You spend all of your time here promoting Trump. I think that's clear to everybody. Aren't you proud of that?

So answer the question. What is more important to you: your Bitcoin going up in price, or Trump getting elected?

No, but lots of them do. And if Bitcoin becomes a "Trump" thing, like you are trying to do here, then they will invest in something else.

So you have to ask yourself, what is more important to you: your Bitcoin going up in price, or Trump getting elected?

Not according to the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

It is now used mainly as an investment instrument, using mostly centralized brokerages, which are contrary to its original goal, but the original intent of Bitcoin was to create a system out of the reach of any government.

For probably 99% of Bitcoin users this goal has failed since they use a brokerage and/or they don't use a mixer to hide their transactions--making them easily tracked by central governments.

Hence where we are today doesn't resemble where Bitcoin started. But that doesn't change how it started.

The goal of Bitcoin--and now, generally, the blockchain architecture--is to evade government oversight into transactions.

That's it. That's all was made to do. If you wanted to do anything else, blockchain would be a massive waste of time and resources since a good centralized architecture is a thousand times easier, safer, cheaper, and faster.

(This is why "centralized blockchain" is so pointless).

(This is also why using blockchain for a CBDC is really dumb).

You know, if all of "the libs" sold their Bitcoin, the price would drop by about 95%. Did you ever think about that?

Biden is pretty darn normal, if you ask me. Boring, even.

And I suspect that when you get a little older, you aren't going to think that being older than 60 makes it impossible to function.

Update: the medium age in the USA is almost 40 years old--and that's being averaged with children. I suspect the average voter in the USA is something like 50. Republicans are really pushing the ageism thing hard on Biden (because, what else would they attack him on?), but lots of people in the USA are "old" and don't think they are ready for the rest home.

I just wrote another Medium article on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Here's the gist of it:

Using blockchain to create a CBDC is a waste of time and resources, and will lead to the CBDC project failing.

CBDCs, by definition, are centralized in terms of their governance. It makes no sense for a central bank to use a technology designed principally to evade centralized oversight. In short, if it weren't for the problem if evading centralized oversight into transactions, then Bitcoin would have never been invented.

Decentralized architectures cannot scale to mainstream transaction volume. This is underscored by Bitcoin's transactions that can cost 30 dollars and take 30 minutes to complete. Credit card transactions take a few seconds and typically cost less than a dollar. Haypenny currencies take single-digital milliseconds to complete and cost $0.005. Blockchain, in short, is a terrible choice, technically speaking.

And then there's the usage model, which requires users to have a key pair, which hinders the spread of the currency and makes the whole process much more clunky for end-users, which is especially problematic when introducing a brand new way of doing things to millions of users used to doing it the old way.

In short, from a pure technology and user experience standpoint, using blockchain for a CBDC is bonkers. CBDCs should instead be based on a traditional centralized architecture.

Without the US, Ukraine would fall within weeks because they would know it would be inevitable. With a Ukrainian victory, a move into Poland would be the logical next step, and without the US involved things get a lot easier for Russia to maneuver. War has thus far been very, very good for Putin, so it's logical that he will continue to engage in it.


Well, funding for Ukraine is being held up by Trump loyalists right now. It doesn't seem to matter what the majority of Republicans think, only what Trump wants. Trump killed the immigration deal, and he's killed the funding for Ukraine for now. He will be twice as powerful when he's actually president and no Republican in his right mind would go against him.

Gary Gensler taught a class at MIT on blockchain. He knows very well what he is talking about.

He was saying that the way most holders of cryptocurrency use it it's not decentralized--it's a brokerage account in an "oracle database" in his words. And he's absolutely right.

As that thread repeated, over and over, "legal tender" is not the same as "legal".

The word, "legal tender" has a very specific meaning derived from the US Constitution, and it absolutely means forcing people to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment even if they don't want to accept Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is unsuitable as a mainstream means of payment because transactions can take 30 minutes and cost 30 dollars. This is not a conspiracy by "the government", it's a simple technical limitation of the blockchain architecture and it's not going to be solved. Bitcoin works just fine for what people actually use it for, which is a speculation instrument.

Using the government to force Bitcoin down people's throats won't accomplish anything except making people hate Bitcoin. (And why especially should Bitcoin have this special status? Why not Ethereum? Why not Dogecoin? Why not Haypenny currencies?).



