I like the idea of having correcting threads.

So to the point, I’ll just add some obvious information for potential newbies reading this:

If we define the effects of inflation as a resulting loss of purchasing power over time, and Bitcoin is a form of money that is provably increasing in purchasing power over time -> Then it’s just obvious that it is hedging against inflation.

What some people might not get is that every traded asset underlies market forces regardless, and Bitcoin specifically is also kinda cyclical. The point is: it won’t appreciate when you want it to, and the market might have already priced suspected events in beforehand. So to any newbie reading this, if you want to use Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation you also gotta hold it over longer periods of time, you can’t just go in when inflation is already at its worst and then expect Bitcoin to save you. That’s not how markets work. Time in the market beats timing the market, and you will have to operate on a being one step ahead basis.

They can, which outside source actually checks the legitimacy of procedures? None, anything can be considered suspicious and anyone can file an SAR for whatever they consider suspicious. There’s no punishment for false flags. And in case they falsely confiscate your funds, good luck proving it and going up against an army of lawyers, for sums that are not even worth this much effort.

// Edit: if you have a problem with people questioning the actual results and effectiveness of bs procedures and regulations, then idk how to help you. It has nothing to do with an agenda that i question how these things are actually handled. If regulations treat everyone as a potential criminal , demand further restrictions of financial freedom and produce no crime reducing results, then i dont see how they shouldnt be contested.

So people under mass surveillance are private when they just go along with it, even tho each of their steps is tracked, archived and can be questioned at any time?


True.

That’s something else. Proving it to a tax authority is standard procedure, you can document everything for that matter. Only taxes and death are certain, i personally wouldn’t play around there just to save some bucks, not worth the headache. A mixer is not a crime and not what would get you in jail or make documentation impossible. I wouldn’t even use these tools for any criminal activity or to try to launder money, they’re not even suited for this and real criminals will realise that the fiat system is much better suited for this.

Giving some private companies a pass to demand proof without any evidence, is a whole different ballgame tho. Now essentially customer support employees, algorithms and some surveillance companies have been given the power to freeze/ steal peoples funds with complete arbitrariness. And they can now hide their actions by just taking AML as an excuse, it will be barely possible to contest this for a regular person. This is completely backwards and no one can tell me that this is smh justified and not a problem.

When a business receives counterfeited bills, its recommended that they inform the police immediately. But a business cant just claim that your legit bills are suspicious and then keep them. Theres no real process that violates peoples rights there, but with coin taint its completely arbitrary and a process thats completely detached from the justice system.

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The irony is that real laundering happens inside the same institutions that „just follow regulations“, so in reality laws are imposed again that restrict financial freedom on people who are not even doing the laundering and real criminals can act like theyre fighting crimes and hide behind this. And then its also giving people a false sense of security and the impression that something is done against it.

Heres just one of countless examples.
But lets keep repeating that its the average joe that should make his whole life transparent to anyone to combat „crime“, regulations are there franky but anyone with a right mind would question and contest them when theyre complete bs, no matter if you run a business or not. Otherwise we end up in a clownshow where everyone starts enforcing useless bs on others, because of „regulations“ and no real problems are solved anymore.   

I think it’s for two reasons:

1. Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live). But when cash is not accepted at all, it’s a lot of people that experience this directly at the same time. Their funds are all blocked at the same time. So there will be more outcry and it can hurt business.

Coin taint and blacklisting are sneakier and psychologically more tricky. Not all users funds will be blocked/ frozen/ stolen at the same time. Most people that didn’t experience it directly won’t care enough or don’t even know it’s happening. They will maybe even buy into the bs reasoning for it, because their weren’t victims of it yet and maybe really believe that this is done for legitimate reasons and to solve a problem. Even tho it’s complete nonsense.

2. Cash has been around for a long time now and it’s acceptability is already widespread. Bitcoin is relatively new, as acceptability and usage grows i also would expect more people to react in similar ways to when it would happen to cash, but it’s still trickier when only a certain % of coins aren’t accepted. Similarly, i never saw an outcry when 500€ bills weren’t accepted somewhere, they only make a tiny percentage of bills in circulation and it didn’t affect enough users directly for people to care.

