Oh for fucks sake, I've already covered this before.  It and the site "Medium" are both monetized so there is no difference.  Nobody even makes money on Steemit anymore in the first place!  The payouts are equivalent to money you find on the floor of your car.  I don't have a medium or "blogspot" account so I just posted stuff on there instead.

I don't think my conclusion is really subjective.  A settlement layer has to compete with or beat gold as a store of value.  Bitcoin cannot accomplish that task so it has to do something else besides being a settlement layer or there is no point!

I think you are being dishonest if you claim this is not sound reasoning.

The problem with Bitcoin is that without a 2nd tier layer or block size increase you have a serious problem and I will describe that problem below.  I also have a lot of doubts about LN working due to probably needing to place all channel closings in a common, centralized queue.  The problem is Bitcoin's value is based around transaction flow and artificial block size scarcity as I explain here:

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-vol-7-bitcoin-is-not-an-actual-store-of-value-because-there-is-no-real-price-floor-or-inelastic-demand

This means Bitcoin doesn't really function as a store of value, yet it's small load bearing capability delegates it to only functioning as a settlement layer in which being a store of value is key.  Do you see the completely conflicting traits here?  Anything that functions only as a settlement layer HAS to function as a store of value, otherwise there's no point in using it as a settlement layer.  Speculators have given Bitcoin the illusion that it functions as a store of value, but I think this will break down once Bitcoin hits a growth wall.  

What will happen is, transaction fees will go sky high while the price per coin also increases at the same time.  This will make it so nearly everyone is booted off of the chain except for settlement purposes.  Now here is where you reach your problem.  Typically objects used in settlement (like gold) can sit in one place for a long time and never move.  They don't have to, but often times that is the case.  The invisible hand of the market will then decide that far better, more anti-fragile options exist to just sit in place to store value than Bitcoin (like gold).  

That is when the Bitcoin downward spiral begins and why Bitcoin is doomed without vastly increasing it's TPS.  I used to think ~50 TPS (8 MB + Schnorr sigs) would be enough to prevent this, but now I'm not too sure and you might require an order of magnitude or two above that.  So, as you can see, my current thesis is that Bitcoin is doomed without a functional Lightning Network, but I'm not super confident they can even make LN work in a decentralized manner.

The "wall" has not yet been reached, but I think it would likely occur somewhere around $10k per coin and 1 MB blocks.

This people power hippy stuff never stopped the state before.  The state will be glad to run over some hippies with tanks.  I think you need to examine how many years they were able to ban private ownership of gold in the US and understand it will always be several orders of magnitude easier to ban or regulate bitcoin out of existence than gold ever was.  

Anyway, I typed up this post for you so you can see the real problem at hand.

Why Bitcoin is currently a roach motel:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1760723.0

Lol, no.  It's actually the exact opposite.  The price on the Comex will go near $0 as they default on delivery and nobody will want to put in a bid there, while the real world OTC price will skyrocket far higher than Comex ever was.  I'm surprised how few people know the metals markets on these boards nowadays.  

The dotcom "boom" was basically just accounting fraud.  Kind of like that CYNK company except numerous CYNK at the same time.

Gold should currently be around $2200 even in their highly downward manipulated system where metals never reflect true price.  I have looked at numerous inflation metrics, though.  It's hard to quantify because there are now more goods and services, higher population, etc, than their was 50 and 100 years ago, but some of these inflation metrics actually show the price of gold being right where it's supposed to be right now ($1200).  Like I said, these metrics do not take all the right variables into account, but those metrics that lowball the price of gold show the exact opposite for silver.  They show the price of silver needing to be at $25 right now and it's $17 instead. 

I think silver is really going to shock people when the metals break free.  Shills like Martin Armstrong, who are some of the most bearish on gold, say it will still go to $5000.  Gold going to $5k would likely bring silver to 30:1 GSR or lower in the bull run ($166 an ounce), so I think no matter what you believe, there is a lot of compelling evidence that you should own some silver because it's likely to highly outperform gold.



Rather than just inflate the currency, I would not be surprised to see something much more drastic as I talk about below:

https://steemit.com/news/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-vol-9-how-trump-might-accidentally-help-soros-and-his-band-of-international-financiers-by-fighting-them



Bitcoin has a pretty clear endgame:

Please, can you not mindlessly repeat Antonopolous slogans like they actually mean something?  Antonopolous is just a salesman or religious evangelist.  The internet isn't some wild west where you can get away with whatever you want.  The state rules the internet and most sectors of the globe are censored already.  There are only two endgames for bitcoin, either the state bans it or co-opts it.  The mining pools are such enormous physical attack vectors that they can shut down Bitcoin just as easily in the physical domain as the digital one even if you were able to magically camouflage all your Bitcoin packets.

