Bitcoin’s gold rush was always an illusion
newstatesman.comNon-paywall link: https://archive.is/coOQ5
Thanks. I guess that considering the shortsighted analysis, it’s ok to not waste money on that!
The article argues that, "Through successive booms and busts, the price of Bitcoin has been manipulated by a handful of large players, using fake transactions, imaginary assets and sophisticated timing."
It highlights the role that Tether plays. "[W]henever Bitcoin’s price began to fall, Tether was issued by Bitfinex and sent to two other exchanges, where it was used to buy Bitcoin – which would then rise in price."
Yes of course. When Bitcoin drops in price, tether increases in price. Bitfinex has to issue more to keep the price at $1.
Are they revoked or redeemed at any point, or is this just a one way street?
“Cryptocurrencies are described by their fans as a people-powered revolution, digital banking unchained from the interests of the wealthy and powerful.“
Not quite correct. The wealthy and powerful can be wealthy and powerful and express their interests. They just have no special powers, as crypto currencies aim to be permissionless and deregulated.
That means price manipulation or other financial games are largely quite ok by crypto standards so long as anyone is invited. It’s anti-bank and anti-government.. not anti-capitalist or anti-finance.
Whether you are on board with this vision or if it’s good for society is another issue, but crypto is largely fulfilling its goals in my opinion.
Yeah. On top of that the article is a bit misleading as the goal of crypto, gold, etc is not to become rich, but not to become poorer due to inflation.
The goal is permissionless transactions on an immutable ledger.
You can have different, non-conflicting goals. Specific projects bring something in particular to the table. Permission-less transactions on an immutable ledger is the very least most bring. A form of rebellion against centralized banking and an unfair global financial system where if you have the means and the connections you can get away with pretty much anything: lemon socialism, laundering billions and paying pittances on your taxes.
To some, these are important goals; to others they are troublesome things to get rid of because they believe centralized economic systems are superior and inherently more trustful and less prone to abuse by criminals and terrorists, or that the perceived ecological impacts crypto mining are excessive.
There are valid points on both sides, but it'll be extremely hard for me to change my position on crypto when it's become a personal lifeline for so long.
What is the goal of that?
It's funny. What he is saying is that Bitcoin's value is philosophical in nature.
Cryptography brings computational solutions to finance. The end.
PCs / internet are too slow and expensive for practical home use.
iPhones wont sell well because they don't have keyboards. All you can do is download fart apps? Waste of money.
Etc.
That argument is equivalent with the argument “Ignaz Semmelweis was rejected by his peers and eventually placed in a psychiatric ward, and he was a genius. I’m rejected by my peers and placed in a psychiatric ward, therefore, I must also be a genius.”
Most technology that is rejected is rejected for good reasons, but few remember those technologies. In a few years Bitcoin will only be remembered in footnotes like the tulip bulb craze.
Yeah, people keep saying that.
And year after year it sets higher lows, and new highs.
Transactions go up, users go up, dollar value goes up. New technology like lightning gets developed, it gets cheaper/faster (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning).
But hey, the price is down 50% this year, so we can call it a failure.
Oh, no one is questioning its success as a pyramid scheme. In that regard it is extraordinary successful. It is all the widespread actual use that still is missing. (And I’m sure you can provide some anecdotes about someone using it a lot, but that doesn’t change the data.)
Here's a coinbase user graph, looks like nice growth to me. https://backlinko.com/coinbase-users#coinbase-users
One use case is digital gold. Gold is a ~$12tr market. While gold is a nice conductor and looks good in jewelry, most of gold's value is attributed to store of value and hedge against inflation.
Bitcoin does what gold does, but better. It simply needs time to catch up, but yes, the use case is ironically buying Bitcoin and sitting on it to preserve monetary value from debasement.
What, that they have 6 million active users per month? Is that supposed to be a high number? And those are the number of people who trade with bitcoins, not people actually “using” them for anything.
Gold is also volatile, but not nearly as bad as cryptocurrencies. And since gold actually has uses, it exists at least some kind of backstop for its value. I expect Bitcoins value to eventually become zero.
So how is Bitcoin doing better what gold is doing?
