Might as well cut the bullshit and just say whoever puts up the biggest fiat wall controls consensus, meaning no consensus even exists and everything is just a derivative of whoever has the most USD.  The only way for that to change is for bitcoin to become the world unit of account, but that's not actually possible because bitcoin can't defeat gold and silver on Exter's pyramid when metals are a far superior store of value.  Meaning if the USD dies, you will either be transitioned back into another scam currency by the same banking cartel, or the world will use gold and silver as a Schelling point for real money.

That excuse doesn't work when bitcoin launched with higher than 1MB blocks in the first place so a "bitcoin can never fork" purist doesn't even have a valid reference point to stand on.  The fact is, just about everything regarding bitcoin (and every other cryptocurrency) is completely arbitrary in nature and wide open to rough consensus attack.  There are TWO ethereums.  There could be 100 ethereums tomorrow.  It's pretty much inevitable there will be more than one bitcoin.

This is why it's called a cryptocurrency and not money.  Currencies are arbitrary games that people create, while money does not fork or change.  I don't have to worry about Adam sneaking into my house and trying to fork my gold or silver.  Nobody should even own currency in the first place unless you actively use it or are a forex trader.  90% of this forum are basically acting as forex traders without the skills to do so.  It's also far more common for people holding currencies pretending they're stores of value to get horrifically burned than to profit.

Full nodes are meaningless to the debate and easily Sybil manufactured.  What is not easily Sybil manipulated?  The longest chain of course.  You can't just change the rules of the game on the fly and pretend miners don't matter when the entire system is based around whatever the longest chain is.  The rules of the game are if you don't like what some miners are doing, you're required to mine harder than them.  If your stance is that a cartel in China has taken control of bitcoin colluding together to control it and no Nash equilibrium exists whatsoever, then you're in the bitcoin has failed camp already in the first place.

Miners are supposed to represent the Nash equilibrium, so if you say you can't "trust" the miners, all you're really saying is that no nash equilibrium exists and bitcoin was a failed experiment that should not have value in the first place.

Hence my post:

The value of a bitcoin is based on cost of production and not scarcity in the first place anyway:




And another comparing metals vs bitcoin economics:

This was my battle plan for bitcoin and the market did pretty much exactly what I expected it to do:


But after the price went to $1050 this was my view:

Ethereum is mostly just R3 subsidiaries who don't like bitcoin because they didn't get in on the ground floor and used Vitalik as a useful idiot front man while buying up the whole premine then using that premine as leverage collateral on Bologniex.  This is the moment cryptocurrency became a complete cesspit that should be avoided by the public entirely because they aren't even using real money to pump this thing.  They have a bunch of illiquid assets they can't even dump for profit because...they are the entire market themselves...so they leverage those illiquid assets to try and attract momentum traders and then dump on them.  Ethereum is a giant rat trap.

I guess he forgot the halvings are designed to force a ponzi element where either the price goes up or a large percent of miners go bankrupt.  And then current cost of production always negatively affects previously mined coins if current cost of production goes below cost of production when you bought in if the halving fails to perform it's ponzi magic.  This is why I say the value of bitcoin is based on it's cost of production and not scarcity as I talked about in this post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1442399.msg18167916#msg18167916

Bitcoin and mass adoption?  MatTheCat doesn't even know how to properly set transaction fees to get included into the next block and he's been using bitcoin since 2012.  He kept complaining transactions take 3 hours to get into the next block.  I had to tell him how to do it and I think he still doesn't know how after I told him.  Not to mention the fact normal humans would also have to learn things like RBF and other such peculiarities on top of that, of which they're not really capable.

The only way bitcoin is getting mass adoption is if it functions as the back end of some type of system, but that would likely defeat the entire purpose.  Some entity would just do a switcharoo and change it to a fiat back end while maintaining the same front end (which is what would probably happen with LN eventually).  Metals ownership is only around 3/4th's of 1% of the US population and it requires no technical knowledge.  Metals ownership will likely soar as the economy blows up, but I don't think bitcoin ownership can do better than metals unless it functions as a back end system (which as I said, is probably pointless as a back end).

