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.

Sure thing.

1. I had mentioned that the US dollar has been pretty darn stable for the last 40 years.

2. You countered this by giving the example of the inflation that happened around 1971.

3. I pointed out that 1971 was 53 years ago, based on the mathematical equation: 2024 - 1971 = 53

4. You seem to continue to object to this, while throwing out some personal insults, implying that math is a partisan thing, which is probably best that we ignore.




 

Interesting. What is 2024-1971 using Trump Math^TM?

Just curious…

El Salvador used the power of the government to force Bitcoin down the throats of its citizens and… it didn’t even work.

No government legislation is going to make Bitcoin transactions not take 30 minutes and cost 30 dollars. That’s why vendors don’t accept it, even though they are free to do so because Bitcoin is perfectly legal already in almost every country.

 Begging the government to force your product on citizens is… dangerous and can easily backfire.

1971 was 53 years ago.

That you have to go back that far sorta makes my point for me…

"Legal Tender" is not the same as "legal".

Also, "Legal Tender" is not the same as "legal".

In fact, "Legal Tender" is not the same as "legal".

Please stop asking for "legal tender" when you clearly don't know what that means.

Bitcoin is legal in almost every country in the world. You can buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin almost anywhere legally, even in China, where only the big banks are forbidden from using Bitcoin as one of their assets, but otherwise individuals are free to use Bitcoin.

Asking a government to solve a problem when there isn't one is dangerous...

Good idea. People who live here know that Trump would immediately surrender the USA to Russia if he's elected.

No, there's not. Investment income is investment income. The technical means by which you invest is not relevant.


Uh... sure. You don't want to pay taxes. Neither do I. But it's something we all have to do.

And guess what, Trump supporters: Trump isn't going to repeal all taxes either. Nobody is, because the US would go instantly bankrupt if they even tried.

That is not true. You are taking that quote out of context. He said he didn't think "wealthy tax cheats and [wealthy] crypto traders" should be given tax breaks at the expense of the poor. That's not even close to being "anti-crypto".


Yes, he wants to, again, tax crypto earnings in the same all other investments are taxes. Maybe you call not getting a special privilege from the government, "anti-crypto", but for me he's just making sure everybody pays the same rate of taxes.



Again, if he opposed crypto mining, why especially would the propose a tax on crypto mining? That's nonsensical.

Different kinds of customers have paid different rates for energy since they started selling it. That's nothing new.


Why is being in favor of a US CBDC... anti-crypto? If anything, this would be a strongly pro crypto move since it will introduce millions of Americans to the idea of digital currency. (To say nothing of simply getting our country off of outdated paper and metal currency).


Yes, the government wants to collect the taxes based on what people earn. Again, that's nothing new. If you don't think we should all pay any taxes, well, that's a completely different subject--and you'd hardly start with cryptocurrency in particular since most taxes are paid in all kind of other ways.


His administration pointed out that a particular industrial sector leads to greenhouse emissions. Good. But that's not the same as being against said industrial sector.



Sure, from nearly zero before. That's very different than it surpassing one trillion in market cap.

And you know how Biden could have helped that happen? By providing a safer marketplace for mainstream investors. Bitcoin didn't break one trillion because a bunch of hackers thought it was cool, it did so because millions of Americans can buy it using a broker they know they can trust. (And oh yeah, the supposedly "anti-crypto" Biden oversaw the approval of the ETF... why exactly?).

If you want to tank the Bitcoin price, elect a government that... crazy and says crazy things about Bitcoin and other cryptos, e.g. that TrumpCoin is way better.

Markets function best amid stability and regulation that creates a safe environment for investors.

El Salvador's experiment has been a disaster and hardly anybody there has adopted Bitcoin as a daily form of payment there even though the government basically paid citizens to do so.

It doesn't require a government to shove Bitcoin down people's throats in order for it to be legal to hold or trade. Bitcoin is perfectly legal almost everywhere.

