Sadly, in today's environment there's simply no chance they will be held accountable since most in Ted Cruz's party vote for their party regardless of absolutely anything (and most Democrats are like this too but in my experience that somewhat less loyal to their party).

In other words, none of Ted Cruz's voters are going to vote for the Democrat because Cruz didn't do anything on the border--or even if he broke every single other promise he ever made to his voters--because they've been trained to hate Democrats so much.

We're in a weird political world now where only negative campaigning matters anymore. It doesn't matter to the voter what their candidate does if they are convinced the other side is so terrible.

This is why Trump has recently ordered his party to refuse to vote on border legislation: he knows that his voters don't actually care about the border, they only care about what Trump says. And Biden would get a marginal boost for signing a compromise bill that actually improved things at the US border, and the top priority for the party is to get Trump elected in November, so Trump is against it.

We're in a very, very different realm of politics now, and you need to adjust your brain a lot to understand it. None of the old rules apply anymore .

That is simply not true. Bitcoin is already perfectly legal to be used as a means of payment of goods or services in most countries across the world.

The reason why people don't use Bitcoin to pay for ordinary things is because transactions are far too slow and far too expensive. Why would anybody pay for their $5 cup of Starbucks coffee with something that takes 30 minutes and costs $30 to complete a transaction?

Asking the government to force Bitcoin down people's throats like you are asking them to do here isn't going to help. Most people in El Salvador don't use Bitcoin for anything even though the government there literally used taxpayer money to bribe them into doing so and passed a law saying everybody must accept Bitcoin.


While there are a few countries where individual ownership and trading of Bitcoin is banned, that list is very short. For almost all of the world's economy, there are no significant restrictions on Bitcoin.

And in the US at least, there's no taxes on Bitcoin that aren't present on every other kind of investment. It sounds like you might be asking for a tax break just because you chose to invest in Bitcoin as opposed to other investments, but that's not very fair to others.

As I said above (and I provided a link where you can read about El Salvador and Bitcoin), they are not "really" implementing legal tender there because they don't enforce it. (And I suspect it's because they simply couldn't in practicality--and I further suspect that El Salvador did this as a publicity stunt, not real policy).

I don't worry about governments controlling Bitcoin--it's legal almost everywhere. But the only thing that could change that is a government forcing everybody to use it, which means they'd need to regulate it.


Again, "legal" is not the same thing as "legal tender". People in these forums say they pine for "legal tender status" for Bitcoin even though it's already perfectly legal almost everywhere. (They want the "extra boost" that a government forcing everybody to use Bitcoin would give the price of Bitcoin I guess  .)

Here in the USA at least, there's no distinction between "not illegal" and "legal". If there is no law against it, then you can do it.

"Legal tender" is a different classification wherein citizens are forced to accept a means of payment even if they don't want to.


Usually countries don't announce, "such and such is legal now!" unless it was previously illegal. In the US at least, Bitcoin was never illegal.

The term, "legal tender" has a specific meaning that is not the same as "legal", but it would appear that almost nobody is willing to understand this so maybe I should just give up trying to explain it .


No government is forcing anybody to use Bitcoin right now because no government has designated Bitcoin to be "legal tender" and enforcing that (they announced this in El Salvador, but they clearly aren't serious about this since they don't enforce the law so even they are not truly "legal tender" for Bitcoin).

The definition of "legal tender" is that the government forces people to accept that currency whether they want to or not.


What country does not allow US dollars to be used as a payment? I suspect there might be a few somewhere in the world, but come on, how many could there be? And why would a country even care?

Like Bitcoin, you can use US dollars as a means of payment almost anywhere if the counterparty will accept that payment. Governments almost never get involved in trade like that unless it's a really crazy draconian government.

So since there's not actually a problem here, this is absolutely not a major obstacle for Bitcoin adoption.

Bitcoin is legal for individuals to trade and hold in most of the civilized world already.

Again, you are already free to trade Bitcoin in most countries. Nobody is stopping you. Bitcoin is already legal for payments and has been since it was invented in almost all countries.

People who are asking for legal tender status are asking for the government to use their power to force people to accept Bitcoin.

It is also perfectly legal to use barter to pay for things in most countries.