Any system of bitcoin as a back end will always be used by the state as a scam to trick people into a digital only, ban on cash slave system.  But they can also easily co-opt bitcoin through the legal system, the attack vector of the enormous physical size of mining pools, the fact that network traffic and transactions aren't obfuscated, etc.  It's kind of difficult to beat the state with bitcoin no matter what.  You can hide from the state with metals because they're incapable of surveiling physical space of the entire planet, but they can easily lock down the digital domain.

It's not.  I expected the price to do this already without factoring a BU hardfork in at all.  So right now I feel like the market has not priced in any hardfork.  Meaning if no fork occurs, I guess it can hold this position, but if one does happen, it would likely dump:

That was the most illogical thing I've ever read.  A bond market meltdown and sovereign debt crisis that threatens the currency itself is not....bullish on stocks.  Just about the only thing it is explicitly bullish for is metals.  I don't really care about tertiary effects of some fund that has more money than it knows what to do with puts money in stocks because it doesn't know what else to do.  All I care about is the trade that maximizes profit and stocks are not going to be it.  Hell, stocks are far more likely to be losing than gaining anything.

Another neat conditioning scheme to get people into a digital only ban on cash slave system.  It's even backed by very fake news CNN.  All apps conveniently phone orientated because women love phones while also being the easiest thing on earth to brainwash since they just follow whatever popular opinion is perceived.  

That's an app for you to invest in currency, not money.  The bankers love the goyim to not know what money even is and to pretend they're gaining some type of wealth by hoarding currency only to then have the rug pulled out from under them.  Why pretend you're amassing wealth and removing counter party risk when you actually can with:

Is Adam the president?

Depends if you believe lightning network will function in a decentralized manner or will be a valid scaling solution in general or not.  If you think it won't, Bitcoin needs around 8MB blocks at minium to be globally relevant as a payment system, and even then transaction fees are gonna be yuge.  It would still be limited to things like realtors or car salesmen doing big transactions, or people transferring something like $10,000 of their bitcoin at a time to a centralized off-chain payment system like the Bitpay Visa.

Such a use case would still only place bitcoin in the status of settlement layer.  I personally believe bitcoin does not function as a store of value, which is inherently required to be a settlement layer.  If people were looking for the base of Exter's pyramid (store of value) you should be looking at gold and silver instead.  Due to this, the price of bitcoin has to be floated by just raw transaction processing numbers aka utility, so huge scaling is imperative to it's price.  

The only way currently known to get that type of scaling is a solution like LN, so it seems like to me that the life and death of Bitcoin may rest on the ability of LN to work or not.

By that logic, such an attack would have occurred years ago on people like Gavinator, Wlad, or Gmaxwell already...

This event was foreseeable from a mile away.  Me + Adam were both bearish while MatTheCat was bullish.  There has never been a better indicator of where the market is headed than that.

It won't be inflation, it will be transfer of wealth.  But sure, there could be hyperinflation and god knows what else going on at the same time and maybe you'll see gold revalued to $200,000 an ounce instead.  The act of doing so won't be inflationary though, it will be transfer of wealth of digital and/or paper fiat being invalidated.

I'll take the exact opposite of that trade.  The main macro level bet someone should be making is shorting the US debt.  Buying stocks is definitely not that trade.  Yea, stocks will benefit from inflation if they monetize the debt from no buyers in the bond market, but it's far more bullish for metals, especially considering the starting point of both assets.  Stocks starting from stupidly high prices and metals in an inverse bubble.  Metals should win any inflation trade, definitely when they also hedge against govt going out of control while stocks don't.

As for bitcoin, while everyone was completely full of shit saying bitcoin was going to skyrocket and metals were going to drop, I sold all bitcoin at $1168 to hold cash on the sidelines and wait for the drop:







Bought more silver at $16.90 too before the fed rate hike increased the price because I knew the bottom is already in on metals without a massive deflationary event.

This is the only outcome from here concerning US debt:

What about shorting the US debt?