Yes, but "currency" is a loaded term. Bitcoin is not a "currency" in the way most people use the term, it's a mechanism for value transfer without government oversight (albeit flawed at this task because chain analysis).

Making people rich by investing in it is something that the blockchain architecture can support since investment instruments can be pooled by brokers. Being a mainstream currency is something it cannot support.

Bitcoin will never be a primary way people pay for things. Yes, it may well be a speculation instrument for a long time or even forever, but calling it a "currency" is a bit... misleading in my opinion.

Read the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin was absolutely not designed to be a mainstream currency in the sense of competing with sovereign currencies.

It was design to be a means of transferring numerically-delineated value while avoiding government oversight.

You don't have to go by "some say", you can just read the whitepaper.

Satoshi never meant for Bitcoin to be a mainstream means of transacting because most people don't need to evade their government's oversight in everyday transactions, and/or they wouldn't want to take the risk of being prosecuted. For most people, for 99.9% of transactions, using a means of transacting that could potentially be discovered through a legal action (e.g. a valid subpoena) is a perfectly fine.

And, as I wrote in the Anon Paradox, there are two kinds of "privacy" people talk about: "privacy" from the government, and "privacy" from everybody else.

If by "freedom" you mean being free from criminals trying to steal your identity, or marketers trying to make a buck from it, or careless people who will lose your personal information if you give it to them, or nosy neighbors who want to pry into your personal affairs, then that's one thing. Most people want and need this kind of "privacy".

But if you mean "freedom" from your government's laws, then that's an entirely different thing, and most people don't need this, or don't want to take a chance with going against their government.

The only way to truly protect your legal freedoms is to vote. Most people don't want to hear this because it's much harder than using some technical hack, but it's ultimately foolish to believe that you can successfully fight your government in the long term.

Fight for freedom at the ballot box, because code isn't going to help you in the long run.

More on this same topic...

Donald Trump Slurring Words at Rally Raises Questions

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-slurring-words-rally-raises-questions-1862705

It's not the banks who impose these rules, it's your government. Banks just want to make money, and they would make a lot more if they were able to take in money without any controls.

Nikki Haley wouldn't win because most Republican voters these days aren't Republican voters, they are Trump voters. If Trump wasn't on the ballot, Trump would stay home.

Put it this way, if these rulers wanted to control everybody, there would be a lot more straight-forward ways to do it than to digitized their currency. Dictatorships developed all over the world just fine long before there was digital currency.

I'm not usually one to start political threads like this, but I feel like this part of the board needs a little.... balance?

Here's Fox News clips describing Trump's behavior and demeanor, pointing out how old, decrepit, bumbling, idiotic, senile, moronic, and utterly lost he is when presented with anything complicated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgjS_7eNoOg

This man is absolutely not fit to be president on the purely cognitive level. (And don't forget "person woman man camera TV").

Contrast this with Biden the other night manhandling MTG with an ad-libbed conversation on the floor of Congress in front of 100 million people. Biden is a lousy public speaker and always has been (he has a stutter for chrissakes), but he clearly has fully functional--and very sharp--mind when it comes to understanding the complex problems that face our country.


(Also, for balance, here's a bunch of BOLD OVERSIZED TYPED and a giant wall of text)


[omitted]

(Okay, I'm done  )

That's all true, but it's important to not lose sight of the fact of Bitcoin's original purpose, which was to evade government oversight into transactions. That it has effectively failed in its original mission doesn't change the fact that it was designed solely to do that.

Today, Bitcoin's only viable purpose remaining use is being a speculation instrument and a store of large-scale value (e.g. for holdings >$10k for instance). Monera et. al. have a niche for those trying to evade their government, but this isn't a problem most people have.

A central bank digital currency replaces physical cash and coins with an electronic payment. This is very different than a credit card transaction because bank accounts are not required, and there is no transaction fee (which enables very small transactions e.g. only a few cents), and the transaction would be identity-free just like cash is.

Well, sadly, you "can" create a centralized blockchain, and there are actually a lot of centralized cryptocurrencies out there, some of which are reasonably popular. It's a stupid idea, akin to buying a business jet and using it as a spare bedroom in your backyard, but people "can" do anything.

And I sorta get how they got there. Decentralization comes with an enormous cost in terms of computing and latency. There's no way around it--you are up against the speed of light as a limitation. A truly safe blockchain implementation will never scale beyond a few hundred transactions per second and still have a really slow latency even compared to a credit card transaction--to say nothing of being able to handle large numbers of overall transactions on a permanent basis.

So faced with:

1. The push to make everything "like Bitcoin" because Bitcoin has been so successful as an investment; and,

2. The insurmountable technical limitations of true decentralization;

People paint themselves into an architectural corner by speeding up their implementation the only way possible, which is to centralize it. But even that doesn't get you anywhere near where you need to be for mainstream transaction loads.

But of course if you were just going to create a centralized currency from the get go, you wouldn't do it that way (you would do it this way ).


Yes, definitely. But from what I can tell, many countries are simply in the middle of the learning curve--and many seem to be going the right direction. The limitations of the blockchain architecture are self-evident the minute to you beta test the product--if not well before that if the dev team is diligent and does the proper benchmarks. Governments do a lot of stupid things, but in the long run at least some of them get things right. There have been some good stories of self-service and automation of government functions in various countries. Sometimes it only happens on the third try, but it happens.