I made the same point above as well: deflation is far, far more dangerous than inflation. No country in the world has based their economy on a static commodity in the last 100 years for good reason. If your primary currency appreciates in value, then you are incentivized to not spend it, which contracts the economy, which deflates it even further, and so on into a depression.

As I understand it, based on military analysis of troop movements, Putin's next target is Poland, which he will have free license to invade once Trump breaks up NATO.

And then of course China will go into Taiwan after Xi offers Trump a "deal" to build Trump Tower Shanghai in exchange for the US not intervening.

After that, Trump will leave office and we'll be left with a world at war that our kids are going to need to fight. This is exactly how WWII started, so it makes sense that WWIII would go the same way: an isolationist "America First" movement in the US causes us to withdraw from the world just long enough for two major military powers from Europe and Asia to gain a foothold.

So the Mexican drug cartels go all the way to Ukraine to get their weapons, and not, say, Walmart here in the US?

If that's the case then this is great news since this will drastically slow them down and increase their costs.

Seriously though, this Russian propaganda that's repeated in the OP is getting more desperate by the day. Putin is losing and he knows it.

I feel as though I should point out an important point about macroeconomics here.

Inflation is really bad for the economy. It makes it hard for business to predict the prices they should charge, and puts the squeeze on average workers when their salaries don't keep up with inflation. Periods of high inflation are associated with economic instability and political unrest.

But as bad as inflation is for the economy, there is something far worse than inflation: deflation.

Deflation, in short, is a total disaster for an economy because every consumer will suddenly be incentivized to stop spending any money, leading the a massive contraction in GDP.

This is why no country in the world is on any sort of "gold standard" or anything equivalent.

And I get that we're just talking theoretically here when discussing replacing sovereign currencies with Bitcoin (because I think we all know it would never happen for a number of reasons), but if by some miracle a country tried it, they would instantly wreck their economy.

Now, lets be clear: most people don't envision replacing a sovereign currency with a digital one, but rather they usually mean to use a digital currency as a more streamlined means of transacting in their sovereign currency. (For the Haypenny system, we actually just let people trade in "USDE" or "USD equivalent" to make it easier for them to work with).

But make no mistake, if a country switched to Bitcoin to replace their own currency, it would be an absolute disaster.

Read the thread. It has nothing to do with governments being "threatened". It simply doesn't work in practical terms.

Please see this thread for a discussion about whether Bitcoin enthusiasts should be asking for the central government's help in forcing people to adopt Bitcoin.

I think the answer is door number three: technical factors.

Bitcoin transactions can cost 30 dollars and take 30 minutes. That technical limitation will do far more than any government could ever do to prevent Bitcoin from being widely adopted as a means of everyday transactions.

As for adoption as an investment... what more do you want? With the ETF, every single investor in the US can buy into a Bitcoin instrument using their existing brokerage account. This is as mainstream as it gets.

The other factor, of course, will be the price of Bitcoin: if more people buy it, then the price will go up, and then... more people will buy it. And that too will be a far bigger factor than any sort of regulations. And by the same token, if the price crashes, then people will hate Bitcoin, and this won't be the fault of anything the government did.

Okay, this is getting too personal for me, so I'm going leave this conversation.

So you object to governments providing any oversight on commerce whatsoever?

Yes, it's theoretically possible to curtail trade in Bitcoin with government regulations.

But it hasn't happened, and there's no sign of it happening in the USA (quite the opposite, given the approval of the ETF), and millions of people own Bitcoin and other cryptos.

People complaining about Bitcoin not being a mainstream means of payment right now have no reason to blame "the government".

How do explain the thousands of merchants all over the world, including the USA, who accept Bitcoin then? Are they all breaking the law?



I said meaningful hinderances. There are freakin Super Bowl commercials selling Bitcoin to millions of people. This sure doesn't look like a country where Bitcoin is banned to me.

And not only not banned, but not hindered in any way such that it would meaningfully reduce adoption.

And doing a little KYC--which is required for every sort of financial instrument, not just Bitcoin--does not hurt anything.

And for what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, most of that stuff is done voluntarily by the brokerages to protect themselves from fraud, not some commandment from the government. At minimum they would have to do at least some checks or they would get ripped off. This is not some government killing their business through regulation specially targeted at Bitcoin because they want to eliminate Bitcoin because it "competes with the dollar" or something.