From the standpoint of the average consumer, there is no difference. It's just a different way of betting on the Bitcoin meme, which is all most people actually want to do with Bitcoin.

As for why consumers want this, I've discussed this before in the Anon Paradox: consumers want to keep their "big" money someplace... safe--even if they would like to keep their "small money" someplace anonymous.

In other words:

• Most people don't want to hide their life savings in a mattress.
• Most people don't want to put their retirement savings inside of their iPhone where they can simply lose it in a landfill.
• Most people would be afraid somebody might physically steal it from them if they kept their own savings or major holdings on their person.
• Most people don't want to build a mini version of Fort Knox in their spare bedroom.
• Most people don't like the idea of having something in their house that others might kill for.

Because of this, most people use an amazing invention of civilization called, "specialization". In other words, you work all of your life to be a great dentist, and somebody else focuses their life's efforts on, say, keeping your money safe.

That's why we have banks and other financial institutions. It's not a government conspiracy, it's just a product that consumers want and need.

And Coinbase and the ETF are really just variants of the same product.

I guess what Xi and Putin want is for people to be convinced that their dictatorships are the same as our democracies...

What is a non-blockchain digital currency like Haypenny currencies if not "an L2 scaling solution"?

In the future, there will be two things:

1. Truly decentralized blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and just a few others that are safe enough to invest in because they have a very large server pool.

2. Pure digital currencies not based on the blockchain architecture, that are fast, cheap,  and can be used for tiny transactions like that of a vending machine.

For me, there's not really any room for "centralized blockchain" because it makes absolutely no sense.

What are you talking about? Bitcoin went up 500% under president Biden.

Trump promises radical change to our country and to our economy. His plan to deport 5% of the residents of the USA alone will wreak havoc on our economy. Bitcoin can be used to pay for illegal abortions, so his administration will probably want to shut it down the minute the election is over.

The safe bet here is to stick with Biden and the Democrats.

Based on your comments here, it would appear that you are fine with the Chinese government and the Iranian government being involved in business in the US, just not the American government preventing them from doing so. Interesting....

The Trump administration would have done the same thing, so you should actually be okay with what Biden is doing here.

Bitcoin is legal to hold and trade in almost every country in the world, including China.

If any major country like the US actually made it illegal, the price of Bitcoin would probably drop by 90%.

There are no major governments even remotely threatening to ban Bitcoin. Spreading this kind of misinformation about Bitcoin makes it a less attractive investment for mainstream investors, so please stop that.

It's much more likely Trump will panic the markets since he is erratic, corrupt, and it proposing extremely radical change to every aspect of American life based on his written policy statements.

While there's always chance Bitcoin will go up slightly, Trump introduces the risk that it could drop by 90% or more because he and/or his administration figure out how to manipulate the markets in order to make themselves more money, e.g. making Bitcoin illegal and instead pumping a coin that Trump himself owns.

Also note that stopping the millions of abortions in the USA will require a new kind of police state that will dwarf the old "war on drugs", and in that environment they will surely go after things like Bitcoin since it can be used to pay for things the government doesn't want.

Bitcoin went up 500% under Biden. The safe bet here is to stay the course.

A larger government like the US or China could easily claim over 50% of the hashrate can thus control Bitcoin. This would take an unthinkable amount of money and resources for an individual or terrorist group, but for a major country it would be no problem.

Short of that, since most holders of Bitcoin don't hold their actual private keys, and they instead use a broker, and since these brokers are ordinary centralized companies, then a government could effectively outlaw Bitcoin for almost all of its current users (and thus drop the price of Bitcoin by about 99% while they were at it).

This idea that Bitcoin is "government proof" is a myth.

The reason why the US or some other large government hasn't stopped Bitcoin is because they don't want to. There's no reason to. Any large government could take over 50% of the hashrate and do whatever they wanted with Bitcoin if they felt like it.

Bitcoin is legal in almost every country in the world, even in China for the most part. I'll ask the same question of this post I ask of every post that asserts that "the government is out to get Bitcoin": what country are you from that is making Bitcoin illegal? I know there are a few out the 450 countries in the world, but it sure seems like a lot of people here are convinced their government outlaws Bitcoin even though it's pretty likely they don't.

(I continue to be amazed at how badly people need to feel like they are "defying the government" or something by investing in Bitcoin).

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 ).