Sorry for the late reply, It wasn't showing in my feed.
And thanks for the quality discussion, it feels good and it's rare in this board
Just because regulation exists, that does not mean that people are advocating for it.
What? People begged for it.
Some people begged for BIG BLOCKs too, but did not mean that they were representative.
You can find all kinds of people saying all kinds of shit, and that does not mean that they are representative.
You just have to see literally the thousands of posts saying "we need it to attract big investors or for this and that".
Fair enough. Yes, sometimes people say all kinds of shit, about what is needed, or what would be best for bitcoin, and sometimes you will even catch yours truly engaging in various expressions about what he wishes.... but so what? You think honey badger cares?
O.k. Yes, I have seen both sides regarding "we need an ETF," but still who cares? Just because a bunch of people are saying it?
I'm seeing it over and over the past 2-3 years here.
O.k. maybe I will give up on this argument regarding whether people are advocating for x, y or z.... and change my argument to "who cares?"
or I could change my argument to ... "uncle... I concede that people say a bunch of shit"
I know that I have to look outside this forum too, but since they like to repeat what is said by media outlets it gives a good sample.
O..k. Let's say that I concede regarding the facts that a lot of people are saying that they want some safety BIG players to come in and pump bitcoin to the moon.. such as custody solutions etc etc...
You are wanting to assert that people also want KYC and AML and all of that too?
I just see that you are trying to get too much out of this. Bitcoin is designed in a certain way that it can still grow whether the BIG players embrace it or not.
Bitcoin is also designed in such a way that sooner or later BIG players are likely going to have to come into bitcoin in order to be relevant. BIG players need bitcoin, bitcoin does not need BIG players, even though there is likely going to be measurable benefits to having orange coin go up, in the form of various pumps. Hard to complain about orange number going up, even if it is NOT exactly a necessity for orange coin to survive and even prosper. So again, maybe you are arguing about dynamics that likely happen through the progression of the various network effects and a kind of inevitability of greater and greater regulation, but there is disruption effects with bitcoin too because it is a paradigm shifting technology that we have never had before, so we cannot be sure exactly how it is all going to play out. We have a little development and regulation here or there that might be facilitating bitcoin or hostile to bitcoin but it still seems quite difficult to kill bitcoin completely because it is like a multi-headed monster across jurisdictions, so even if some jurisdictions might want to control and contain bitcoin, the ones who are smart enough about it, recognize that attempting to control it is quite difficult, and that they can only do so much in the so difficult to win, so why not join them instead of fighting them.
Anyway, I do it and what I see is, how many press articles have we read saying that regulations were necessary, inevitable and indispensable, the only way to see the mass adoption.
Still it is a BIG so what. Mass adoption is not going to be rushed anyhow. Sure you hear some people saying that "we need mass adoption," but do we really need it? I will assert mass adoption is going to come, so what is the real purpose of calling for it or saying that "we need it?"
What do we have now? Something like 1% of world-wide adoption, at best? The various bitcoin systems continue to get built and more people find more use cases for bitcoin.
Yeah, there are some people who have accumulated way more coins than what they need on a personal level, and maybe that will work out for them, but if we run out of coins, we just move down to a smaller unit, and if we need more than 8 digits, then we can even expand beyond the 8 digits, which apparently has already been shown to be feasible on lightning network.
I am just having trouble seeing your arguments, and even if smart people are saying that we need x, y or z in order to achieve a, b or c, that does not even mean that they are right.... if we are relying on mere expressions of public opinion regarding what is needed.
Contrary to what you think I see a lot of people preaching for regulations. Whether it's here or in the Bitcoin community in general.
Likely the phenomenon of people preaching, begging or asking for regulations is mixed, and a BIG so what? Sure, what people ask for might be one kind of indicator regarding what is going on in bitcoin, but I doubt that it is a central indicator. Probably more important indicator is what people are doing with bitcoin and what it is capable of doing and even money momentum and waves in the BTC price that show whether or not some of the price prediction models are correct, such as stock to flow, 4 year fractal, s-curve exponential adoption based on metcalfe's law and networking effect, etc.
So the existence of regulation and the asking for regulations is just one piece of the puzzle.
I understand we have different uses of Bitcoin but It hasn't been 'designed' for what people are using it (in the majority). And surely not a quick rich scheme.
Maybe we can even disagree what bitcoin was designed for, and it does not really matter too much what we think or what it was designed for. We already have a whole lot of use cases that are likely going to vary based on location but also these use cases remain evolving concepts too, and it seems that I have already gone over this fairly thoroughly.
If you are trying to suggest that bitcoin is dominated by speculation or that bitcoin can be contained into predetermined categories, which seems to be partly where you are headed with these kinds of arguments, I remain unpersuaded by attempts to pigeon hole bitcoin in prescription kinds of ways or even to suggest that it ONLY has so much value because this is what the majority of what people want as indicated by this poll and that poll... Again, who cares what people say that they want, and one of the barometers of people valuing bitcoin continues to be its price movement. Price movement shows that people want it and also shows that manipulators can only manipulate it so much before sometimes bitcoin's price will explode out of their control.