- Bitcoin has a better stock to flow ratio
- Bitcoin is cheaper to custodially secure than gold (no warehouses, security)
- Bitcoin is nearly impossible to counterfeit
- Bitcoin is cheaper to transfer (try flying gold to another country)
- Bitcoin travels magnitudes faster
- Bitcoin is more transparent, can prove its existence via proof of reserve.
These are the advantages of being digital. But only since the blockchain structure and decentralization have we ever had a provably scarce asset, it always previously depended on a trusted party.
Yeah but Bitcoins expected value is 0 as Nassim Taleb recently argued here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDnwT5h472c . Gold has uses in industry, art which give it a positive value.
And BitCoin also has a often unacknowledged effect of planetary centralisation making crypto mining on other planets in our solar system infeasible.
The market for gold's practical use pales in comparison to the market for its monetary use. Remember that central banks still hoard billions of dollars of gold bars in safes guarded by soldiers. Gold is a $12 trillion dollar market cap, and not because people love using it in electronics or showing off bracelets.
All value is human made. A painting is not worth $800m until someone decides to pay that much for it. Fiat dollars are only worth anything because we trust that other humans will take it from us in exchange for stuff we want. When we stop trusting this system, it ceases to have value. This happens for example in hyperinflation events where whole currencies die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XMFEUNut18
Watch this and tell me they're not about to run out of greater fools.
Bitcoin has been around for a decade now and no one has imagined much less implemented use cases beyond anonymous payments for illegal cross-border transfers or illicit goods and trading other crypto coins
The use case is:
- an asset that cannot easily be seized (safe, mobile, relatively easy to recover with seed words)
- an asset that cannot easily be debased (good at storing value)
- a network that is permissionless to participate in (no requirement for citizenship or identification, just software)
- a network that is censorship resistant (interact with willing parties, pseudo-anonymously).
What you mean to say is that YOU have no use for it. That's fine, you most likely have elite banking access, access to stable and liquid stock and bond markets, forex markets, etc.
Look up Turkey's double digit yearly inflation rate over the last couple decades. Look up the capital controls imposed by Lebanon.
you must be living in your own bubble if you think any of those apply to bitcoin.
> an asset that cannot easily be seized (safe, mobile, relatively easy to recover with seed words)
the us government was able to chase back bitcoin payments made to hackers
- an asset that cannot easily be debased (good at storing value)
bitcoin in it self is not an asset, just like paper money by itself is worthless.
- a network that is permissionless to participate in (no requirement for citizenship or identification, just software)
i'm not sure if it's as permissionless as you think. you would still need an internet connection, which in most cases require identification to setup. regular people aren't gonna implement the software themselves, so they have to get it from somewhere. the most widely distributed bitcoin wallets are not permissionless.
- a network that is censorship resistant (interact with willing parties, pseudo-anonymously).
if you're trading bitcoin through an exchange (i.e 99% of the users), it's not anonymous.
> the us government was able to chase back bitcoin payments made to hackers
"chase back", but not forcibly, cryptographically seized. The blockchain is transparent. So yes, transactions can be traced. But there's a billion dollar bounty out there if you know how to crack private keys.
> bitcoin in it self is not an asset, just like paper money by itself is worthless.
Anything is only worth what someone is willing to pay. Anything is an asset. Some assets are utilized as money better than others (gold, bitcoin, fiat vs apples, paintings).
> i'm not sure if it's as permissionless as you think.
Most people already have internet connections. App stores are not permissionless, but there are many other ways to load software onto a device.
> if you're trading bitcoin through an exchange (i.e 99% of the users), it's not anonymous.
If you're trading Bitcoin through an exchange, then you're not using Bitcoin the network. You would be "trading bitcoin through an exchange". There are also p2p services like localbitcoins and bisq.
You must be living in your own bubble if you think that people are going to accept that statement with zero supporting arguments.
fair enough, arguments added
>the us government was able to chase back bitcoin payments made to hackers
because they left it on a US exchange. They were not able to chase up the affiliate fee, which should give your pause to think about exactly how it can be reclaimed.
> bitcoin in it self is not an asset, just like paper money by itself is worthless.
I dunno man, i can give a paper $20 bill to a bartender and they give me beer. paper seems not to be worthless by itself.
