF was approved by the SEC under... president Biden. Of course you can say that the president doesn't directly affect these things very much and I'd agree with you, but such an assertion would contradict your central thesis that Trump would be better for Bitcoin investors.



True, but without market regulation, investors cannot feel safe in investing, which means they won't invest. It's a balance.

That would only happen if Bitcoin/blockchain was suitable for everyday (read: small) transactions for billions of people everyday, and... it's not. That's not the problem Bitcoin set out to solve, and the blockchain architecture makes that impossible.


And Bitcoin already works just fine. Why do you want to change it?

If you are saying it's too slow/expensive, then I think you are not understanding what you are buying. As you said (and I'll correct you here), other blockchain-based currencies are not as centralized, and you like your currency to be more decentralized. Fine. But decentralization costs money and time. You don't get that for free. Bitcoin costs what it costs to transact for very good reason. You can do it cheaper, but you will sacrifice decentralization.

Maybe I should ask more directly: why do you want this? What is your goal?

Why would you say that? Bitcoin absolutely accomplished what it set out to accomplish, it's just that not very many people have that problem.

While a few people in the world need to keep their transactions out of the reach of a government subpoena, most don't.

Meanwhile, pretty much everybody likes to make money .

Now, are you are saying that those investors... annoy you? That could be, and maybe you even have a point, but without those investors using their apps and brokers and banks and ETFs, the price of Bitcoin would be back to the price it was before they all came, e.g. about $1 per Bitcoin.

I'm pretty sure nobody on the core dev team of Bitcoin would do something like that.

And then there's the broader context: Bitcoin's original purpose is far better served by other products today, e.g. Monera et. al.

So what you are asking the Bitcoin dev team to do is ignore their users and just solve your problem, even though your problem can be handled with another product just fine. Why would they do that?

I never declared Bitcoin a failure. Not even close. Bitcoin has accomplished what it set out to accomplish. And beyond that, it accomplished something else. That is in no way calling it a "failure".

If I say that it's architecturally impossible that Lionel Messi will ever become a top NBA basketball player, I am not calling him a "failure".

Here's the list on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_country_or_territory

As you can see, there are very few countries that make Bitcoin illegal.

Of course, as I've said here many times here, the term "Legal Tender" means something completely different, and it essentially means that it's illegal not to accept Bitcoin, in other words, a government shoving it down people's throat even if they don't want to transact in Bitcoin.

But most people assume "legal" means, "you can hold or trade Bitcoin and you will not be put in jail". That's true in almost every country in the world.


You can support Bitcoin and still believe it cannot "take over the financial system".

Okay, so you want Bitcoin to be fast (low transactions latency), and have low transaction fees. Great.

I completely agree that these are barriers to Bitcoin (and decentralized cryptos generally) to be accepted as a means mainstream means of daily transactions.

In fact, I suspect people here in Bitcointalk are probably getting sick of hearing me say this.

Now let's talk about how this will never happen using the blockchain architecture.

The blockchain architecture--implemented as it was designed to be used, e.g. as a massively decentralized architecture--is directly at odds with both cost and latency. Indeed, you could say that Satoshi intentionally designed Bitcoin to be slow and expensive in order to make the decentralized paradigm work.

Insofar as cryptocurrencies have decreased their cost and latency, they have sacrificed decentralization. This is a trade-off that is based on the universal constant of the speed of light.

It will not be solved by optimizing some code.

It will not be solved by making a few changes to the usage paradigm (unless you sacrifice decentralization).

And while I am an experience software architect and I could have told you this shortly after reading the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, even if you aren't a technical person, you'd have to conclude that after 14 years of trying with no solution, the problem is never, ever, EVER going to be solved.

And no, increasing the block size isn't going to help. A mainstream currency would need to the tens of thousand of times faster, it would need to be hundreds of times cheaper, and it would need to handle tens of billions of transactions per day which is absolutely unthinkable with a public ledger.

Repeat after me:

Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.

Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.