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It would definitely help if Bitcoin can’t be told apart, I’ll definitely look into the possibilities more and study. Cash can simply cheat trough legal tender and always force universal acceptance of bills, if it wants to. Or reduce fungibility if the government wanted to. Code might be the only way to achieve true fungibility, but social acceptance will always play a role regardless. It might be worth trying to advance in both battles at the same time.

Its a hard balance to achieve, but even taking 1 small step every day in either direction will bring you much further than doing nothing. And will already set you apart from most people who are doing nothing. Its not necessary to be perfect in this, consistency compounds by itself.

Yup, youre touching the point of having freedom in ones own work, this is true freedom. Its something that will take a lot of work and talent(everyone is talented in something, it takes exercise to become better) to to achieve. Being stuck in some corporate culture bs wont get you there, even if the compensation is good. So working on this early can pay out later on. Work that you really enjoy can also give meaning to a oneself, torturing oneself trough 40 years of lame meaningless work wont pay out. Sure this person will have finally time when theyre 70 year olds, but then its not even sure how pensions will be with the future demographics and the financial system, also when youre old priorities change, someone shouldnt only start to enjoy life at 70 years old, its too late. Someone whos still able to meaningfully work on their own terms in their 70s, will be truly free regardless. We should spend more energy on enjoying the now, than preparing to safely wait for death.

Ultimately, true meaning isnt achieved trough money or material things tho. A good wife will give you much more joy, money(theres women who are better at earning money than men nowadays), and meaning than any hooker can. You might have more fun driving an average car in a country like germany where there are tracks without speed limits, than it is to drive a supercar in the desert. It might be more fun to go for a roadtrip trough italy in a cheap car with friends/ family, than to drive a supercar alone. You might regret taking blow when it makes you age faster than you otherwise would or cant enjoy things without it anymore, because it affected the chemicals in your brain too much.

We get used to nice things fast and then were standing infront of the same problem again, and it will never be enough and theres always someone with nicer things than oneself. So everything is relative. Its possible to win at life with or without much money, Its possible to lose at life with or without much money. Its always possible to enjoy life in the absence/ presence of nice things, theres no need to make it dependent on either thing. Everyone can do it now. Im neither scared of having too much or too little money, i will structure my life in a meaningful to me way, regardless.

Some of them are free to work when they want and happy, while others are stuck with exploitative record labels and depressed. Freedom is true wealth.

Yup, its in millions. On my chart the last month is at $8.2 Billion(May 2022) tho. The discrepancy between El Salvador and Honduras would be logical, if we keep in mind that Honduras uses their own currency. So in times of high inflation it would make sense to hold more foreign exchange reserves that are stronger than the own currency, or to peg their own currency in some way? Their forex reserves were just at $5.5 Billion in january 2020, so the increase makes sense. El Salvador on the other hand is using the usd, it would make little sense to accumulate different currencies now, their focus also seems to be into investing into the country and Bitcoin at the moment.

And indeed they just increased their usd holdings.

• Honduras holds¹: 0.69 tonnes of gold and $8.292 billion.
• El Salvador holds²: 1.37 tonnes of gold and $3.484 billion.
• CAR holds³: nothing how it seems.

¹ https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/foreign-exchange-reserves/honduras/
² https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/foreign-exchange-reserves/el-salvador/
³ https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/gold-reserves/central-african-republic/

So i actually found something:
Theyre actually using a peg, so it makes sense.

From my understanding it serves different roles, for example: What i mentioned above to reduce risk by holding stronger currencies; To influence the value of the countries own currency, you would buy/sell another currency to keep your own currency at a certain rate for example, this then influences other things like the cost of exports/ imports; To trade and pay debts to other countries.

Yup, this is another use case to simply stay solvent, or to simply fund projects, pay for things or whatever.

That is what is fishy to me, they even created their own shitcoin.

It most likely is.

Thats how it is tho, it doesnt change anything about how transaction fees work.

We would know when too many miners started behaving dishonestly or too many couldnt afford to mine anymore, when honest miners cant keep outpacing attackers. The compensation just serves as an incentive for miners to stay honest, theres no fixed amount that determines whats enough for people to stay honest. It works on the basis that a majority stays honest, doesnt matter how.

