No there isnt.

Name one.

These definitions are proving my point?

Currency is an expression/denomination of money in the form of paper or coins.

Also here you go, a much better souce:

Money: A medium of exchange that functions as a unit of account, a store of value, etc

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199229741.001.0001/acref-9780199229741-e-2370?rskey=aDLoqH&result=3181

Currency:  Any kind of money that is in circulation in an economy.  Anything that functions as a medium of exchange including coins, bank notes, cheques etc.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199229741.001.0001/acref-9780199229741-e-895?rskey=dcjCKo&result=1161

Currency has no requirement to be a store-of-value.  A store-of-value can only be achieved by an asset that has an underlying intrinsic value like bitcoin.

In finance/economics, the two terms are completely different.

Bitcoin has intrinsic value.  The damage and drawbacks created by traditional "currencies" goes against almost every single one of Bitcoin's founding principles.

That is why it is important.  By getting the messaging through that it is MONEY and not CURRENCY will make a bigger impact on people, particularly people with financial/economics backgrounds.

I've been annoyed by the application of the term 'cryptocurrency' to Bitcoin.

There is a distinct difference between Currency and Money and these terms are not interchangeable:

Currencies do not have intrinsic value (i.e. fiat paper money, promissory notes) and by extension, are poor stores of value.  There have been thousands of currencies in existance, all have become worthless because there is no intrinsic value to support the price, instead currencies rely on its users to give it value.  As a consequence many currencies may have fallen with their empires succumbing to regulatory bans, some have died simply because its users did not deem it worthwhile to use and I have no doubt a significant portion are hyperinfalted by their central authorities out of existance.

Money on the other hand has intrinsic value (i.e. gold and silver coins), a gold coin from ancient Eygpt still retains the same purchasing power today.

Bitcoin falls into the category of money, its intrinsic value is supported by its scarcity, verifiability, fungibility, portability, durability and divisbility.  While it might not be 'tangible' and useful for physical use cases like jewerly, it also has benefits Gold does not offer, for example, instant settlement of any amount of 'money' over long distances. Further, no central authority can print bitcoins into existance.  Bitcoin has also become a legitimate store-of-value which can be attributed to its supply cap and emission schedule, its been profitable for 94% of its existance and has not lost its purchasing power which would be consistent with the traditional definition of 'money'.

All-in-all I think it is incorrect to call Bitcoin 'cryptocurrency', it should be 'cyptomoney'.

Thoughts?

I've never noticed your posts but I did a quick scan of your posting history.

Based on your posting history only, and I apologise if it hurts your ego, a significant portion of the community would have a greater understanding of Bitcoin.  You seem to have an extremely superficial understanding (if you can even call it that) of Bitcoin that has been looked solely though the lens of price and market movements.

Your understanding on the following key topics have not been demonstrated and are likely to be low based on your posting pattern:
- Proof-of-work: how it works, its postives, its drawbacks and its needs basis
- Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Second layer scaling solutions like the lightning network
- The history of money from adoption based on its properties to the impacts caused by government interference
- Austrian / Keynsian / Chicago / Marxist schools of economic thought and its relationship with bitcoin
- BTC emission schedule and its significance including the current relationship between block rewards and transaction fees
- Longest chain rule and its significance
- Hard forks / soft forks
- The hashing difficulty and its significance

How much money you've made is irrelevant.  Many people holding from early 2007 have made 20,000 + anyway (again this doesnt mean anything) so your 'achievement' means nothing.

You must be retarded.

Litecoin is a fork of a BTC that sacrifices security and decentralisation for slightly more throughput.  First mover SOV won't be displaced.

BTC is here to stay and the prices will continue to grow (as long people use inflationary FIAT currencies).

I'm the biggest bitcoin bull on fundamentals but it wont get anywhere near that under non hyperinflationary scenarios.

$50,000 in the short term (within 5-10 years) would be realistic.

Think on this:

1. There are 105 wallets with 10,000+ BTC and 2027 with  1,000+ BTC
2. If BTC hits $100,000, there will be up to 105 new Bitcoin only billionaires.
3. If BTC hits $1,000,000, there will be up to 2132 new Bitcoin only billionaires.
4. There are only 2,100 billionaires right now.

The expected wealth transfer that would have occur in one generation for BTC to reach $100,000 and $1,000,000 let alone $10,000,000 is ludicrous and won't happen.

