LOL, they are going to get their $100M ripped off from Trump whether he wins or loses.

If Trump wins, he will be accountable to nobody--just like Putin and Xi are accountable to nobody in their countries. The only reason Trump would help Bitcoin would be if it made himself richer, but he would make far more money trashing Bitcoin in favor of his own personal crypto (or some similar scheme) rather than pumping Bitcoin, most of which he would not own.

What "immutable laws of math and physics" is stopping the CCP from ordering some of its people to take over the hashrate of Bitcoin and thus take control of it? That's all it would take to annihilate Bitcoin and every block it stores. 


I believe the comparison to an American bank is flawed.  Unlike a bank, which readily shares identifiable information with the government upon request, you operate as a company issuing custom currencies.  If these currencies facilitate anonymous transactions beyond your tracking capabilities, you're essentially conducting operations beyond the government's oversight.  Eventually, you'll be viewed as enemy to them, and if that happens... bye-bye Haypenny.   
[/quote]

Correct. Haypenny is analogous to a cryptocurrency in this regard since we merely supply the transaction mechanism and we don't take in US dollars etc.

And we offer the government tracking of transactions from point A to point B, similar (and probably much more precisely) than what you'd get using chain analysis on Bitcoin. If the government wanted to track a transactions, there would be two end points we would supply them and then they would subpoena those endpoints and have their suspect.

Overall, using Haypenny to do a crime would be about as smart as using GMail to discuss a crime with your fellow criminals with pseudonyms. Maybe some are stupid enough to use GMail like that, but they'd be caught pretty quick. (And Haypenny also tracks IPs and VPN companies are in the same boat we are in e.g. they can be subpoenaed to find the real IPs etc. so again, criminals would be really stupid to try to use Haypenny to do crime).

Right now there's a heated debate about miners needing to pay an extra tax in another thread here. Who are these miners? Oh that's right, they are readily identifiable individuals. If the government could target them they could target any blockchain network. I think we're talking about relative doomsday scenarios--governments aren't going to shut down either of us--but ultimately there's nothing especially "government-proof" about Bitcoin or any human invention. Fighting governments will always be a losing proposition no matter what--the only way to keep yourself safe is to vote (and support democracies over dictatorships).

Shutting down Bitcoin would be a simply matter of throwing some money at the problem. Shutting down Citibank would require a legal fight. I think both of these scenarios are very, very far-fetched, but based on the track record, I would believe my money to be safer at Citibank than in Bitcoin (and of course that's assuming I have round-the-clock armed guards protecting my keys--the reality is that most rely on an institution that is smaller and far less safe than Citibank to hold their keys).


Why should I use bricks to build my house instead of just wood?  After all, you can break both.  

[/quote]

As I said above, Bitcoin is, as a whole, probably easier to attack than a large American bank. And in the average reality of a typical holder of Bitcoin, mostly a LOT easier since it could be some sketchy broker--or worse, somebody doing something stupid with their private keys like putting them on their iPhone with a password.


Yeah, getting into a direct fight with the world's governments doesn't sound like a good long range strategy to me. I would never invest in Monera for that reason. Even a medium-sized government could shut them off if they wanted to, and they wouldn't need a court order to do it and in fact nobody could do anything about it.


The minute you trade Bitcoin for anything actually tangible or for a sovereign currency, you are in the same position.


Here's a handy chart:

Haypenny currencies: Protected from criminals, marketers, your snooping friends, and hackers; not protected from a valid government subpoena.

Monera: Protected from everybody.

Bitcoin: Open to criminals, marketers, your snooping friends, hackers AND governments even without a subpoena.

If you fear government prosecution you have to use Monera or something like it. You basically have no choice.

You are far better off using a Haypenny currency from a privacy perspective than you are with Bitcoin in either case.

IBM mainframes are not obsolete, and they are still a multi-billion dollar business.

They are just no longer the "hottest thing" for most consumers, that's all.


As we've discussed in another thread, Bitcoin is no longer "censorship resistant" by itself (e.g. without mixers etc.) because of chain analysis. Criminals no longer use Bitcoin because of this--they will get caught if they do.