So we already know the state can easily wipe out Bitcoin if they want.  The next option is of course co-opting it.  To do this, all they're going to do like I said before, is create a static address, alias system wrapper that goes around Bitcoin and sign laws that you're forced to use it or be considered a criminal launderer.  Then once they have everyone on-boarded, they will divorce the alias system away from the native Bitcoin unit into their regular old fiat system run by the state with the bonus that they were also able to ban cash in the process to totally lock you in their system.

For the 5000th fucking time, Ted Kaczynsky was right and increasing technology always leads to loss of freedom.  There is no way around it whatsoever no matter what your original intention was.  The only way you're getting any freedom is by operating solely in the physical space (transacting in a fungible substance like metals), not digital, because the state never has the resources to monitor every square inch of the earth, but they can easily do so for the digital space!

All you're really doing is making it easier for the state to enslave and destroy you.  Bitcoin came out before the era of them trying to ban cash at every second of the day.  The thing you should be afraid of right now isn't the possibility of a bitcoin ban, it's the fact they aren't trying to ban bitcoin at all!

"Technology" in a broad sense is useless in this aspect, or more specifically technology that's unrelated to the energy sector.  ALL human excess and abundance is based around energy, not anything else.  Just like I said in the silver example, people used to get paid a small amount of silver per day because it took a huge amount of human labor to get it out of the ground.  People then discovered diesel fuel and machines to dig it out of the ground for them, thus devaluing silver by just shooting it out of the ground at you with much less effort.  All it was is arbing "excess" or spare energy into the depletion of resources as fast as possible in a tragedy of the commons scenario.

This was all a zero sum, unsustainable game, depleting both energy reserves and metal resources as quick as you can for short term profit to a few individuals because people generally don't care what happens after they die.  Discovering new energy resources really does nothing to change this dynamic for non-renewable materials.  Everything is doomed to become more scarce and expensive for the advanced products that require them.  However, for renewable things like plants (which you can eat), generally adding infinite energy to the picture allows you to do all kinds of magic in terms of creating more abundance.

So, assuming you discovered some very abundant energy source (fusion isn't it, it's not actually high EROI as I said), you could then use this infinite energy source to create almost endless abundance of things like food.  The problem here is, you would have an R-selection population that doesn't have to submit to any selection traits just continuously getting bigger, while they also want to live a high tech lifestyle with things like iPads that require excessive use of all those more exotic materials like silver that I mentioned we have already maxed out tragedy of the commons on.

In summary, technology in the general sense solves nothing and only energy solves anything, but only if you can continuously bring in a constant stream of new non-renewable resources that you already depleted by tragedy of the commons, otherwise tragedy of the commons has then defeated you even with free energy.  This tragedy of the commons pain will be felt long before humans are able to "mine asteroids", if humans ever are capable of doing such a thing.  The actual economic benefit when mining asteroids would be very low return on investment compared to everything we've done for the past 10,000 years.

Anonymint, are Bitcoin holders living in complete delusion?

Lol, what?  I'm sorry you couch potatoes, but buying Bitcoin does not give you financial freedom.  Fighting a war with an AR15 against whoever is trying to take your financial freedom is how you get financial freedom.  Just like the days of the revolutionary war, you will probably have to get off your couch at some point.  There is no mouse click shortcut to freedom.  Even metals holders get worried about the government trying to confiscate or legislate against metals in some way.  TPTB can impede the usage of Bitcoin about 5 billion times easier than metals, so you are definitely not getting freedom by smoking some stuff out of a bong and clicking something on Coinbase.

Speaking solely in terms of monetary speculation in Bitcoin, there's been a lot of developments since then.  For one, LN was billed as some type of savior to make Bitcoin a million times better and able to take over the world.  It seems like LN would need to do things like que channel closings in some type of centralized manner, so I never knew exactly how the hell they were planning to pull this off.  I thought, hey, maybe they can do this in some way I'm not anticipating, but the miners aren't even approving segwit, so Bitcoin has kind of lurched into stagnation for the moment at least.

I've always said Bitcoin needs at least 50 TPS (around 8 MB blocks + Schnorr sigs) to function as a viable global currency, so with no block size increase or LN, it's in a problematic state IMO.  At current block size, I feel it might not be able to go higher than $10,000 to $20,000 a coin at most due to transaction fees and load capability.  If that's the only upside I see in this thing (while also easily being able to go to $0), stuff like silver starts to become a fuck load more enticing than Bitcoin does since it has even higher upside with less risk.

Do you really think Bitcoin can go higher than $10k - $20k each with no block size increase or LN?  This is assuming it doesn't get stuck where it is now.  I know these markets better than anyone and the last 3 cliff wall rises like from the halving and recent $1150 were all done by a single entity (single entity meaning 1 guy or several people pooling all their resources to one trader).

The only time I noticed more than 1 entity moving the market (they all have unique signatures) was when the Bitfinex price TEMPORARILY went higher than Huobi during halving.  And then the naked shorter on Finex right before it goxed (who were likely Finex employees).  Regardless, I don't think people understand how few people rule this market.  There are not many!