Its a valid concern, but there are good counter arguments to this.

Higher risks of 51% attacks, so possible risk of double spendings, preventing transactions from getting confirmed etc.

If its extremely expensive to carry out these attacks, then its less likely to happen. Especially if it would be more profitable to work for the network than to attack it. If a majority remains honest regardless of compensation then they can still outpace any attacker, but they have running expenses so even someone honest will need compensation to keep mining. So if its profitable for a big amount of people, its likely that a big amount of people will mine honestly. No one wants to bite the hand that feeds them.

Ofc im not dumb, all i said is that its not easily possible to reduce fees without potential security or decentralization drawbacks. Idk if you correctly understood what i wrote. If there would be more blockspace than demand for it, there would be lower transaction fees than otherwise, its just logical. There would be no icentive to pay more than the minimum fee, when this one would always make it into the block anyways. So you need to maintain some level of scarcity, for achieving higher fees. Demand needs to outgrow blockspace, otherwise no one would choose to pay higher fees.  And when miners solely rely on fees for compensation, higher total fees will be a bigger incentive to keep miners honest/ enabling more miners to mine profitably, than lower ones.

I never said that fees wont be enough compensation, i think they will be. And ofc the number of miners matters too to a certain degree, if there was just 5 miners left, it couldnt seriously be considered secure anymore(ik this wont happen).

I get what youre trying to say franky, all im saying is that these services have no business flagging any privacy measure as suspicious in the first place, when they have no proof for anything beforehand. But im also aware this wont ever change in practice by itself.

Agree. We still need some preaching tho, to get more people aware and stop using these services, but its more important to have working solutions. Genuine question: lets assume Bitcoin had perfect privacy, would it be possible that these services would introduce taint trough whitelisting?

Theres not any single proof that you received coins that have been used in a crime. Your coins get frozen automatically on some services for just having used a mixer. General suspicion without any evidence is discrimination. Its not anyones business which privacy services youre using on your own money, if theres not a single evidence beforehand that you have been part of a single crime.

Also i dont think you understand how criminals operate or which tools theyre using, then every single tool in the world is now a tool criminals use. They also dont need mixers to do money laundering, and these ridiculous regulations wont prevent any crime from happening or will even break down on real money launderers.

Bs, many of these coins get stolen afterwards or simply frozen. Its completely dependent on the arbitrariness of a non-judiciary entity.

Bs again. The police can investigate something, but its still up to the justice system to decide. They will need evidence to prove you guilty. With how these services are handling it, you need proof for being innocent, which is completely backwards and unjust. Creating an environment of complete arbitrariness for not criminal users.

Its not what criminals do. If you think you can catch criminals by the way theyre walking on the street, you might have watched too many bad movies.

They do, they say youre guilty until proven otherwise. If you dont understand why this is important, you would have probably also cheered when people hunted "witches" during the dark ages.


Any proof on how many criminals use mixers? It also doesnt matter how many use it, because no AML legislation will reduce Money laundering crimes. They will just move somwhere else and now only legit people are completely robbed of their privacy forever for no reason.

Im unsure, their Bitcoin law was introduced in june and came into effect in september 2021. Maybe they sold off some forex before this to purchase Bitcoin, but as we can see levels are already back to before.

I disagree, how it seems is that El Salvador is actually bettering financially and trying to payoff it’s foreign debt beforehand in the upcoming weeks, let’s see if it comes true. They’re definitely not solely betting/ dependent on Bitcoin, their holdings are relatively small.

To me it seems their approach is actually more thought out than CARs approach.

Yup, but then it’s also not impossible to recover the seedphrase depending on how well family members/ friends could have access to it. Recovering an unknown passphrase is hard, but not always impossible depending on what passphrase was chosen. Having a plan early will make things easier. Some coins will get lost forever, some will be recovered, some will be passed on.

Im also a fan of maintaining a healthy balance between spending and saving throughout life. Simply saving everything is pointless, because you can’t get time back, so you might as well spend enough when you’re still able to. But simply spending everything, never allows someone to build something.