Even if it were, most consumers simply don't care about that, as is shown by the fact that almost all Bitcoin investors get Bitcoin through a broker or app, which is centralized.

Bitcoin is indeed very good for its stability as a project, and it's broad network. But lots of products can match that, and do. Again, 99% of Bitcoin investors rely on a centralized database governed by a single private company to hold their Bitcoin. That demonstrates they simply don't care about "decentralization" and all of that stuff.


Bitcoin will never replace mainstream daily transactions, and it was never meant to. Such a currency would need to scale to levels thousands of times larger than Bitcoin, and the blockchain architecture is intentionally slow by design. The problem it was trying to solve was ""censorship resistance"", not trying to be a common payment method.



If people did what you are suggesting, the price of Bitcoin would drop by 95%, so... people aren't going to do what you are suggesting .

Bitcoin is going to be fine, but it's not going to be the last word in digital currency, that's all. There will be new things that will be even cooler than Bitcoin.

As we've discussed in another thread this week, a major nation-state like China could easily take over Bitcoin if it wanted to by controlling 51% of the hashrate. In our discussions most agreed that it was completely possible, although people questioned why they (or any other big country) would want to do that, which I agree with.

And by the same token, I don't know why some state-level actor would want to attack Haypenny either. Or PayPal, or Visa, or Citibank, or a corner grocery store?

I agree Haypenny can be attacked, but so could anything.


Have governments gone after the many blockchain-based currencies that are defacto centralized (e.g. Ether)? I don't see why they would since these entities have public ledgers like Bitcoin does, and as such they can be tracked by anybody, including criminals, marketers, and... governments.

Haypenny, like any company, will respond to valid government subpoenas, and we make that very clear to our customers. But unlike cryptocurrencies with public ledgers, your transactions aren't out in the public for all to see. This makes Haypenny far more private that most blockchain-based currencies.

And this brings us right back to the beginning of this thread: blockchain's sole advantage is resisting government subpoenas into transaction activity. Then they figured out that Bitcoin couldn't really do that because of chain analysis, so mixers were invented. Now governments are cracking down on mixers. If they are successful, one wonders what utility Bitcoin has at all, since net-net it's less private than non-blockchain-based currencies like Haypenny.


Of course we follow the law. There's no demand for an entity to do KYC who does not take in or give out tradable money. We are regulated exactly as any cryptocurrency is regulated.

As for our transaction integrity, every Haypenny transaction is written to three geographically separate locations before the transaction is marked as completed. And then, within about 10 seconds, transactions are written to military/financial-compliant distributed WORM system, meaning transactions cannot be erased no matter what, forever. This treatment of data is similar, or generally exceeds that of any major financial institution like a bank or a broker. (And as such, 95% of Bitcoin investors probably do not have this level of transaction integrity since their broker of choice is probably not this diligent with their transactions, and they may not even be with their own direct Bitcoin transactions).

Haypenny is a digital currency, just like Bitcoin is. You could also say, "Bitcoin operates similarly to PayPal but without the need for identification". I guess that's one way to look at it...

Anyhow, Haypenny is just the transaction mechanism. Like with Bitcoin, the businesses who are compelled to deal KYC and so forth are the ones who take in and send out sovereign currencies e.g. US dollars and so forth. The Haypenny platform itself doesn't do that. We rely on brokers just like blockchain-based digital currencies do.

Of course, authorities can "demand" all they want--the platform simply doesn't have any identity inside of it. The only personal information we collect is an email address, and that's only for those wanted to create their own currency. You can have a client-side wallet with no identity at all if you want.

Yeah, use an anonymous means of payment that's more expensive and less convenient in order to buy... a car... that is necessarily... registered in your name.

Moronic...

This is a reminder that digital currency will never be something that people use for "large" transactions in a mainstream way because most people don't want anonymity for large purchases, only small ones. Most people don't want their car or house owned by a private key that could be lost or could be stolen, they want it owned by themselves using their actual name.

(Conversely, most people want "small" purchases to be totally anonymous).