Then you also have the fact ScamFinex has been pulling higher volume than Bitstamp even though it's a completely insolvent exchange with no margin enabled that no real human would ever trade on in current state.  The Bitcoin market is currently a giant MtGox time bomb waiting to destroy everyone with stuff like this going on.  If Bitstamp can't even beat Scamfinex in volume post Finex goxing, it means there is no actual, real interest in Bitcoin and the whole thing is just powered by fraudulent exchanges pumping and dumping in collaboration with the Chinese attempting to move money west.

No, I actually don't think anyone knows what's going to happen, even the bankers themselves.  Unlike Anonymint, I do not believe we live in a deterministic universe.  The only thing I know is that somewhere in the timeline where all this occurs is that people holding both metals will see a large increase in buying power.  When you see metals spike to something crazy like $10,000 gold and hundreds of dollars for an ounce of silver, with real estate prices imploding at the same time, that's when you start selling off metals and buy a house or boat or something.

It's happening.






http://www.dailystormer.com/nazi-currency-bitcoin-hits-1000-usd-value/

Trump's economic policy is essentially "make the yuan strong again" so the US can export, while the Chinamen dump their soon to be appreciating Yuans?

It appears you have not discovered the inevitable endgame of our civilization unless humans turn the earth from a closed to open ecosystem by leaving the planet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

But things like the speed of light means it will likely always be a closed ecosystem.  Instead of "more growth" it's also likely the human population craters down to 500 million since the earth only has that much sustainable arable crop land to support humans with.  That and the whole peak oil and natural gas thing.  Growth is over.

The 500 million number on the Georgia guide stones wasn't arbitrary.  Que Anonymint "ya'll beez Malthusian Luddites!"

This is the bullshit FOA argument.  He argues that only one metal is needed because people "can just trade 1 gram of gold".  I'm sorry but nobody is inserting one gram of gold in vending machine or paying the Dominoes pizzaman with one atom of gold.  The FOA argument was ENTIRELY central banker propaganda and assumes central bankers will not only maintain their current power structure, but accelerate it EVEN MORE where everyone is forced to store all of their net worth inside the bank in the form of gold the bankers then leverage.

LOL, yes, if the USD blows up, that does sound like a great deal for the banks as a fallback option doesn't it?  Too bad nobody cares about what the banks want.  Nobody will trust the banks for decades after an enormous percent of the population loses their life savings to them.  Since the only other noble metal that functions as currency at all is silver, there is no way they could possibly contain it or prevent people from using it to avoid the counter party risk.  FOA's complete FAILURE in predictions shows this, where he claimed silver would go from $5 to $0.50 and it went to $50 instead.

You CANNOT rig the universe to fit your will in an actual aggregate market.  The only reason gold has value is to prevent counter party risk and gold alone is not capable of the task.  Silver has to be utilized as well in any circumstance where the price of gold skyrockets.  And please, do not even try to claim Bitcoin solves all these problems to prevent counter party risk.  Bitcoin endgame is basically as centralized as fiat is, with the added bonus of additional black swans on top of it to make it even more unstable.  

Then you get to add additional counter party risk above and beyond fiat even if it doesn't implode in a black swan because the tokens aren't fungible.  If someone can tell you if the coin is spendable or not or if it's India style "black money", then you're trapped inside of some permissioned ledger hell that puts everything we already use to shame.

That news isn't even new.  I mean I read yesterday or the day before something from PBOC talking about how they believe cryptocurrency is good but the "emission should be controlled by the state".  So I mean, all they really want to do is make a govt slave coin that has nothing to do with Bitcoin at all.  I'm not even sure how that would be bullish.  If anything, they would probably ban Bitcoin after they make their govt slave coin.  All the stuff I read made it sound more like they want to get rid of Bitcoin and replace it rather than "embrace" it.

I'm probably the only non-troll in this entire thread.  My success rate on calls is almost 100%:

Like this picture 4 months ago: 

https://steemit.com/money/@r0achtheunsavory/bitcoin-market-in-one-picture-without-commentary

Or the thread below: 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1496372.0

Or the MatTheCat thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1442399.msg14930010#msg14930010

Please stop getting high on your own supply with your "anyone who doesn't think Bitcoin will be the world reserve currency within 24 hours is wrong" nonsense.  I don't care about people who post some kind of reasoning for why they think the price will go up or down, but when this thread turns into a non-stop stream of moon idiots who post no logical reasoning whatsoever for their calls it gets old.

Contrary to you and Adam's opinion, if the dollar randomly crashed to nothing, everyone and their mom knows metals are going to be the new backbone of the monetary system unless they attempt to try and force their SDR nonsense on people (which would likely fail easily since nobody is buying into a new fiat after the current fiat just imploded).