Let’s also add that some people that were part of introducing AML legislations are money launderers or law breakers themselves. Just because justice systems worldwide operate under double standards, doesn’t mean that high tier individuals have clean records, even when they go unpunished. They demand the average citizen to become completely transparent with every single thing they do in their life, but can’t live up to it themselves.

People should come back to their senses again and not comply with every privacy violating legislation there is. We should ask ourselves first, who is actually demanding all this information about us? We’re the ones keeping the world running, not them. If they’re cheating and keeping their activity opaque, we should for sure not give these people all of our information on a golden plate. They’re not our friends and they also don’t introduce these measures to protect us from anything. If so, they failed hard and these legislations don’t achieve anything. Except damaging the people they’re trying to protect. Too many people still fall for false senses of security.

Debasement doesn’t reduce fees tho, these two aren’t correlated. You would pay the same fees, regardless of debasement or not. The concern of some people is that transaction fees alone wouldn’t be enough to compensate miners and thus secure the network.

Reducing fees wouldn’t be that simple, you need to let more transactions in. But this comes at the cost of decentralization, depending on how much throughput you let in, because it becomes much harder to run a node. And if blockspace isn’t scarce enough, transactions fees are less likely to be enough to compensate miners, because it’s based on a fee market.

Lightning or sidechain proposals that will likely come in the future. Lightning is more suited for daily payments anyways, because of the speed of transacting. But this doesn’t mean the actual chain becomes unusable for other kinds of transactions, even if the fees ar higher. Different kind of transactions require different levels of security.

It’s not.

If were strictly talking about the coins itself then yes. But there can still be net benefits for a country/ person for simply starting to use/ learn Bitcoin, outside of having profited monetarily.


I am. K nah just kidding. Ofc you have to ultimately be able to spend, if you wanna get something in return for it. Otherwise it would be broken.

I wouldn’t overcomplicate it, not planning to sell doesn't mean not being able to. So having an asset that has the least likelihood of failure when other assets will, is like having an ace up one’s sleeve. Having an asset that’s least likely to be able to get confiscated, is also like having an ace up one’s sleeve. So it will be there exactly when betty needs it, kind of like an insurance.

And if we look at the current state of the world, where are the 400k best placed in? You have to put it somewhere to really preserve it, even when not planning to sell. And then again i don’t see a better option than Bitcoin for this purpose, for the simple fact that you can move and self custody it. Simply holding will benefit a whole lot of people trough many possible scenarios. Good luck crossing borders with 400k in gold, good luck spending 400k in fiat in other currencies or getting this trough the banking system easily. Simply holding Bitcoin can be the difference between a complete wipeout or having preserved even something for a lot of people, this is game changing.

In the scenario you mentioned where Bitcoin would hypothetically have dropped 50% over 10 years(which has never happened), she could have still profited by still having access to it. Something like gold can get confiscated in economic turmoil, currencies can undergo monetary reform where people get disadvantaged heavily. So it could be, that even in this hypothetical scenario where Bitcoin fell, that it preserved more value for the average person then they otherwise could preserve.

You never need an insurance, until you actually need it. And that’s where you benefit.

A bot that notifys me who replied, without me having to go trough the thread. How convenient.


Sure, but this is just noise in the long term. I actually met many newbies who are actually holding strong, despite just having mediocre knowledge about Bitcoin. Bitcoiners did a good job teaching people early, but sure this wont save everyone and it doesnt have to. Everyone is responsible for themselves. After enough market cap it will probably become obvious by itself even to paper hands and sceptics, and then the real fomo starts.

And like i said, you dont need to have profited from Bitcoin for it to be useful. Even when youre starting from scratch its better to go into Bitcoin than some fiat, gold or other bs. In times of woke politicians and recessions, i wouldnt trust anyone but myself to keep my assets safe. So even if youre not there to profit from Bitcoin primarily, the choice of barely confiscatable assets to save some purchasing power long term, is really small. This really is for everyone, no matter when they started.

Now i got it, i agree with you. There can’t be democracy without privacy. So I’ll add some points.

• It also changes the behaviour of people when they know they’re being watched. This has economic and social consequences as shown in states like china and east Germany.
  