They buy bonds. There's really not enough space here to explain macroeconomics, but suffice it to say that they don't just "print money" and the actual supply of hard currency is actually quite disconnected from what the FED actually does.


FTX stole money, and under Biden, they were charged and convicted. That's what a normal presidency does to things like FTX. That's not what Trump does, who had already pardoned numerous financial criminals, and has promised to pardon many more if he's elected again.

A kleptocracy is not a place where crimes happens--that describes all countries. Rather, a kleptocracy is where the ruler of the country allows criminals to rip people off as long as they kick up to the ruler, e.g. like a mafia boss. That's what Putin has already in Russia, and what Trump wants to create for the USA.

Just an example. With the power of the presidency, Trump would hardly have to do anything all to drop Bitcoin's price by 90% or more.

Trump wouldn't bother with a CBDC because the US government would own it, not him. In fact, he'd probably be against it because a CBDC would compete with a "Trump Coin" too, conceivably.

I really don't see any political support for a CBDC in the USA from any side, frankly.

Well, the FED doesn't "print money". It doesn't work that way...



Biden will be fine for Bitcoin, as would any normal president would be. Trump will be a disaster. Biden will be "non-bad" for Bitcoin, I guess is another way to put it.

And the economic instability we had during COVID is nothing compared to what Trump could do with the markets if he starts screwing around with them, like the way he's messing around with his public company's stock. He has no doubt figured out the US presidency could easily make him the richest man in the world by just making some relatively innocuous moves like say denigrating Bitcoin in favor of his own crytpo.


That was before Trump showed the world he was the "real deal" by attacking the US Capitol, and his party showed that they would support him no matter what laws he broke. The next Trump administration will be nothing like the first. All of the "normal Republicans" are gone. This new regime will be pure grift. Trump has promised to pardon all of the 1/6 criminals, and had already pardoned dozens of financial criminals. He's clearly signaling that he intends to run a kleptocracy just like Putin does in Russia wherein he is essentially at the top of a crime family: kick up to Trump, and you can do whatever you want.

FTX was shut down and SBF was put in prison under Biden. So that makes no sense...

Again, the situation is exactly the same whether the means of transaction was PayPal, Bitcoin, a credit card, or an envelope with some paper bills. Some actual humans need to be involved in a merchandise return situation, which costs a business money to deal with.

There are probably other services that deal with this cheaper, but in any case you are not paying for the price of PayPal's servers to move a few rows in their database around, you are paying for human beings to deal with a customer service problem.


A digital currency is a... digital currency, e.g. like Bitcoin, or Ether, or Haypenny. Digital currencies are digital tokens that maintain their value by virtue of one's possession of it, as opposed to one's identity like as in a bank or credit card or PayPal etc. Digital currencies allow value transfer without an exchange of personal information. For instance, here is 1M USDE (non-negotiable) in DollHairs: gmBe00H5TVgD1XiA6tOEPR. Put that into your Haypenny wallet (which requires no identity), and you have the Doll Hairs (see how fun this is? ).

It's worth noting that lots of blockchain-based digital currencies (aka cryptocurrencies) are defacto centralized since they don't have a broad dispersal of servers, or don't have very many servers. Indeed, probably most cryptos could be taken over fairly easily by a central entity, which makes them only "temporarily" decentralized. And there's lots of debate over whether Ether and others are "really" decentralized since there is so much control over these systems by a single company.

(And I'll be wondering how long before somebody claims those Doll Hairs ).

Bitcoin is being regulated by governments because a lot of consumers are using it, and like anything that becomes a part of consumer financial life, problems arise. But these regulations ultimately help the market because it makes it safer for your average consumer to enter it, and reduces social downsides (e.g. terrorism and criminality).

And while I agree with everybody here that it's currently unlikely China (or some other big country*) would want to do this to Bitcoin, it's important to understand that it's absolutely possible.

(* On another thread, we've discussed the possibility of the USA doing this if Trump was elected, so he could kill Bitcoin and force everybody to use his own personal currency instead--for instance...).