Again, that's not what the term, "legal tender" means. The word you seem to think it means is, "legal". You can currently pay for things with Bitcoin if you want, and the counterparty freely accepts it.

What legal tender means is that you want to force people to accept Bitcoin even if they don't want to.


Any business in the United States, right now, under today's laws, can accept Bitcoin as payment. Nobody is stopping them.

I can also accept gold as payment, or baseball cards, or shares of AAPL.

There is no law against any of this.

What "legal tender" means is that businesses are forced to accept Bitcoin as payment.

And people should stop asking for that, because it's wrong...

That's actually the exact definition of "legal tender".

Again, don't confuse the term, "legal" with "legal tender". They are two different things.



Again, like many here, you are confusing the terms, "legal" and "legal tender".

Bitcoin is legal in most countries. Anybody can trade in Bitcoin if they want to.

Bitcoin is not truly legal tender in any country, including El Salvador, since even there they don't universally enforce their law.

Legal tender means payees must accept Bitcoin as a means of settling a debt whether they want to or not.

It's also worth noting here how incredibly rare it is for this to even be an issue.

The US dollar's legal tender status only comes up in court judgements where there is disagreement about a settlement of a debt denoted in some other form of payment (e.g. a barter), in which case the court can make a judgement that an equivalent US dollar amount be paid, and the payor is forced to pay in that currency.

That's it. That's all "legal tender" actually does.

Okay, it's time to get real for a moment.

US inflation peaked at about 9% annually during the post-pandemic economic disruption, and is now down to something like 4%.

Bitcoin has fluctuated by about 300% in the last two years.

Bitcoin is a "hedge against inflation" in the same was that betting on horses is a "hedge against inflation". This might be true in some narrow context, but not in the way people generally use that terminology.

When the dust settles, anywhere you put your money is an 'investment' which includes US dollars, Bitcoin, cryptos, land, gold, shares of AAPL, baseball cards, or anything else you think people might find more valuable in the future than they do now.

Again, the word "legal tender" has a specific meaning derived from the US Constitution.

And shares of Apple (AAPL) are not "legal tender" and clearly investors are not living in fear that the government might "someday" make Apple illegal because investors have bid its worth to trillions of dollars.

In my opinion, the reason why people want "legal tender" status for Bitcoin is to use the power of the government to make their Bitcoin holdings more valuable. Just like anybody holding AAPL shares would like the US government to say something nice about it and enforce that into law.


Done. 



This was a point I was making about the "practicality" of the situation. Countries that force their citizens to carry health insurance, for instance, necessarily heavily regulate the health insurance business.

That would be true of the US government forced everybody to accept Bitcoin as payment: Congress would regulate it much much more. Instead of being "just another asset people can invest in", it's now something the government officially supports and voters are not going to accept giving that status away for free.

Bitcoin is legal to hold and trade for individuals (including China) in almost every country in the world except for a tiny few.

You are making up a problem here where there isn't one. You don't need to force people to accept Bitcoin. It does not need to be officially anointed as "legal tender" in order for it to be legal to trade and hold.

---

The definition of legal tender is that "all debts, public in private" must be able to be settled with this form of payment.

If I arrange, by some sort of trade, to get your car, and I pay you, and you don't give me what I asked for in return, when we go to court, the court can order you either give me the thing I wanted in trade, or the equivalent in US dollars.

That's it. That's all "legal tender" means. It means that everybody in the country must accept this currency whether they want to or not.

It's the government forcing the adoption of a means of trade.

The definition people seem to think it means is, "legal to trade", but Bitcoin and all cryptos are perfectly legal to trade in almost every country in the world, including the USA.

By that definition, cigarettes are "legal tender" in the United States since you can legally settle a debt using cigarettes. Or gold coins. Or furniture. Or baseball cards. Or whatever the counterparty accepts as payment.

So there's great news for you: by your definition, "Bitcoin is Legal Tender in the United States!".

But that's not the legal definition....

I think a lot of people misunderstand what "legal tender" means.

Legal tender means that the government forces everybody to accept Bitcoin whether they want to or not.

Typically a country only has one currency like that, which is their sovereign national currency.

