Monetary mechanisms should be transparent, but I believe financial privacy is important.
And why do you believe so? What does the society gain from financial privacy?
As I see it, crime and deception are the things that have most to gain from financial privacy.
I agree that leeches and crime are a drain of society's wealth. However, I think your use of the word "anonymous" is spurious, as non-anonymous leeches are also a drain.
I agree, that an anonymous leech is just as much as an leech as an known leech. Anonymity brings forward new problems tho. It brings forward lack of responsibility and it demands it's investors to depend on blind luck, that some former drug dealer/criminal won't use their 1mil.
BTC+ holdings to attack the entire economy that's dependent on
BTC. It would be universally stupid to ignore this risk of possible harmful ownership.
If information is easy to spread and difficult to stifle, deception is hard to practice.
Exactly, and that's why it's hard to convince more serious investors to get into
BTC. The hype revolving around bitcoin is mainly made through deception. Like the deception that bitcoin would solve problems like wealth concentration and corruption in the monetary system.
Bitcoin is a global network, a transparent protocol, and a public ledger. Perhaps there are sub-groups in the bitcoin community with cultish attributes, but there are sub-groups in all communities with cultish attributes.
The bitcoin software code may be called a protocol, but bitcoin itself is as much of an protocol, as gmail is an protocol for e-mail. The specific trademark product "bitcoin", with including it's blockchain, is a specific kind of product, not an protocol.
I would rather say that there are sub-groups inside the bitcoin community
without cultish attributes. The majority are showing strong signs of cultish behavior, by often trying very hard to either ignore or ridicule the critique of serious flaws. Keep in mind that you also ignored the threat of criminal ownership in your reply.
It appears fair is the new f-word. It seems to me that most people's definition of the word fair is "more for them and less for those other people." I don't find it a particularly useful concept.
In this context, fair means less concentrated wealth and better rewarding for those who have earned it with their education, skills and experience. More developed societies tend to be more fair in the general understanding, while the less developed societies tend to be the opposite. For instance in Switzerland, your success is mostly dependent on your education, your ability to apply yourself and your past work experience. In Somalia, in another hand, you are mostly dependent on personal connections or just luck with being in a right place at the right time. Knowledge and experience isn't highly valued in less developed societies, and that can be considered as unfair, when luck, not natural selection, will decide everyones success.
It would be just like that when bitcoin would hit big. The ones who would get rich would be mainly uneducated and inexperienced people who just happened to stumble on a right thing at the right time.
This could have been fixed with a more even coin supply, but it seems that Satoshi valued a quick and strong starting momentum more, then bitcoin's long term probability of success.
Bitcoin can assimilate any useful technical quality, should one emerge in the future. I'm not sure you've identified any useful technical or financial qualities beyond some vague concept you have that bitcoin is somehow unfair.
I find it a little hard to believe. Adding PoS mining to the equation, is already an advancement in the technology, but bitcoin won't ever adopt it. As I sayd, it's flaws are beyond repair. The cultish behavior that leads the majority, is a major drag to the general development. The cultists tend to think that the core properties of bitcoin, like PoW mining or fixed supply, are perfect, and so no developments are needed.
I would be more interested in a coin, that's community sees how imperfect everything currently are, and how this is just a tip of the iceberg for future developments.
Bitcoin is a presently the best payment system and the most legitimate ledger. In the unlikely event that a better payment system appeared, why would people panic trade out of the bitcoin ledger when bitcoin could just assimilate the new technology?
Bitcoin is far from being the best payment system. As an payment system, it is inconvenient and also rather expensive. And even most of the altcoins, with shorter transaction times, could be called better for payment then bitcoin.
As I said before, bitcoin seems unable to assimilate new developments. I also think that it could, only if the cultish majority wouldn't slow down the development. They treat the bitcoin original mechanisms as holy as Christians value the bible. They also see that the original writing is holy and nothing should be changed.
Once again, if new "better" technology emerged, why would people trade out of the most legitimate ledger? Why wouldn't the economic majority favour simply adding the new technology to the current ledger?
Half of the bitcoins were released during times when it was mainly used for illegal trade, so calling it "the most legitimate ledger" is kind of weird to read.
Do you think it would increase or decrease trust in cryptocurrency by regularly panic trading in and out of various ledgers?
This won't be considered as panic trading, but as natural movement of wealth that is decided by fair competition.
If the price of bitcoin continues to increase, how does this benefit early adopters more than current adopters? You cannot make wealthy early adopters unrich by not adopting bitcoin, and increased bitcoin adoption benefits all holders equally from this day forward (whether they acquired their first coin in 2010 or 2014).
In this new age of finance, the holders won't be rewarded for doing nothing. Mostly those will be rewarded, who have the skills and experience needed to actually help build the infrastructure. Rewarding holders is the way of the old world, where people could leech riches from others by themselves doing nothing. Bitcoin is a technical innovation, but it has nothing innovative financially. Still the same game built on the greed of the leeches, just with promises of wealth redistribution from one leeches to another.
Anyway, I want to say that I understand why most of the people here are so fanatical about bitcoins success, and why they don't want anything changed. They are mostly guys who aren't educated or trained to work in these kinds of investment environments. They stumbled upon bitcoin out of boredom and random google surfing, and they want things to be as easy as they have been. How they can just buy and 4 years after they are a lot richer. When wealth would start to migrate from one crypto to another, then more skills are needed to actually succeed in gaining wealth. Most of the people here aren't equipped to handle these scenarios and they want to remain in their bitcoin comfort zone.
You can believe that bitcoin will be the currency of the future and people will somehow find, that bitcoins blockchain is the most trustworthy account for wealth. I believe more in the success of natural selection, and I find bitcoin too primitive to make the cut. So, I think that we would both save time, if we just agreed to disagree.