Bitcoin was not designed to be a mainstream currency.

It just. plain. wasn't.

This was never Satoshi's goal. If it was his goal, he would have designed Bitcoin differently (e.g. not blockchain, not decentralized [e.g. he would have created something like Haypenny]).

Be content that Bitcoin does what it was designed to do (well, sorta does): it allows transactions that evade government subpoenas. Thousands of people all over the world need this.

And Bitcoin also does something it was never intended to do, but has become very popular: it works fine as a speculation instrument. Millions of people like this.

Having Bitcoin do any more than that will require that Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin anymore.

In China it's legal for individuals to hold and trade Bitcoin--they only ban their financial institutions from using Bitcoin on their balance sheets (presumably because they think it's too risky to invest in).

There are a few countries where Bitcoin is banned, but they are very few, and financially speaking very small.

I don't know of governments who have a "bad view of Bitcoin", but as a very significant financial instrument, there are going to be issues with fraud, so it's proper that they try to protect consumers from that. But they have this same "bad view" of stocks, bonds, and sovereign currency too. It's just the government being the government.

What country do you live in where Bitcoin is illegal?

This is just plain untrue. Bitcoin is legal in almost every country, there's no evidence there are countries "against the adoption of Bitcoin", and almost no country in the world is trying to ban Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.

And there's no chance that Bitcoin could, technically, "take over the financial system".

Just out of curiosity, in what way can you imagine Bitcoin being improved?

What is wrong with the way Bitcoin is now that you'd want to be different?

I was just pointing out that the public ledger is a constant security risk. People who are serious about privacy use Monera or some equivalent.

There's a security risk with storing your own keys as well, and I suspect most people see that as a bigger risk than using a company they trust. As I keep saying here, most people would be terrified to physically hold their life savings in their hands, where they can lose it or it can be stolen. (I'm not talking about some smaller amount of money you could lose and it not ruin your life, I'm talking about one's major holdings for the future).

Ask any serious security expert and they will tell you that security is not just some code, there's a lot to it, and many factors besides technology go in to making a more security system (and just a warning, if you use terms like "perfectly secure" around a security expert you might get something thrown at you ).

And I always have to laugh when I hear people say, "it uses blockchain so it can't be hacked".

By the way, the genesis of this idea--that people want a service to keep their Bitcoin safe rather than doing it themselves--is the same phenomenon I wrote about in the Anon Paradox: that most people do not want to take on the challenge of keeping their wealth protected. Most people don't own a safe, a gun, and are trained to use those things. Most people would actually be terrified knowing their their life savings could be lost or stolen while keeping it physically on their own person.

(And the paradox here is that for small amounts that people are comfortable with losing, they do want to handle that themselves in order to keep anonymity).

Yes, Bitcoin was meant to (but really doesn't) do that too, and blockchain can accomplish this, but again, there are easier ways of accomplishing this besides blockchain. Today, consumers trust VPN companies like NordVPN to keep their actions completely private from everybody but governments with valid subpoenas. They make it their whole business to do this, and the minute they fail at this, they lose all of their business and consumers switch to another provider.

And centralized model could do what the VPN providers do and not use blockchain. Yes, they could fail at this, but so could any public blockchain project, as Bitcoin has for example. There are no absolutes in this regard--no matter what, you need to be diligent. No computer architecture can guarantee you safety--it takes a lot more than just technology.

Blockchain's sole unique advantage is the architecture's ability to create a "government-proof" means of transferring value. If you don't need that, then blockchain is an enormous waste of time and resources.

There are many ways to implement electronic cash, and blockchain was merely one possible way of doing it. What you are saying here is like saying an A380 airplane was design for "flight". While technically true, it misses the entire point of that enormous undertaking.

Bitcoin's central purpose was the evasion of government oversight into transactions.

If you didn't care about that purpose, then blockchain would be an enormous waste of time and resources.