In other words, when you are asking for legal tender status, you are asking for a free, open and decentralized thing like Bitcoin should become controlled by the government because they force everybody to own it. Not only is this immoral, it will absolutely backfire because anything you force everybody to own will always end up being controlled by the government.

Understand that "legal tender" does not mean "legal". Bitcoin is already perfectly legal in most countries: you can own it and you can trade it if you want to. Even in China, where people consider Bitcoin "banned", individuals there can own it and the laws only apply to financial entities there (which are already highly regulated in all kinds of ways and there is probably a long, long list of things they cannot own).

So please stop asking for government help in proliferating Bitcoin by forcing people to accept something they don't want to accept.

And concede that Bitcoin is already legal for the most part, and governments at this point are not meaningfully "holding it back".

Bitcoin will not have any part to play in the future cashless society that it's not already playing in today's some-cash society.

Bitcoin is not a currency in the sense of being a medium that can be used for ubiquitous transfers of value: transactions are far too slow and expensive for that purpose. World-wide credit card volume alone peaks in the millions of transactions per second which no blockchain architecture--even a centralized one--could ever come close to achieving.

(If you want to see what an actual technical solution looks like for this sort of volume, check out the Haypenny whitepaper).

I believe that physical cash will be eradicated from our society within 20 years or less, but cryptocurrency will have nothing to do with that.

About once every five years politicians talk about a "flat tax" because it sounds so cool. Then when they go to implement it they say that they'll have a flat tax... except for this ONE THING that they say "everybody" really really must have. Only one thing!

And this one other thing, of course...

Then it evolves into the Steve Martin One Thing^TM speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSWBuZws30g

And then the politicians stop talking about a "flat tax".

There are, roughly speaking, two distinct reasons one might want to keep their transactions and holdings anonymous, and because of this, most people's feelings on anonymity changes significantly when the amount of money in question goes from a "small" amount to a "large" amount.

By "small" amounts, we mean some amount of money that one would be able to lose without significantly impacting their long-term well-being. When talking about traditional money, this would be the amount one would carry in their physical wallet on their own person. This money would be reserved for convenient anonymous purchases, such as buying one's dinner from a restaurant.

By "large" amounts, we mean one's "life savings": the wealth they store for long-term safety and security. This amount would be reserved for major purchases such as a car or a house, or would be a money store to draw upon for a long period of time e.g. a retirement fund. This would be an amount of money that would be devastating to lose.

People value privacy to keep their information safe from three kinds of actors: legal, illegal, and state.

Legal actors include one's friends, family, associates, neighbors, marketers, and businesses. These are actors who seek your privacy out of curiosity or to profit from it e.g. to sell you things, or to gossip about your activities, or to make a judgement about your character. One typically keeps things private from legal actors because they don't want to give people a particular impression about themselves (which may be out of context and wrong for instance). This sentiment is captured when one says, "it's none of your business".

Illegal actors include criminals in every form who seek to steal your money. Here it's important to point out that protection from criminals is usually indirect: you don't want to divulge something to a vendor not because you think they are criminals, but rather you don't trust them to keep your information safe from criminals.

State actors are the police who work within the bounds of a political system in order to obtain your private data. Keeping your information private from these actors is done in order to escape the reach of the law within whatever dominion one finds oneself in. In mostly free western-style democracies, this typically means what we would call "criminals" e.g. those hiding proceeds from criminal activity, or those seeking to evade their taxes.

So in summary, when one asks, "do you want to keep your stuff private?", the answer must be prefaced with, "what kind of 'private' do you mean?". There is "private" from legal actors and criminals, and then there's "private" from your government. Those are two very different things.

Most people don't have any use for second kind of "privacy": most people are not criminals or tax evaders. (This is not making a moral judgement here by using the word, "criminal" because a "criminal" living under a corrupt government is not necessarily immoral). And morality aside, most people don't want to get on the wrong side of their government for practical reasons e.g. their own personal safety.

Now we can talk about people's desire for anonymity for "big" and "small" amounts of money.

For one's "life savings" (i.e. "big" amounts), most people desire this holding to be kept as safe as possible, and, most importantly, safer than they themselves could possibly keep it e.g. stored by an entity that specializes in storing wealth as a service, such as a bank or financial institution.