That $20 chargeback fee is still cheaper than what you'd pay for the necessary Bitcoin transaction to send the money back in that situation. And of course for that $20 you are mostly paying for administrative time, which would be the same amount of work regardless of the technical means of the transaction. That means that in a Bitcoin scenario, you'd probably pay the $30 for the Bitcoin transaction and pay some company another $15 to mess around with the legal/contractual situation around the chargeback.

And through all of this, we've been talking about the old, slow, outdated system known as "PayPal'. The future is pure digital currencies that are not based on blockchain. My company's transaction fee is baked into the name of the company: one haypenny, or $0.005, or one half of a cent. That's the price of all transactions, no matter how big or small, and transactions are completed in under 10 milliseconds, and credibly scaling to handle every daily transaction the occurs by the human race on a daily basis.

Blockchain-based currencies are simply non-viable for mainstream transactions. That's why nobody has made this happen, despite billions and billions of dollars in hype that has been lavished on the idea. Blockchain will stay around forever as a means of providing investment instruments, but consumer transactions are quite another story.

LOL, "started pumping". Okay. Sure. It doesn't change the fact that Biden's presidency has been very, very good for Bitcoin.



I never said they could. And I personally see no direct connection between the presidency and the price of Bitcoin as long as things are stable. A normal Democrat like Biden or a normal (pre-2016) Republican would be fine. But Trump very uniquely brings a high degree of risk to this market, which could very well crush the price of Bitcoin down to something like $10,000 or lower. If Trump wins, people should prepare for the worst.

Bitcoin transactions can cost 30 US dollars. PayPal charges a buck or two for small transactions. What are you talking about?

Are you seriously trying to say that Bitcoin is superior to every other from of value transfer because... it's cheaper?

Bitcoin went up 500% under president Biden.


That was before Trump learned he could blatantly break the law and his voters wouldn't care in the slightest. And that was back when Trump had actual Republicans in his administration who actually cared about the country. He calls those same former Republicans "enemies" now they won't be around to keep the country from collapsing this time.


Trump is not a libertarian, and there's no evidence he's more "free market" than Biden. He's not a traditional Republican from the 1990s or something. Those lines don't mean anything anymore in the Trump era.

And no, Trump wouldn't lose any votes because nothing he does loses votes. He pardoned one of his associates for ripping off his own supporters and they don't care.

And no, Trump surely wouldn't do a CBDC, he'd do a private coin that he owned most of, making it so he'd get most of the profits. Trump doesn't care about the USA, he cares about Trump.


I know that, and you know that, but try telling that to zealots who think they have been sent down from God to stop the murder of millions of what they consider "children". Republican have a big big project on their hands trying to stop millions of women from getting abortions every year--and by extension getting millions to stop having sex. This will be the drug war times ten by the time they are done. Crypto could very easily get caught up in that.

The safe bet is reelecting Biden, who presided over Bitcoin going up 500%.

So Trump just reversed himself.

Why are you so sure he won't reverse himself again once he's elected?

Why do you trust a convicted criminal like Trump on faith like that?

But wait, if the project includes blockchain, how can it possibly fail, since, as you said above, it automatically make a system secure, right? As opposed to other technologies that have been around for decades (say what your bank account is stored in) that are somehow "insecure"?

True: in the proper context (e.g. with thousands of servers like Bitcoin has), and with good governance, a blockchain architecture can be made to be secure.

Also true: you can make any software system secure with good governance and careful testing.

The only difference is that using the blockchain architecture adds unnecessary layers of software that make the system more complicated (which makes it inherently less secure), and adds unnecessary costs (thousands of servers), and still involves a risk of a network overthrow, which could even happen to Bitcoin from a nation-state like China.


It's just one of the many use cases there but I've found this for that specific and many others did actually used it.

