Again, the problem isn't about governments shutting down bitcoin. It's about them taking over the other 99.999% of the market, stopping bitcoin's growth.

A government coin can allow government backed/favoured companies to take advantage of other advantages offered by crypto, like fast confirmation times, less cost, and stuff like that. Savings normal people care about. If you go out and ask a random person on the street "what is the problem with fiat?" I bet most of them would ask "what is fiat?" So if government move before the world is aware of the problems, they can conveniently cover it up and continue their system while bitcoin stagnates into the background, and the vast majority of crypto becomes centralized.

Yes, there are rich people who continue to work because they are workaholics. But there are also rich people that don't work, other than to make sure their portfolios are well diversified and making money. I personally know a few. In the far future, everyone would be in a position where they only need to manage their portfolios. If some still choose to work, that's their prerogative, but because of abundance, there would be no need to work for the average person in the far future.

I'm not sure what your ad hominem attack was meant for, but it didn't take away from my point in the slightest. As you say, people will stop working for money. I agree. That contradicts with your earlier statement that whether in 100 or 1000 years, people will still have to work hard to make a decent living.

The bolded part is wrong. YOU would expect that they're up to no good. Maybe most bitcoiners would feel the same way. But the fast majority of the world doesn't care, just as they don't care about governments printing more fiat. In fact, they think that's the way it should be and can't imagine any other way.

The problem is not about a governmentcoin taking away the current bitcoin adopters. It's about a governmentcoin taking over the other 99.999% of people who are not bitcoin adopters. Bitcoin will then be relegated to a non-official, anarchist/drug dealing currency that most people avoid. I'd imagine merchants would feel the pressure to not adopt bitcoin, and bitcoin will essentially be either destroyed, or at least completely contained within a very small niche, with no further growth.

Again, the problem is, does the world really care about decentralization? My personal opinion, without any hard statistics to back it up, is No. In fact, I believe that a significant number of people would believe that centralization is a necessity*.

*I say WOULD believe, rather than believe, because I bet that most people don't really care enough to think about these topics, so they'd simply come up with an opinion when someone asks them the question. For now, they have no opinion.

So in the end, this question is about how we can achieve mass adoption with decentralized crypto like bitcoin, rather than a centralized government controlled one taking up 99.999% of the rest of the population.

Because then merchants wouldn't agree to accept bitcoin, and then bitcoin users would never have any place to spend bitcoins, and thus bitcoin dies a quiet death?

So far most (all?) of bitcoin's competitors, i.e 'altcoins' are created by random groups of people who aren't that influential in the grand scheme of things. As such, bitcoin's first mover advantage is huge; it is almost impossible to overcome. Another common argument for bitcoin, is that whatever features altcoins come up with, it can be implemented in bitcoin as well, if it's beneficial enough.

But what if bitcoin's competitors are not random 'altcoins' but cryptocurrencies designed and controlled by large governments or corporations? In the Economics sub-forum, we see threads like Canada trying to make its own cryptocoin pegged to the Canadian dollar, and IBM is possibly going to make their own as well. How will bitcoin fight against these competitors? Though bitcoin already has some infrastructure set up, for many bitcoin companies, they can probably switch to a government controlled crypocurrency easily. Bitcoin's first mover advantage can be easily overshadowed by governments trying to promote their own currencies, while making it harder for bitcoin to succeed.

So how will bitcoin edge out against these competitors? Before you say "well, bitcoin is decentralized so centralized government cryptocurrencies will not succed", are you sure about that? The majority of bitcoin supporters are either huge techies or motivated by their political beliefs, thus they see value in decentralization, getting rid of fiat, and stuff like that. But even for someone like me, who has read a lot about crypto, its benefits and effects, I'm not wholly convinced that decentralization is such a big advantage. Heck, I'm not even convinced it's a good thing. And I believe the majority of the world is like me, and not like you guys. If a government based crypto gets better infrastructure, approval from the government, ease of use, etc, I just don't see how the normal Billy Bob Joe will care for or understand the benefits of decentralization. I think a good example is Ripple. Though it's centralized, it's still bigger than most alt coins. Now imagine what a government backed Ripple can do.