There is no need for that:

https://i.ibb.co/L0dBWKB/2.png

Bitcoin is organically replacing block rewards with higher transaction fees - this bodes incredibly well for its future. BTC doesn't stop surprising, its almost as if the more one learn about it, and the more that unfolds, the more magic that happens.

At this point, I can only look at this piece of technology with absolute awe and I have never had this feeling about anything else in my lifetime.  Dare I say, I've become 'moved'?

The longest chain in a PoW has the most 'work' commited to it.  Changing a block in the past will require all subsequent blocks to be somehow remined at huge energy costs - the earlier the block, the higher the energy cost.  This is simply not the case with POS as you are effectively told what the longest chain is.

By extension POW has much better immutability which is perhaps the most important feature of any decentralised ledger technology.

Spot on.

If there was somehow, a far better piece of decentralised distributed ledger that is invented in the future, this can just be forked into the Bitcoin network and the existing data is retained, or the Bitcoin data is transfered to the new distributed ledger.

You misunderstand bitcoin.  If the pool mining operators attack the network and its not in the interest of the individual miners, then the individual miners will exit the pool and mine for a operator that has their best interest at heart.

Lets pretend even if there was 2-3 entities that can attack the network, well the network will just fork and the chain that is accepted by the majority of the users will be the real bitcoin. 

A large mining pool would have to be completely irrational to 51% attack a network they and their users are heavily 'invested' in anyway.

PoS is not BFT, and is not comparable to the hardest and most secure cryptocurrency - Bitcoin.  In any case, POS/DAG etc coins are far more centralised than bitcoin with the vast majority of tokens held by the top few (the bell curve would actually look far more skewed than that of Bitcoin's).

Bitcoin can survive as an SOV alone with the currentl transaction limitations.

Gold as the precious metal dominant SOV would have very little transactions across a day, and I am certain the amount of transactions in gold per day can easily be matched and surpassed with current Bitcoin infrastructure.

A 2nd layer scaling solution like the lightning network is just a cherry on top.

I will address three fundamental flaws with your reply.


Bitcoin is absolutely a store of value and designed as such with a emission schedule imitating that of gold.  The base layer has throughput limitations that preclude it from being a 'currency' useful for general/micro transactions.

It's borderless, secure, censorship resistant, immutable and decentralised.  There is $30 trillion in tax havens and swiss banks, using BTC as a SOV is a no brainer.

Additionally, BTC's deflationary nature does not encourage transactions and by extension lends itself to hoarding which would be more in line with an SOV.  People in this forum hate Keynesian economics (and perhaps for good reason), but its proven deflationary assets experience lower use and becomes hoarded.


Bitcoin as a SOV is fundamentally different to two different companies delivering mass market products - we would be comparing apples with oranges.  There can only be one dominant SOV which is explaned in my original post.

By way of analogy, Silver has more market uses than Gold, why are governments/institutions hoarding gold over silver?, why has government/institution inventories of silver dropped precipitously to almost non-existant levels?

Both these articles are excellent and reinforce my point on Bitcoin as the dominant SOV and the problem with utilities:

https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-take-on-cryptoassets-690421158904
https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/doubts-about-the-long-term-viability-of-utility-cryptoassets-db04350b1f55


I never claimed this to be the case.

My point is that there is pretty much no point in decentralising uses aside from money (MoE) and perhaps illegal market places.  All other uses are better suited to centralised databases where the market (operators and users) are happy to bear the risks cumbersome and expensive decentralised platforms seek to eliminate.

The more I read and think about ethereum, the more unanswered questions I have.

The most concerning being:

1. The vast majority of DApps are better off on a centralised database (see original post).
2. The only use case that may benefit from being on a decentralised platform is an illegal marketplace.  Ethereum has proven to not be immutable with the DAO hack and I think it's no longer a candidate for this use case.
3. Eth has a 'utility' basis for value. The cost of utility (gas) act as a ceiling to price.  An increase in fees results in more competitor chains becoming attractive.
4. Exponentially increasing blockchain size and decreased ability for one to run full validating nodes.
5. PoS is not BFT

Eth may fill a niche market for smart contracts but why you would speculate in ETH over something that:

• is the perfect storm of being the first mover, most decentralised built on the back of guiding principles in security, stability, censorship resistance and immutability
• benefits immensely from the network effect of a sound store of value, where an increase in price only creates additional demand and legitimisation

After 4+ years in the space and countless hours of research, it is becoming increasingly apparent that BTC is the only worthwhile project.  Also by the thread title, you can probably tell its not my first rodeo.