Further, when one purchases a "large" item like a house or a car, then people want that purchase to be non-anonymous because they wish for the ownership of that item to be based on their indelible identity and not simply their physical possession of the item, which can be easily lost or stolen. One buys such a major purchase, "in your name" so to speak. This is the very opposite of anonymity.

For "small" purchases, most people want the opposite: they would prefer to use an anonymous means of transacting to maintain the "privacy" from legal and illegal actors.

In both of the above cases, there is an exception for criminals who wish to keep their privacy for illegal reasons (again, the caveat above as to what constitutes "illegal" applies).

What This Means for Cryptocurrencies and Digital Currency

Within the context of a mostly-free, mostly-just government, anonymity is desirable for "small" purchases and holdings, and undesirable for "large" purchases and holdings.

Hence, what the world needs is an anonymous means of value exchange and holding for small amounts, whereas that need, paradoxically, reverses itself when the amount becomes larger.

In that context, today's cryptocurrencies, in terms of their fit for the marketplace, have it exactly backwards: the (decentralized) blockchain architecture necessarily incurs a high cost in terms of time and money, making it unsuitable for small transactions--which is why it is rarely used for such transactions. On the other hand, for "life savings" level holdings, cryptocurrency's anonymity is usually undesirable and this can be seen in the fact that most investors of cryptocurrencies do so with the use of a centralized institution e.g. a brokerage or app, and they keep their holdings "in their name" instead of by physically holding a private key.

What is needed, therefore, is a digital currency that is suitable for very small transactions and yet keeps these small transactions completely anonymous. This currency does not need to evade government actors and therefore can be centralized, but it does need to evade all other actors unlike a traditional credit card transaction.

This is what we sought to do with the Haypenny system, which is the simplest and most anonymous form of numerically-delineated value transfer every invented--as long as one defines "anonymous" as keeping one's privacy safe from legal and illegal actors and not government actors.

What actual real-world difference does that make? In most countries (say like the USA) it's perfectly legal to buy things with Bitcoin. What you seem to be asking for here is that you want a central government to force people to use Bitcoin. I'm not sure anybody is going to do that, nor would we want them to.



Sovereign currency can (and usually does) have a physical manifestation, but most money (in terms of dollar volume) is actually moved around digitally these days.


Most people who invest in crypto use a central entity like CoinBase or Binance or their brokerage account. Most people don't like the idea of being able to physically lose a big chunk of their life savings, and instead want somebody else to physically guard it for them, and to base their access based on their identity.

People usually only like physical cash when it's a small part of their wealth e.g. the money inside of their wallet. And they do this for the convenience of being able to make cash payments.



Bitcoin can be permanently lost which is the same as destroying it. Indeed, we actually have no idea how much actual spendable Bitcoin exists in the world, and it's likely less than the theoretical supply and it might even be a lot less.

While I'll leave this thread open, I think it's sorta closed itself: the answer to my question is: there aren't any documented non-cryptocurrency design wins for blockchain.

After this question has been sitting here for over two weeks, in front of an audience that certainly ought to at least know where to look, nobody can come up with anything.

While I tried to ask this question with an open mind, this answer matches my own analysis of blockchain when I looked into the technology many years ago. My own technical background is ultra-high-scale Internet applications, although I've been in IT for over 30 years and I've done a lot of everything. My take on blockchain when I learned about it was, "that will never scale to anything within orders of magnitude of mainstream volume", and, "that won't be useful to solve any real-world problems besides cryptocurrency and NFTs".

Perhaps the error in thinking for those looking at using blockchain for their enterprise is that commercial enterprises are necessarily centralized and hence the decentralized benefit of blockchain to these entities is rather meaningless.

In other words, "centralized blockchain" is a lot like, "alcohol-free moonshine": probably not a product anybody will be interested in.

One thing people have pointed at is the preponderance of tools that major tool suppliers like Amazon, Microsoft and others quickly made available when the "blockchain" buzzword became a hot thing.

This led many, I suspect, to believe that this meant blockchain was going to be the next big thing in the enterprise. Some of us, however, have seen buzzwords like this come and go over the years, and know that at least half of the "next big things" are actually just duds--despite the multi-billion-dollar onslaught by the giant toolmakers, who can easily afford to lose everything on half of their initiatives since the other half is so profitable.