I am bullish on bitcoin, and I hope that bitcoin will succeed versus a government/large corporation controlled coin. But I think we need to critically look at bitcoins strengths and weaknesses, and how exactly bitcoin will edge out all competitors, including huge goliath's like the government. If bitcoin's technology proves to be as innovative and revolutionary as promised/hoped in the next few years, I think we can be sure that governments will seriously try to promote their own crypto instead. If we don't want centralization, if we don't want government controlled money, we have to take steps now to prevent that from happening.

But it doesn't matter what mom and pop thinks. If it did, Visa, Mastercard and amex would not succeed. But they did, because consumers choose what to use, not businesses. And so the key is to make acquiring bitcoins a smooth and painfree process, rather than making it easier for businesses.

Only when 1 Satoshi = 1 universe in the multiverse

If that time comes, you still won't need to find your 1k Satoshi wallets, just as you won't waste time trying to find a lost penny now. Or 1/100th of a penny.

Yeah, just sell a third today, a third of what's left tomorrow, a third of what's left the next day, and so on.

But a lot of people don't have to work now, which would not have been possible before. And I doubt anyone lived off of dividends in 1700 for example.

I would guess that in a few hundred years, "money" would essentially be a bunch of stocks, which would be tokens, or "altcoins", if you will, of DACs, since robots would run companies much more efficiently than humans can, pretty much all the big companies are DACs, and every single human being at that time would have to have some ownership of one or a few of these DACs to live. Probably those who don't will get weeded out, and the people that are left at that time would all essentially live like multi billionaires without ever having to work.

That's true, threads are not stupid by themselves. It's the people who start these threads that are stupid.

In another note, I wonder how many monopoly sets it would take to gather "ten hundred billion" dollars.

at that point, a can of pop will cost a few thousand dollars at least, so there really is very little use for cents. So it's not a problem.

Pretty sure I'd cash out at least a significant portion way before that. I'd be satisfied wth $50,000 - $300,000

But you can't withdraw funds from the game, right? So how do you get a return?

Depends on your definition, obviously. I don't see bitcoin as an "experiment", but if you did, I think one good way to determine whether bitcoin still is an "experiment" or not, is to see if there a number of people who exclusively use bitcoins.

And I don't mean a person attempting to challenge themselves by living off bitcoins for a day or a week, but rather a whole ecosystem that uses bitcoins, so that if they were in a closed system and did not interact with people using fiat, they could all still live, work and trade exclusively in bitcoin.

The number of people doesn't really matter, as long as every point in the production and consumption chain there are people who uses bitcoins.

You can also announce your private keys in a public place like this forum and let them write it on paper, that way even if a few people get in a traffic accident and this site somehow shuts down, the private keys still won't be lost, and you wouldn't have to deal with a paper cut

Fair enough, I haven't read this thread. The title itself is enough to make me want to puke. Along with a bunch of other threads about the illumati and whatnot recently, I have a very low tolerance for these kinds of conspiracy theories.

The biggest question is, why does it matter? Why does it matter if the elite has an agenda? Why does it matter if someone wants to create a world currency? If you believe that having a world currency is bad, then you can talk about that, don't bring in the illumati or Armstrong or central banks; what they want is completely irrelevant to whether something is good or not.

From a futurist standpoint, we are currently at a 0.7-0.8 on the Kardashev scale. A type I civilization would be completely global, controling the power of the entire planet. For humanity to have a large chance of succeeding, we need to go beyond a type I civilization. According to Michio Kaku, we already have some signs of a type I civilization's culture, a global language (i.e english), global communications system (i.e internet), and I would argue that a global currency is the next logical step towards achieving type I status.

Store it in a freezer, obviously...

Man, what's with all these conspiracy theorists popping up these days? It's ruining the forum.

Look, no one is forcing you to use bitcoin or anything else. If you think it brings you benefit, use it, if not, don't. Why does it matter who created it? Why does it matter if this made-up 'illumati" created it, if it clearly brings benefit to the people? Conversely, even if some really well-meaning people created policies that are horrible, then we shouldn't use it.


Evaluate policies/technologies by themselves, don't evaluate it based on who created it. Why does it even matter if the creator gains a larger benefit than you, if you can gain benefit from it?

If you think that no matter what you do, you're just a powerless slave to the elite, then just go commit suicide or something. Lol.

The only real change is that I would be sitting in my penthouse in toronto or tokyo or my mansion in LA, sipping on chateau mouton rothschild, and eating a wagyu foie gras hors d'oeurve.