Nonetheless, Bitcoin seems to continue hold a pretty decent place in this whole scheme of things.... At some point, there may be some other complementary systems to bitcoin, but a lot of us who already know and study bitcoin, should feel really excited about bitcoin when we are also seeing the folding and unfolding of other world developments, including the various financial systems. I personally don't think that it would be good for anyone, including bitcoin holders, if there were a total financial system implosion, but some of the weird and ongoing subtle and camouflaged collapses of various fiat systems seems much more conducive to the prospering of bitcoin.
I'd rather find that we would switch from one financial system to another seamlessly trough adoption. People who come to the party prepared, don't have anything to lose. We don't even need end-point users to adopt anything new, just the financial institutions.
I don't think that any of us can really predict various kinds of political and/or financial calamities because in any kind of scenario, there are a lot of various human actors in play, and frequently these various influential actors (and sometimes not influential, but coincidentally effective actors) can act out in predictably unpredictable ways that in the end remain unpredictable because there are so many various probabilities, so many players and likely even quite a bit of irrationality involved too.
Actually, I have had some recent theories regarding the behavior of rich people, which certainly depend upon social, political and cultural context, but sometimes some of the super rich and influential rich folks behave in certain ways under certain systems that allow such behavior of goals of not become more wealthy but instead engage in activities and persuasion to avoid more fair wealth distribution to society as a whole, and sometimes these influences of the super rich can sabotage society in a lot of ways to allow super rich folks to have so much influence over outcomes when their goals are quite selfish, disempowering and exploitative.
JJG, can you speculate a scenario where Russians instead of trying to ban bitcoin, would start hoarding bitcoin.
I am not sure whether I understand the political context sufficiently in order to be very accurate. I think that now, Russian officials are kind of skeptical of bitcoin and even having misconceptions that it is a kind of USA product; however, yeah, there could be scenarios in which they recognize bitcoin as a possible means to undermine the USD, which seems like it would be a more accurate assessment to consider Bitcoin as a competitor to the USD rather than some kind of USA invention.
Also what are the odds of any country publicly announcing that they are hoarding bitcoins?
I think that your questions are very good, and in order to come up with such questions, you have probably thought through some of these various scenarios.
To me it does not seem that any government would announce that they are hoarding bitcoins, unless they have already invested considerably into bitcoin and then are attempting to cause a pumping effect by such announcement. Sure, those kinds of scenarios could play out in the future, but it seems that we are quite a ways from such a scenario playing out. On the other hand, the seeming assumption of the question seems to be correct that sometimes it may take only a few influential persons within a government system to cause by persuasion some changes in policy and risk taking in terms of adopting and/or hoarding bitcoins. I do recall that there has been some discussions of these kinds of potentialities in some smaller governments, including Cypress and Barbados, and probably there have been some other areas in which bitcoin had been given some serious attention... but yeah, seems like the more likely scenario would be secret hoarding rather than public hoarding.
Also aren't governments the biggest institutions that are currently interested in bitcoin?
I think that frequently a large and overwhelming majority of government officials do not recognize potentiality in bitcoin, so they are frequently considering ways to compete against it rather than somehow playing into the bitcoin infrastructure. Sure there are some exceptional government officials, but so far they are likely rare and not influential in terms of causing radical bitcoin adoption within their respective governments.
Thanks again for the idea to document my finances in excel, it has worked out for me really well.
Sure, yeah.
I recall that maybe I had mentioned Excel as a means to project your personal cashflow for several months in advance (I usually do at least a year, but sometimes nearly 2 years depending on some projected cash flow issues), and certainly, Excel is a very powerful program in which you can create a lot of spreadsheets to project a variety of your personal finances and also, for example, to project the money that you have invested into bitcoin and what you have available for bitcoin/or other crypto currencies and also various financial aspects of your bitcoin investment.
I have been creating excel spreadsheets for nearly 20 years, so several of mine have become more and more sophisticated , and possibly some of them only readable (or workable) by me, but really this practice seems to allow me a great means to keep tabs on my finances and to adjust along the way.... better than paper, but does not eliminate paper for some quick jotting situations.
For example, with Excel I may project my cashflow to have $1,000 to invest into bitcoin in the next 3 months at certain time frames, depending on bills and income; however, sometimes there will be unexpected flow of cash in or out, which will cause me to have to adjust the projection (frequently can have rippling effects of months in advance), yet in the end, it allows me to have some future security and to create my own priorities in terms of which investments are more important than others. For example, eating, rent, utilities and a minimum level of monthly recreation do have higher priorities over my bitcoin investment because I never really want to be in a position to have to cash out my bitcoin because I have not adequately planned ahead.
Also, currently, for me, bitcoin has a higher priority than some other investments that I may consider, and even a higher priority than creating some seemingly extra recreational expense, like maybe I really don't need that trip to Vegas.
Poll