[/quote]

Maybe actually read the content of the link before you cite it? Here you go:

"Voatz recently has come under fire for their application security. A team of MIT researchers published a paper that outlined numerous issues, specifically highlighting their vulnerability to third party attacks. The paper specifically advised the Department of Homeland Security to abandon the use of the app in high-stakes elections. Since then, West Virginia has paused use of the app while Utah county will continue to do so because of its popularity"

This is exactly my problem with people who think just saying the word, "blockchain" will magically make a system more secure. While it's technically possible to make a secure blockchain system, it is harder to make it secure with blockchain than without it.

And using a decentralized architecture for a centralized problem like voting (viz. votes must necessarily be connected to a real human identity not an anonymous public key), is really (sorry), pretty dumb .

---

Every new technology architecture that comes along in the IT world always has "case studies" that document increased customer value, reduced costs, and other benefits. Tools sellers like Microsoft and Amazon love these things, and you will see all of the technology architectures have these studies to show proven customer benefit from the architecture.

They don't have anything like that for blockchain. Nobody does. That's because IT projects are all done by known entities who are by definition centralized in their governance, so using an architecture that makes the system slower, more expensive and more complicated makes no sense.

Blockchain's only unique benefit is that it thwarts government subpoenas into transactions. That's it. That's all it does that other architectures don't do. And to solve that specific problem a very complicated and expensive and less secure architecture was invented to solve the problem.

But if you don't have that problem, then you are just wasting your time using the architecture and probably making your project less secure.

Thousands of "manager types" have probably instructed their engineers to "create xyz using blockchain" because it was the hottest buzzword for a while. This was driven mostly by the market cap of BTC and nothing else.

But when engineers go to actually implement a blockchain system, they learn the actual reality here, which is that buzzwords don't solve problems (but they sure can create a whole bunch you otherwise never would have had).

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Yep, I did. See the above comment about that experiment. Hint: it was a failed one.



You should really understand the technology you are talking about before commenting on it . The time it takes to verify a Bitcoin transaction is not some variable in the program that determines how long they want to make a user wait. That time is spent doing calculations that are slow on purpose based on the architecture.



If you aren't anonymous, then why use is blockchain? If you just want to keep a database of every known person's vote, why not... just keep a database of every known person's vote? This can be done very securely and has been done like this for billions and billions of votes worldwide.

Bitcoin would crash if Trump was elected because he brings chaos and risk into the markets. Trump is corrupt and has shown he will use the power of the US presidency to fill his own pockets, and he absolutely doesn't care about anybody else. That means he is apt to do something like create his own crypto and ban Bitcoin, for instance, and make it illegal to hold anything but his currency. (This wouldn't necessarily "kill" Bitcoin, but it would certainly drive the price down to just a few dollars). And using the power of the presidency (without any fear of being prosecuted or impeached), Trump could do a million other things.

Remember that in his last presidency Trump pardoned criminals who ripped off money from his own supporters. He knows he can get away with anything, so he acts accordingly.

And if it isn't Trump trying to rip off Bitcoin holders, there's also the matter of the huge police state his administration needs to create in order to stop all of the millions of abortions that occur in the US every year (their intention to stop abortions nationwide is outlined very clearly in Trump's policy document; tl;dr: Republicans consider abortion to be "murder" and they will do absolutely everything they can to stop it in all 50 states and through the internet).

Once the Trump administration figures out that Bitcoin can be used to pay for illegal abortions, they will ban it.

Bitcoin went up 500% under president Biden.. The safe path here is to stay with a known winner, not take a risk on a criminal like Trump, or the fundamentalists who would run his administration.

I don't like to mix politics and business either, but the business decision here is to stick with the stable state, not take a wild risk with something fundamentally different.

The Trump administration will crack down on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency when they figure out it can be used to pay for illegal abortions. There are millions of abortions happening in the USA every year, and Trump's policy document makes it clear he will work to stop every single one of them, because they believe it's murder.

Stopping all of the abortions in the USA will rival the old "War On Drugs" in scope. They are going to need to build a great big new government presence in order to do it. That will include taking out cryptocurrency.

That's just one example of how Trump could utterly annihilate Bitcoin and the crypto market in general, especially the aspect of the market that stop's Trump's government from enforcing all of the new laws they want to pass controlling people's behavior, e.g. cryptocurrency.