The main goal is controlling the people of China and Hong Kong that means capital controls, monetary controls etc.

The difference is the difference between gold and pyrite.

Of course some people will be fooled because the CCP doesn't like people to be free and so controls money, speech and everything else.

I agree.  There probably won't be many people using bitcoin to buy tickets right now.  It seems more like an announcement aimed at getting some media play.  Bitcoin is great, but this isn't a huge deal until everyone is doing it.  So it is a start.

"Sen. Elizabeth Warren shoots down a key reason investors buy bitcoin, calls for tighter regulation."  (see https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/sen-elizabeth-warren-doubts-bitcoin-as-inflation-hedge-wants-tighter-regulation.html)

Did anyone think an autocrat like Warren would do anything except call for "tighter regulation"?  She doesn't like freedom, she doesn't want people to be able to control their lives, and she doesn't like privacy.  In short, she is an authoritarian, autocratic thug who loves the power that comes with the socialist/fascist/communist mentality where she commands people to behave exactly how she wants.  She wants freedom for herself and her autocratic buddies to debase the currency without any independent escape hatch to allow people to protect themselves from her misguided policies.

She is also an idiot: "Look at what’s happened in the high volatility in the price of these things,” the Massachusetts Democrat said.  Yeah, anyone who bought it for inflation protection at any point until April 2021 has been well protected against inflation.  Volatility is not risk.  Over a more than a few month time horizon, bitcoin has been phenomenal.  Anyone who listened it fools like Warren has missed out on a tremendous investment.  And if history rhymes, then we still have 1 or 2 (maybe 3) orders of magnitude to go before bitcoin reaches a point of fiat price stability.

Comments like her's are woefully ignorant: Warren, disagreed with “crypto coins are not going to have their own inflationary pressures” and 'she countered such a notion, saying inflation “may come from a different source than what happens with dollars."'   Bitcoin will not have inflationary pressure as anyone with even the most basic understanding of bitcoin would understand.

I still wonder about the obvious limited intelligence of the people who keep electing her.

Bitcoin fluctuates every day.  Since when is this news. The only time tradable assets don't "fluctuate" are when markets are closed and for bitcoin recently, that is never.

What specifically was wrong with Hal's analysis?  What he said and the math follows easily.  He didn't say it would do that, just that it was one possibility with a tremendous risk/reward ratio.  Recall that at the time it sounded a lot like today with people saying it is a scam, ponzi, worthless, that it will never reach $1 etc:

Most people who understood it at the time were saying that it was something of a binary proposition, either it will be worth very little, or a whole lot.

Yawn.  The FUD and nonsense that gets bandied around and repeated is nauseating. 

The answer to the thread is: no.

Some questions should be answered before one can ask that question:
1. Is the environment constantly changing?
2. What are the optimal environment conditions for earth?  For humans?  For other life?
3. What is the cost of the tradeoffs involved?  e.g. between fiat's total environmental impact; between the people who are using fiat to steal from everyone every year etc.

Just an open ended question like the title is worthless unless the goal is to spam with nonsense to help advertise your casino.

And if it is getting anywhere near the point where they are going to be knocking down doors and using coercion on people to confiscate bitcoin, it is time to cross the border before it begins and borders are shut down.  One would think there would be some warnings about what is to come.  In Cyprus in 2013, there was no overt warning about the coming capital controls and bank seizures, but there were a lot of warning signs.

The problem is once you hit the "Cyprus 2013" scenario, it is probably too late to buy bitcoin or much else, so it is imperative for people like those in Hong Kong, Taiwan etc to purchase them before that so that if it is getting to the point of capital controls and eventually border controls for people, one has a backup plan in place.

Competition is great, but many of the alts are just junk.  They don't have much security or anything to add to bitcoin.  There are certainly a few that have some interesting features - e.g. true anonymity, smart contracts etc, but those are coming to bitcoin. 

The biggest point though is that out of all of the alts, there are none that are as secure because none have the non-centralized developers, non-centralized miners and non-centralized nodes/user base.  Will there be something that eventually has that?  Maybe, but having one person or one small group of people basically in charge of the code is an awful idea given the number of people worldwide who want to control crypto in general.

No thank you.  I am perfectly capable of making my own decisions and living with the consequences.  The so-called "narrow specialists" were so wrong about many things that anyone who trusts them is foolish to do so.  Coronavirus and masks not working (see Fauci's lies about it), the WHO etc.  The US funding gain of function research in Wuhan and then attempting to hide it.  The regulators in DC - eg. See Bernie Madoff, the financial crisis etc.  If you are foolish enough to trust them, you will eventually learn the consequences of doing so.  

And all that assumes they are not malevolent and not merely incompetent.  There are plenty of useful idiots, but there are malevolent people who don't like freedom involved too.  