You should really put this in your sig somehow, so people always know exactly where you, um, stand...

Why is is a "joke"? What is wrong with a country replacing its paper and metal money with digital money?

If you consider all sovereign currencies a "joke" (and if so I would assume you don't use such currencies in your everyday life), then I guess it would make sense that your view of a digitized version of that currency would also be a joke, regardless of it's technical implementation.

But every day, billions of people make tens of billions of transactions with national sovereign currencies using physical cash and coins, and there's no blockchain-based cryptocurrency that could come even within several orders of magnitude of handling that demand, let alone at a reasonable cost. Governments need a technical solution to replace physical currency, and blockchain ain't it.

Here's another reminder that the blockchain architecture is not the only game in town when it comes to creating a digital currency:

Philippines to launch non-blockchain CBDC in two years

From the article:

“Other central banks have tried blockchain, but it didn’t go well.”

My take on this:

"Centralized blockchain" is a technical oxymoron and is a pointless waste of time, money and resources. Central banks--and central anything--should not use blockchain because they don't need this added complexity that will raise the cost to consumers while not adding any value. The blockchain architecture's sole incremental benefit--thwarting government oversight into transactions--is a feature that is only interesting to certain users in certain situations (e.g. public cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin).

Just because Bitcoin has become an incredibly popular investment doesn't mean the technology behind it is the solution to everything.

This is basically the service brokers like Binance and Coinbase offer, but they offer it for a lot less money than you are proposing here.

Any product succeeds because it offers something the market wants. Most investors in Bitcoin today probably don't care about "decentralization" and many probably don't even know what that is (and unless they physically hold their private key, they aren't technically exposed to the idea). That goes double for "immutability".

As for security, that is a big deal for consumers, but since most people aren't security experts, they need to rely on institutions they trust, e.g. their broker or the media. There have been lots and lots of blockchain-based currencies that have been either technically poor or outright scams. This has surely hit that market hard, and for good reason. Any new product would need to take security (stability, transparency, etc.) head on.

As for utility, I personally think that no blockchain-based currency will ever have mainstream utility since the blockchain architecture makes it impossible to scale to mainstream loads that can handle the world's everyday transactions. There are some coins out there that are a "lot" faster than Bitcoin (and correspondingly less decentralized), but these still don't come within orders of magnitude of handling the tens of billions of transactions per day you would need to seriously take on credit cards and physical cash.

What if there was a popular platform that actually could scale to mainstream transaction loads and was 200x faster than today's credit card transactions? That sounds to me like an altcoin platform that could have something consumers really want and could create a new market for digital currency investing by introducing new consumers to something faster and simpler to use .

Seriously though, although unseating Bitcoin as the market cap leader is a tall order for any new product, and although there have been setbacks for challengers, this is the technology realm and new products do come along every once in a while that are successful. One should always keep an open mind.

As an investment they would be more flexible than Bitcoin since they integrate with the rest of a typical consumer's investment dashboard. You can buy the products on margin, schedule purchases, do program trades, and all kinds of things. And things like tax reporting is built right in to the system so it doesn't leave you a nightmare filing mess at the end of the year.

And unless you want to engage in tax evasion, you absolutely need to sign documents, at least in terms of reporting any gains you realize.

And buying Bitcoin without presenting anybody with any sort of identification is exceedingly hard for the average consumer--it's practically tradecraft. (I personally wouldn't even know how to do this, and I've googled it before, and I'm surely far more savvy than the average consumer).


Yeah, believing it will never ever fall from it's current level is the same... judgement shall we say... as believing it's going to keep going up. Bitcoin fell by 80% just two years ago. Did something about it change since then that has made in invulnerable to such devaluation? Bitcoin's price is driven by masses of consumer investors being convinced the price will go up--consumer sentiment. In my experience, something like that can change in a heartbeat.

Fiscal deficits and national debt is a political problem, not a technical one. We don't have a national debt because banks use relational databases to store bank accounts. Blockchain not only won't help this problem, it has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

And a CBDC--no matter how it's implemented technically--will not change the value of the currency that is being digitized.

A CBDC is just a digital form of an existing sovereign currency. It doesn't solve any broader problems than making it so people don't have to carry around physical paper cash and metal coins.

Yeah, you are sorta making my point for me, in that your concept of morality has been so twisted by Trump that you think adultery, debauchery, rape, robbing, lying, and bullying are... virtues now.

If y'all nominated somebody like Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney, I could probably vote for one of them. But Republicans chose Trump over all of the others...

It's been 13 years since the original Bitcoin whitepaper, and Bitcoin is slower and more expensive to transact than ever. If that's the way it's "evolving" then I don't see it branching out of it's current primary use as a speculation instrument.

But this is all beside the point. The way people want Bitcoin to get "better" is for it to increase in price. That has nothing to do with the technology, it just means they want more people bidding for Bitcoin.

It's not going to get "better" in some way that most of its users don't care about.



My proof is the proliferation of brokers like Binance, Coinbase, and hundreds of others, and their obvious very large market presence. And now, the ETF.

And the other evidence is something I call the Anon Paradox: that people don't want the responsibility of physically carrying a large portion of their life savings and instead they would rather have professionals do that for them and hold the asset based on their personal identity (the paradox being that for small amounts of money, people want the opposite).

(I understand that you can also do chain analysis that will indicate the flows from major brokerages as opposed to individual wallets, but I haven't dug that deep on this path personally).