Consider bitcoin's price in early 2016.. there were a whole hell of a lot of attempts to keep bitcoin under $500, and bitcoin's prices had been manipulated the fuck out of during 2014 and 2015 and even through 2016. At a certain point, the manipulators could not get the BTC price to go down any more or to stay below $500, so there was no real choice to go along to get along and to go with the momentum of BTC's then price, which was UP.
Development continued through that time.. and a variety of use cases were found, but likely a lot of the UP and DOWN between late 2015 and early 2017 and even proceeding into todays price had been pushed by speculation. At the same time, manipulators would like all fuck to get BTC prices to go below $3k and to stay there for a while, but in late 2018 they could not get BTC prices to go below $3k, and there has been some troubles after April 1, 2019 to try to get BTC prices to go back down to $3k.. and in some sense $3k might be a lost cause, and we get a kind of Lindy effect that becomes prices way above $3k... and even now there are fuck all difficulties of getting BTC prices to get into the $6ks and preferably below $6k, but she just won't go down.
Call that speculation domination, or speculation coupled by use cases coupled by development and adoption coupled by financialization or coupled by regulatory attempts to stifle various bitcoin uses cases or whatever you want to call it, the bitcoin space is way more complicated than attempts to narrowly describe what some people might wish upon it, including you and me.... and including governments and financial institutions, too. Yeah, there are likely going to continue to be attempts to control and regulate bitcoin, but how far are these attempts going to go? How successful are they going to be? What is going to be your own chosen investment levels? If you are too much of a naysayer or too much of a FUD dud believing that the governments are going to regulate bitcoin into a lack of disruptiveness, then good luck to you, because whether governments regulate bitcoin or not, it still remains as a force to be reckoned with and it already has been disruptive and seems to continue to have enough design power to continue to serve as a very decently-sized ongoing disruptor of various status quo systems, government, financial and other personal value holding/transfer options.
just take, for example, people getting into bitcoin and keeping their coins on exchanges, how are you going to stop that? There needs to be other options in order to incentivize people to use the other options
Lowering the risk to get your coins hacked or locked by the platform itself, isn't it enough incentivizing?
Didn't coinbase just come out with a report that they have nearly 1 million bitcoins in their possession? Seems to me that people are putting their bitcoins with 3rd parties such as exchanges. Maybe not everyone , but a decent number of people are leaving their coins on exchanges and with other 3rd parties.
I repeat myself but the majority of the transactions are related to trading, not real uses cases. So from a decentralized currency, it's rather online. investment, a new asset class. Bitcoin's ideology is gone for a lot of people, and capitalism is infesting the crypto world lol.
You just seem to be drawing all kinds of weird conclusions in an effort to attempt to minimize the disruptive importance of bitcoin. For what reason(s), I don't know, and I don't really care too much. I mean bitcoin is what it is, and if you neither see bitcoin as important or even disruptive or valuable, then that is your choice.
If you believe that bitcoin is overvalued and overspeculated upon in a way that is NOT sustainable then that is your choice, too.
There is all kinds of evidence out there in order that varying individuals such as you and me can arrive at our own conclusions regarding the extent that we consider something like bitcoin to be valuable or if we see value in its future direction or even as an investment vehicle for ourselves. There is also sometimes information or evidence that seems to be contradictory and difficult to resolve, but there seems to be a lot of good information out there too, and even these days, bitcoin seems to be a much more solid investment than it was 6 years ago when I got started, but there are also some strange factors and indicators that can cause you to arrive at any conclusion that you want.
For example, do you believe it or not? In the past year, there were about 12 million bitcoins that did not move at all. What does that mean to you? To me, it seems to show that there is a decent amount of HODLing that is going on, but sure, there also might be a decent number of those coins that are held by exchanges, so they do NOT need to move those coins in order to facilitate trades on their platform. Also, seems to me that we cannot just move to a system of decentralized exchanges and people retaining their private keys because some of those decentralized exchanges are still being developed, built and tested, and NONE of those decentralized exchanges have truly gotten masses of HODLers to use those exchanges, rather than leaving their coins with 3rd party exchanges.
Yes, a lot of this is likely to be tested out in the years to come, and surely if we have some exchange crises in which people demand their coins, then we could see a crisis. What if coinbase only has 300k coins, but there are claims to a million coins? Will coinbase go under in the event that they cannot cover all of their claims? Some of these matters are still to play out, and on a personal level, each of us decides our own level of allocation based on these kinds of factors and also including our own personal factors, too..,. including our views on bitcoin as compared to other investment asset options, to the extent that we have any meaningful amount of money that we can afford to invest anyhow. We also likely realize the statistic that about 50% of average americans do not have enough value available to cover an emergency $400 expense, so we have a lot of americans who live on the edge in regard to their personal finances, and I am not sure if that means that hardly any americans are investing towards the future, or if all of their investible assets are in home ownership. In any event, sometimes what other people do or are able to do can affect our investment decisions and whether we consider bitcoin to be a good investment on its own or a hedge to balance out other investments that we might have in our total portfolio.