Likewise, even if what you claim is true, why does this need to be a top down force based approach?  If you are not competent to make decisions for yourself, hire someone to do it for you. Don't force the rest of the world down to the lowest common denominator for competence.  Just because one person isn't able to make decisions for themselves, doesn't mean the rest of us cannot.

I am afraid you may be correct.  The goal is a socialist dictatorship so that everyone is enslaved to everyone else with no liberty while some extremely small group is in control. 

And it isn't just limited to the US, but the world which is a goal of the "global minimum tax" - seduce people into thinking that "corporations will pay taxes" when the reality is that corporations don't pay taxes, they only collect them from people:  The people being employees, consumers and shareholders.  Mostly consumers and employees.  It is beguiling to think that some faceless corporation is going to pay and it works in manipulating people into voting for them to get "free" stuff but it is a scam to seduce people worldwide into giving up freedom to some faceless group who intends to control everyone.

Hopefully there are some countries that will ignore the siren song, but I am not hopeful yet.  The bodycount from the destruction caused by socialism/communism/fascism is in the hundreds of millions if not billions.  The cost to human life and human ability is an order of magnitude or more larger.

Good find!  Thanks for posting it.  They are right, since 2010 I can't count the number of times I've read bitcoin was a ponzi, scam, dead etc.  

The more the insane control freak politicians and their followers want to be able to control and seize the products of people's lives, the more important things like bitcoin become to protect oneself and one's family.

"Move wealth through time. " - e.g. protecting it from authoritarians and the ravages of inflation.

I think it is because they are naive and think that governments are out to protect them when in reality the governments are there to control them and collect a vig from every person in each country.  It gives them power and money, all the while allowing the politicians to control everyone else.

The government is not there to help.

Which illegal activities?  Where physically are these illegal activities?  Which country is going to decide?

The authoritarian leaders in China night have a different view of what is illegal than the people who want to be free in Hong Kong or in the country of Taiwan.  Or the anti-liberty Biden admin in the US might have a different view than the Swiss, the people of Cayman Islands or the people of the Cook Islands.  Russian might not like someone in Ukraine or vice versa.  Unless one is advocating for a world government - which in the end will eliminate competition and destroy human liberty on the planet - this is a bad idea.

Good luck attempting to enforce that as more privacy protections come to bitcoin and other crypto, adding back doors to seize assets is as bad an idea as adding backdoors into encryption of devices.  (Or not encrypting cloud backups with on-device keys).

Edward Snowden and Julian Assange might have different views on what is illegal than the left-wing autocrats in the governments of the 5 eyes (people like Obama, Biden who went after them in the first place etc) and the people at the NSA, CIA etc.

Warren:  "people are too stupid to be able to figure out risks for themselves and yet are smart enough to vote in people like me who know nothing about it to regulate everyone else." 

Putting a dishonest, divisive, pandering, anti-individual politician in charge of anything, let alone crypto, is idiotic.

I wouldn’t say the early days of the internet, but maybe the early days of the web.

People didn’t know what a domain name was, said people wouldn’t use credit cards online, etc. Bitcoin was certainly like that in 2010. And 2013. And 2016. Maybe today it is like the web in 2005.

Look at Cyprus in 2013, exchange controls etc. Look at the totalitarian takeover of Hong Kong, and Venezuela, if bitcoin had been around.  Smart people will have some of their assets in a portable, non-censorable asset like bitcoin to protect themselves and provide an escape hatch. The people of Taiwan should have some now after they have seen the destruction of liberty in Hong Kong.

Bitcoin will do just fine and survive.  Who knows about the fiat price, of course, but bitcoin itself will be fine.

Bitcoin didn't exist in the 20th century so there were no investors or traders in the field of bitcoin.

You are right, bitcoin takes power from the governments.

Just to note, that scrip was issued for millennia until the collectivist authoritarians (socialist, fascist, communist etc) found that they could use inflation to destroy countries and to have a hidden tax on everyone who was under their control.  It is the "progressive" (really regressive away from freedom) dream to have control of the products of every person in the world and fiat currencies help to enable that.  Once they had ended any type of peg to an asset, they ended up destroying things even more.  Look at Germany in the 1930s, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China etc.  

Even look at how much the British pound, the US dollar, the Euro, have lost in value over time.  Anyone who thinks that these people promising "free" stuff are really trying to help you, aren't paying attention.  They are manipulating people in order to get their votes to siphon away their wealth.

This "global minimum tax" is an anti-freedom, anti-competition, pro-monopoly policy in order to extract more money from people so that the power hungry politicians in government can take a cut for themselves in terms of money and power.  

Corporations are only tax collectors, they don't actually pay taxes.  So all these "fair share" people are attempting to delude people through the politics of envy, and divide people through the politics of hate in order to conquer them.

Climate change has only been happening for about 4.5 billion years on earth.  50 years ago the concern was global cooling, 20 years ago global warming, now generic climate change in order to make any proposition that could be falsified. If you want control, you'd sow fear.