Like most designs, Bitcoin's design is a trade-off:

1. Bitcoin's central goal (see above) requires decentralization.

2. Decentralization requires an extremely complex and costly architecture to be viable, e.g. blockchain.

3. Blockchain precludes a currency from getting anywhere near being a mainstream currency that could be used for daily transactions.

Today, the problem Bitcoin has in the popular marketplace can be summed up by the following misalignment:

1. Millions of people now love Bitcoin because it's been a profitable investment for them.

2. Thousands of people love Bitcoin for it's original purpose of being a means of conducting numerically-delineated transactions out of the reach of government oversight.

In other words, probably 98% of Bitcoin "users" today are simply investors in a placeholder, and they gain no value whatsoever in Bitcoin's original goal thwarting government oversight into transactions. (And Bitcoin itself has been surpassed by other technologies e.g. Monera et. al. for answering Bitcoin's original goal).

As an investment in a brand name as an end in itself, the blockchain architecture works just fine since you need relatively few direct transactions to make a marketplace work. In other words, brokers gather transactions and deal in bulk. Blockchain was never meant to do any of this, but it works just fine for this purpose because transactions can be very few and very large.

If the people maintaining the core want to follow the actual marketplace, they would solve the problems of the 98% and not the 2%. In other words, make Bitcoin work better with brokers like Binance and CoinBase, and/or make it work better with the ETF, or something like that.

5. Making a mockery of the original intent of Bitcoin and the blockchain architecture generally.

By definition the ETF is absolutely centralized, meaning that investors are investing in absolutely nothing but the name, "Bitcoin" when they buy shares of the ETF.

The ETF underscores that very, very few people have a need to ensure their government cannot subpoena their transactions, and most people do not want to hold a large portion of their wealth on their own person, but would rather pay somebody to guard it for them e.g. a bank of financial institution.

In a sense the ETF represents the "grown up" view of Bitcoin--but it makes the original concept of Bitcoin look like a toy.

And employers have 250x more money to pay them (etc.). Profits are at all-time highs right now, even adjusted for inflation. Our standard of living is the highest it's ever been.

Absolute inflation numbers are meaningless. What helps businesses is relative price stability, and for the past 40 years, with a break for a 100 year black swan even event with the pandemic, prices in the US have been very stable.

And the USA has succeeded through the pandemic better than almost any other country.


No, prices have not "doubled". Not even close.

Unless you watch the partisan media, which would try to focus on one particular product in the market that has gone up in price due to some anomaly. If you look at a complicated product like a new car, and compare the same car for sale now and five years ago, prices have gone up perhaps 10% (even though the quality is marginally improved as well, reducing the long-term cost of the asset).

We sadly seem to have an entire political class who think its in our best interest that the American economy is terrible so they will win the next election. People should resist partisan rhetoric and look at the numbers--and their own outlook--themselves.

Just your daily reminders:

1. "Legal Tender" is not the same as "legal". Bitcoin is already legal to hold and trade in most countries in the world. Most people here are using the term "legal tender" even though they don't actually know what that means.

2. Making Bitcoin Legal Tender will not increase the adoption of Bitcoin, and could even turn the public against it. Involving governments in the promotion of Bitcoin is both dangerous and completely unfair to all of the other digital currencies like Ether, Dogecoin, and Haypenny currencies.

3. Legal Tender is the equivalent of using the government to force Bitcoin down people's throats which is against everything Bitcoin has ever stood for.

4. El Salvador's experiment with their Bitcoin law has been a disaster wherein they essentially paid their citizens to accept Bitcoin, and yet very few have adopted it for transactions.

5. Bitcoin's lack of adoption is based on technical reasons, not political ones, chiefly because it can take 30 minutes and cost 30 dollars for one transaction, making it absolutely ridiculous for 99.9% of the world's daily transactions.

There was a pandemic. The United States recovered from the pandemic better than almost every other western country.

Inflation is now essentially back to normal pre-pandemic levels.

To be clear, it's still unacceptable for the Democratic party. And the for the non-MAGA portion of the Republican party.