Some of my strongest reasoning is specified below, it is by no means comprehensive.  While I may have typed the below with conviction, I am openminded to other views (my wallet compels me so) - please put forth your opposing views.

• PoW is the only true Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism.  PoS is not BFT at this point in time and I do not see how it gets there.  At the end of the day, under PoS and the many other consensus mechanisms, one needs to trust a third party to relay them the correct data and that is assuming that one can be certain that the delegated node holds the majority of the voting power – this is not trustless and re-introduces third parties.  With PoW, I can verify the hashes and the longest chain is the correct one.

• Bitcoin as a base layer focuses on censorship resistance, immutability, security and decentralisation.  Second layer solutions (scalability/escrow) can be built on top.  Claims by other ‘cryptocurrencies’ to be ‘better than bitcoin’ are ignoring trade-offs involving BTC’s key features.  Any appreciable increase in throughput will reduce security, decentralisation, immutability and censorship resistance.

• There cannot be a ‘next Bitcoin’ and the paradox of replacing a store-of-value (SoV) applies.  Any successful replacement of BTC will forever undermine the credibility of any successor.  We are instead made to forever question the replacement of a SOV.  How is an investor to know it won’t happen again?.  Any other attempt at digital money ‘fails by succeeding’, it fails the eco-system by replacing Bitcoin and ultimately fails itself.  By way of example, Gold is the precious metal SOV of choice, most governments/institutions warehouse little or no silver.  If silver supplants gold as a SOV, then I’m all out of precious metals because one cannot trust silver will maintain its SOV dominance.

• Medium of exchange(MoE) aside, I can’t think of another legitimate use case for ‘decentralisation’.  At a stretch illegal marketplaces may benefit from decentralisation given the risk of censorship or seizure of assets.  All these other uses cases like smart cities, record keeping, supply chain, fundraising etc are far better managed through centralised databases where it is not unacceptable for the user/operator to bear some of the risks cumbersome decentralised platforms seek to eliminate.
  

• If (and it’s a big if) smart-contract enabled platforms finds widespread commercial use, the ‘utility’ basis for value for many of these smart-contract enabled platforms acts as a ceiling to price.  An increase in fees to use the network will result in competitor chains becoming more attractive.

• For smart-contract enabled platforms, infrastructure limitations decrease the ability of users to run fully validating nodes (compared to a cryptocurrency targeting a MoE use only).

Two reasons:

1. Not financially worthwhile to commit resources to destroy something when that resource can be better spent mining BTC.
2. You can't "destroy" things in crypto.  A 51% attack will just result in a hardfork/rollback.  Your resources are wasted and their legacy crypto continues as previously intended.

As we can see with the new FATF rules, exchanges are scrambling to comply with mandatory KYC set to be introduced for anyone wishing to transact over $1,000 worth of crypto.

When a true decentralised exchange is invented (i.e. something that boots up like a bittorrent interface with no centralised server), having centralized exchanges with KYC is redundant.

Someone can just buy crypto off a centralised fiat exchange, and exchange it for moneros on a dex destroying the audit trail.  They will be able to do as they please with the crypto (laundering, terrorist donations etc).

Can anyone explain to me how crypto/fiat exchanges won't get banned when a true dex is invented?

Market ATH was $825b. Currently, it is $365b so a drop of roughly 56%.

Here are the drops from various Chinese projects from their Jan/Feb ATH to current figures:
CPChain - down 56%
Achain - down 84%
IOT Chain - down 80% (using $4.85 not the telegram pump ATH)
Bottos - down 69%
Neo - down 59%
INT - down 85%
HPB - down 77%
Aelf - down 75%
Nuls - down 66%
Matrix - down 66%
WTC - down 58%

Better performers:
Elastos - down 50%

Does anyone have an explanation as to why the more prominent Chinese projects have dumped harder than the market average? Some of these coins are actually quite promising too.

No, BTC has majority of the development and will always be recognized as the default blockchain.  Segwit will allow updates like lightning network and rootstock.

I love immutability.

I love a store of value where i am protect by financial divorce rape.