But even with self-custody, you still need to trade it somehow in order to use it for your own life. And self-custody has it's own problems, and one can easily "lose control" if your physical keys are lost or stolen.
That is OT. There's P2P trading and Bitcoin is made for self-custody.
At some point, in order for money to be useful for something, you need to trade it for something tangible. That's the whole idea.
And an asset that cannot be moved easily is also an asset that isn't worth very much, relatively speaking.
So you live in a shack in the middle of the forest
Opposition supporters in countries like Russia, Cuba, Belarus, etc. don't live in shacks. Much less those under pressure by the provincial "caudillos" I mentioned.
We were talking about the US going down the drain, as I understood it. We can talk about other countries that have serious problems today, but two things: 1) those countries probably don't amount to much of the Bitcoin market cap; 2) those countries benefit from a USA / western civilization that is still very much intact (networks, liquid markets, financial structures, etc.). Take the USA off the map the internet in general would not be the same, let alone Bitcoin. And you are talking about a catastrophe that would probably make whatever is happening with Bitcoin the least of your worries.
How? Again, governments can control anything they want.
No. Look at what happened in Bangladesh for example. Or some years ago in Ukraine, or the GDR, or the Soviet Union. Revolutions are possible. In addition, most authoritarian government's wet dream is not to be the second Hitler but instead a benevolent paternal figure. Like Atatürk for example. Or the Chinese government. Yes they have control. But scare tactics are often better than brute force for them.
Again, if you are seriously talking about
civil war in the United States you are probably not talking about a civilization that has a working internet, at very least.
And governments have about 127 other levers they can pull besides the transfer of currency value. You don't see armies bombing the enemy's central bank, they go after energy, networks, food supply, etc. etc. Putting down a revolution involves... kinetic action, long story short.
When there's a working USA and banking system and all of the stuff, then other countries can leverage all of that infrastructure, but if you are talking about the US (and presumably the western world since it's all so interconnected), it's a completely different (and rather unthinkable) situation.
No. I'm talking about the US government transforming into something between Erdogan and Putin. Not Pol Pot or Hitler. MAGAs would perhaps even like that if the government is on their side.
If the US government was intact, then you could compare Bitcoin (or whatever it was they didn't want) to totally illegal things like child porn networks. Yes, they exist, even with massive government crackdowns, but they are extremely small because they are underground and cannot benefit from the scale you get from civilization. Maybe there would be a "Bitcoin" in this scenario, but it would be extremely small compared to what we have today.
Sure they can. If your transaction is going through the system, the transaction can be stolen or lost. You are adding a layer of software that can do whatever it wants to do with your Bitcoin.
Tell me how this works in the case of Ark.
Insofar as the L2 handles the transaction, then it... handles the transaction. That means the L2 exposes the user to all of its risks. Saying, "it doesn't handle the transaction because it hands the transaction to Bitcoin" is saying it handles the transaction. It means that if the L2 is compromised, then you are compromised. All L2s have this problem. It doesn't matter if the exposure is "only a few seconds" or even a few milliseconds, exposure is exposure.
The Ark protocol depends on an Ark Server. That's a technical system that can be compromised, etc. and needs to be scrutinized exactly as you scrutinize the L1. You can say that the Ark server is perfect because it has X, Y and Z--but then why use the L1 at all? You can't have it both ways with L2s.