> i'm not sure if it's as permissionless as you think. you would still need an internet connection, which in most cases require identification to setup. regular people aren't gonna implement the software themselves, so they have to get it from somewhere. the most widely distributed bitcoin wallets are not permissionless.
It is permissionless, in that nobody needs to grant permission to download/compile an open source product and use it. You have to have permission from your parents to be alive i guess...
> if you're trading bitcoin through an exchange (i.e 99% of the users), it's not anonymous.
Yes, and with the travel rules going in worldwide it will be even less. However, what the powers that be do not understand is that it is PERMISSIONLESS. Once the funds are in the UTXO, they can be spent anywhere, including non-KYC destinations, or even lightning channels. The industry wants to push the narrative that KYC-exchange -> ??? -> KYC-exchange implies ??? is the same beneficial owner. It isn't, and someone is in for a rude shock when their case falls apart due to bad assumptions. Ultimately, any regulation is a bandaid on a broken arm. The technology exists and is unstoppable.
Hit me up if you're looking for a like minded friend, my github and LinkedIn are the same as my username.
What about cross-border payments to family members living in a different country?
It’s is usually trivial to do international money transfers between banks today. And if that isn’t possible, there are services like Western Union.
Settlement within an hour? For cents (vs $10 for wires)? Without permission of 3rd parties? To regions that are not connected to the international banking system? No.
Bitcoin is better for international money transfers than WU or your local bank. I can't believe this is even a talking point in 2021.
If I send bitcoins to friends and family abroad, they are worthless until they are converted again to a real currency. I remember when someone buying Pizza with bitcoins made the news. Now the only thing you can buy with bitcoins is decryption keys from ransomware-installing hackers.
It’s more expensive to use Bitcoin than TransferWise to send international payments or money transfers. TransferWise often settles very fast if the destination country has good fintech plumbing (Australia, Canada, SEPA, etc).
I knew someone would say this!
They are not factually correct, and I have done several wise.com transactions to people in other countries last year. The transfer fee was in the order of whole dollars per transaction. It is also a percent of the send, which, you may not be aware is not how Bitcoin works, rather, Bitcoin is based on the transaction size in (v)bytes.
A bitcoin transaction currently cost 1sat/byte, or $0.04USD for a standard transaction.
You don't get what Bitcoin is about. Wise does not need to exist in a bitcoin standard world!
(Transfer)Wise arbitrarily stopped working for Venezuela over sanctions that don't even apply to the entirety of the country, right before I was going to accept a pretty well paid gig that would have covered my living expenses for months. To say I was fuming would be an understatement. Life or death in an impoverished country.
Found a different gig, less well paid but they accepted paying me in crypto. It was a grand total of 0.10 USD in BTC to receive that money and it took 5 minutes before first confirmation.
Yes, transaction fees can be expensive sometimes, but in practically every case I've experienced they're nothing compared to the highway robbery most of the mainstream payment infrastructure imposes upon everybody.
Those people are lucky to live in country with good fintech plumbing. Many poorer countries do not have that, and the citizens don't even have bank accounts.
There's more to economics, business, and technology than making up assertions like "This is the Iphone of _______".
New platforms often look like toys. They have limited features, are not always faster, and are usually more expensive. This makes them easy to dismiss.
People often analyze Bitcoin's price volatility, the way it is manipulated in unregulated trade. They then assert that this asset must be as valueless and useless as the patterns it trades under. Bitcoin the asset is no longer separable from the hustlers profiting from it. Bitcoin, the network, the platform, the technology, somehow becomes the scam.
As far as I can tell this article isn't making an argument against utility or usefulness merely pointing out that the price of BTC has been artificially manipulated (which seems obvious).
that's not even close to an accurate analogy.
iphone was better than conventional phones in every aspect.
what are some of the things that bitcoin does better than conventional banking?
>what are some of the things that bitcoin does better than conventional banking?
sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911974
The first iPhone didn't have a front camera nor 3G, which were common features at the time. Not saying it wasn't groundbreaking (it was), but "better in every aspect" is a bit of a stretch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
Ballmer's thoughts were rational at the time, but wrong.