Before Biden won the election in November of 2020, Bitcoin was at about $15,000.

Bitcoin is over $68,000 today.

Biden, in short, has been been coincidental with a 450% appreciation of Bitcoin.

Unlike Biden, Trump needs hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for lawsuits, and has a business on the verge of collapse, meaning he could potentially need billions. Nobody should trust somebody like that to not try to manipulate crypto markets in his own favor to the detriment of other coins like Bitcoin. One word from Trump could send Bitcoin into the toilet and he knows that. And if that meant TrumpCoin would do better, then that's exactly what he would do.

Personally, I'm voting for stable government in 2024. That's the best thing for the digital currency markets.

I point this out because many people seem to think Bitcoin's lack of adoption for mainstream payments is some sort of "conspiracy" by governments, "big banks", the Illuminati, or whatever. It's not. The US government (and most other governments) are not meaningfully hindering the adoption of Bitcoin.

If Bitcoin was faster and cheaper than normal credit card transactions, and could scale to handle the world's everyday transactions, then it most likely would have long ago.

Blockchain was never meant to scale to mainstream levels, and it solves a problem that only a few people actually have. It works perfectly well as an investment, and it's reached incredible heights already. But it's silly want it to do impossible things.

There are so, so many things wrong with this graphic:

1. It cherry-picks very specific consumer goods, which are subject to market volatility--and the items it picks are really bad examples since they are simple products. A better example is something complicated like an new car. Plug that into the graph above--and then account for things like the longevity and quality of the good--and your graph gets much flatter.

2. It does not compare the average income of workers. Back when a Hershey bar only cost ten cents, the average worker only made two dollars a day. Today the average wage in the USA is over $250 per day.

But even if you still use this graph, you would note that in the last 40 years, the US dollar has been amazingly stable.

We discussed this a few weeks ago extensively in this thread.

The primary take-away from that thread for me was that most people don't actually know what legal tender really means.

Most people think it means the same as "legal", and assume that if Bitcoin is not "legal tender" then it must be illegal. That is not the case.

The actual definition of "legal tender" comes Article I Section 10 of the US Constitution, and there are two things of note about this:

1. Legal tender is very narrow in its scope, and realistically only applies to a very small number of transactions.

2. Insofar as it does apply, it has the effect of forcing people to accept Bitcoin (or whatever) even if they don't want to.

Asking for Bitcoin to be "legal tender" is asking the US government to force Bitcoin down people's throats. Not only is this unwise, it's unfair: why Bitcoin, and not, say, Ether? Or Dogecoin? Or all Haypenny currencies?

Bitcoin is legal in the United States, and in most countries across the globe. For the most part, nobody is stopping you from accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment.

The reason why Bitcoin is not universally accepted is because it takes up to 30 minutes and can cost 30 dollars for a single transaction. This is not a government conspiracy, it's a simple technical limitation.

Stop asking for Bitcoin to be "legal tender". It's not what you want, it's stupid, and while any smart government would never do this, there are a lot of dumb governments out there who will waste a lot of the people's money on a boondoggle like they did in El Salvador.

There is no evidence Biden is "anti-crypto", and Bitcoin has quadrupled under his tenure.

Biden doesn't have "free reign" and unlike Trump he does not seek to be a dictator.

Our choices, as Americans, is either Trump or Biden. I'm not wild about Biden either, but he'll be fine and the alternative won't be.

He's not, he's proposing this to Congress. Just like every other president we've ever had. Jeez.

So why exactly did the "Eton/Oxford elite" choose Trump in 2016? Why did they choose Biden in 2020? Why did they attack the US Capitol? Why were they supporting Ukraine for a while, and have now paused that support? Why did they overturn Row v. Wade?

I love the idea of imagining the world is controlled by a few mysterious men in a secret room somewhere, because that's really easy to understand. But in my experience the real world is a lot more complicated than that...