Yes, and names can be very valuable. Ask Gucci or Nike or any major sports team. Bitcoin has a brand that's worth hundreds of billions. I never said nor meant to imply that Bitcoin is "worthless".



The limited supply trait is extremely important, I agree. And yes, people see value in something that cannot inflate.



I completely agree that "legal" and "moral" are two different things, and I tried to caveat that in my post.

That said, if you are relying on cryptocurrencies to get you out of the thrall of a government that really wants to get you, you are in a precarious state regardless. An evil dictator could make using crypto a crime, and then send out thousands of honey pots all over the Internet to catch his prey, and effectively outlaw Bitcoin because people would be rightfully terrified to try using it (to take just one example off the top of my head). You might be able to stay safe if its some small government somewhere, but if its the USA, well, forget it. We're in big big trouble if it's the US government that falls to tyranny, and neither Bitcoin nor any other technology would keep anybody safe...

Look, I get that my use of the term, "meme coin" triggers people, so I'll stop using it.

I merely meant that Bitcoin's primary value was based on it's brand, which is very plain to see when you compare it to other cryptocurrencies with the exact same technical specifications as Bitcoin and yet have only a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's value.

I never claimed either of those things. Obviously Bitcoin solves a strong consumer need, which is why it has been bid up to the value it has.

I also never made any claim that institutional investors would particularly care one way or another about blockchain technology.

I did claim--and I stand by this--that the ETF and the resultant interest by consumers, and therefore the resultant interest by institutional investors, could affect the price, and I made an argument here that the result could be downward pressure on the price for the reasons I listed.


I'll take these one at a time.

First, bank bailouts. There has already been several instances of the government intervening in crypto concerns in order to protect consumers, e.g. FTX. You might say, "but you technically don't need to use an institution to invest in Bitcoin", but most consumers don't invest that way nor do they want to.

This has been my thesis here all along: most consumers do not want to hide their life savings under a mattress, or in their iPhone. They want an institutional account that is protected based on their personal identity. Hence most average consumer investors in Bitcoin and other cryptos don't pay attention to the "decentralized" mythos of Bitcoin at all and instead just see it as a meme to invest in.

If the "OG" Bitcoin community here wants to kick these people out, then do that--but guess what will happen to the price of Bitcoin et. al. when all of those consumers are kicked out? That's my thesis here.

As for inflation, both USD and BTC are investment instruments, as is gold, land, bonds, soybean futures and so on. To say that your new investment instrument "solves" inflation is circular reasoning: you are essentially promising the price of Bitcoin will go up in value compared to the value of USD, which is a promise nobody can make.

And let's get real here: no investment advisor in the world would tell somebody to put their life savings in Bitcoin--instead of, say, land--in order to hedge against the US Dollar. Bitcoin and other cryptos are speculative, volatile investment instruments which may or may not go up in value.

As for "censorship", what you are actually talking about here is allowing citizens to engage in illegal activity. I am quite sympathetic to those living under terrible governments who need protection from corruption, and I'd wish them every tool at their disposal to save themselves. But if you are saying it's really "terrible" that American citizens can't trade with Russia right now, suffice it to say that the majority of our elected representatives don't agree with you right now, and the solution is to go through the democratic process, not go against your own government.

And for what it's worth, Bitcoin is a public ledger so Bitcoin itself (as opposed to say Monero) is not a good example of that use case. Based on the difference in market cap between Bitcoin and Monero, I would surmise that most consumers don't care about that level of anonymity--they mostly want to keep their purchases from marketers, their friends and spouse, or from incompetent storefronts who would leak their personal data to criminals. That level of anonymity is given to you by Monero (or other cryptos if you engage in complicated tradecraft), but it's also given to you by non-blockchain digital currencies ala Haypenny, which is far easier for consumers to work with.

If all you had to do is move Bitcoin to AWS and it would scale to the level of a true currency, don't you think they would have tried that already? It's been over a decade now. It sure seems like this scalability problem would be solved by now if it were actually possible.

Or maybe it's a limitation of the blockchain architecture. But what do I know, I'm just a software architect with over 30 years of experience in mission-critical ultra-high-scale systems...