• People might conform to the government, even when they personally disagree with it, because they know they’re being watched or it could be used against them.
• People might also start to trust other people in society less and try to maintain a public image that conforms to the government, so they won’t share their real opinions with each other anymore. So people could start doing things they disapprove of even tho most disagree with it, simply because information isn’t shared between each other.
• The population is supposed to put checks on the government, but this becomes impossible without privacy.

Nah it’s for everyone, you forgot that people can also use it. It’s 1 million times better than other currencies, so it will simply become a dominant currency over time, where people also use it. Bitcoin is the valuable thing, not fiat. Some people just realised it earlier than others, that’s why they’re profiting. But people can still use Bitcoin later on when they missed out on the opportunity, as it will still be a much better currency and thus benefits them. No inflation, Self-custody, censorship resistance, no middleman medium of exchange etc. It doesn’t matter if someone in 100 years made money from it or not, as there is no better alternative form of money and thus it benefits everyone. So it really is for everyone. We just have the opportunity now to get sats for cheap, because people are still unaware.

I respect your opinion, but i still disagree. What i mean with first signs are: Many companies are starting to get into tough spots and have to bear higher costs at the moment. Things like energy prices will bring their production costs up, but at the same time many are only able to produce less at the moment. And at the same time inflation is decreasing purchasing power in the population, so to combat this there is pressure to increase workers wages at the same time. But at the same time they have to bear inflation too and the costs of it. Then we have rising interest rates that will also make it harder to pay off new loans. So we have rising production costs, but lower production ability, lowering purchasing power and potentially higher interest rates at the same time. This could lead to layoffs if companies cant bear this.

I included the other posts so its easier for others to follow.

I actually agree with your definition and this is what is actually needed for money in my opinion. I called it democratic, because i didnt know how i should describe it otherwise, but yeah its consensus based money. But i think this is whats actually needed, everyone is open to propose ideas or implement them themselves, but they gotta get consensus for it, or they simply stay in the minority. This leads to a competition of ideas and the best one wins.

For money this is desirable, because it tends to monopolize to the best one. The one that achieves a balance between individual interests and societies benefit. A money that has no users will have no worth, so it cant focus on just serving specific groups interests. And a money that doesnt serve its users will keep loosing users and thus lose value over time, so it also cant ignore individuals interests. I disagree with the author and i think individuals interests and societies interests balance each other out, you cant just serve one. In a free market the money that achieves this balance best, will get most users and thus have most value and win. In markets with legal tender government currencies, theres room for 2 currencies, soft and hard money, while the hard is the one that will be used as a store of value. And will replace the soft money as a medium of exchange, once the soft one has lost too much value. This cycle is expressed in greshams and thiers law.

So to make things short the best consensus based money is actually what achieves a balance between societies and individuals interests. If it doesnt do this, it simply wont be adopted by the majority anymore. If it stops doing this it will be replaced by something that can do this better over time.

I dont think its privacy what would make democratic money fail, but that it would end up with a weird mix of properties that satisfy neither of the interests. Ideas cant be proposed or implemented without approval. And you basically have a completely theoretical process where ideas need to get the most votes before theyre implemented and proven in practice. It would be opaque and not clear for most voters what the best decisions are, and not everyone is a monetary system designer or has ever thought about this, this can also backfire heavily where the group with the most votes will simply serve themselves and thus not benefit society anymore. Consenus based money allows us to simply let ideas compete in practice and it will be clear by itself which one serves everyone the best after enough time. It gives everyone their voice back, that can be lost in democracies.

Sure, so:

And here more to the banking failures:

Now sure one could argue that expansion of the money supply could help here, but then the other question is if its really not just postponing problems into the future, similar to 2008.

It could be argued that a Bitcoin standard could prevent banking failures in the first place, as it is fully backed. But then it also depends on how many people hold their own keys etc.

Thanks, ill move my replies to there.

Stagflation occured in the 70s tho and this disproved the assumption. And i suspect that we could be seeing it again not so far in the future, as theres first signs that point to it, that arent reflected in the statistics yet. But were not fully there yet and it doesnt have to occur. Thats why i just said first signs. I shouldve stated it more clearly, employment is still up but i think were in a dangerous position where it could start to flip, depending on how things will play out in the future.