Posted by JumpCrisscross 1 day ago
It's one of the bugs/features of crypto.
They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.
There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.
It promises something better than the current broken system. And people end and up not looking too hard for / are willfully blind to, the flaws, until it inevitably bites them in the arse.
That world wasn't necessarily impossible. Imagine that the US reconceived the dollar as a coin, and everybody simply accepted it as a replacement currency. Potentially, a very large bank or credit card company could have done that with a stablecoin pegged to the dollar.
But that's not what happened. Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency so there was no way to anchor its value. Infinite shitcoins popped up, making cryptocurrency as a whole the most inflationary system in the universe (because anybody can mint their own coins). The whitepaper never considered that possibility.
It's still possible that the US government could decide to start taking BTC for payment of taxes, at some fixed exchange rate. That would anchor the price of BTC, and the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
Basically the premise is that you need to get in early or you're screwed forever. So what do you do? You create an asset where you are the one who gets to be first this time and gets to screw over others.
That world has always been a hallucination at best and a cruel deception at worst, but it's never been possible and never will be.
> Bitcoin was never adopted as a currency
It was and it is, it's not a central bank currency but the promise of BTC is the opposite of that. BTC is officially tradable in the US, you can exchange it for dollars to pay your taxes.
> so there was no way to anchor its value.
The promise of BTC has never been "anchored value"... it's always been a "to the moon" scam.
> It's still possible that the US government could... anchor the price of BTC, the whitepaper ethos could find a foothold.
That cannot happen without invalidating everything written in the white paper, in other words that wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore and nothing like that could function in the current financial system.
That said, I don't think it's "dead," but rather showing itself for what it is: a well-intentioned attempt at solving corruption of money, predictably co-opted by (and made the bitch of) the very forces it sought to replace. Now, it seems to best exist as a secondary financial rail that you can use if and when it suits your needs.
The original ideological base case failed miserably, unfortunately (sound money).
Edit:
Imagine if the lubricants in your car get more expensive and you can't afford them anymore, then your car stops working, then you lose your job, you lose your apartment/house.
Now imagine if someone made a universal lubricant that society both runs and depends on. If society runs out of lubricant because it is too expensive, then everything will fail. Having society overflow with excess lubricant will cause issues, but it will still work better than without.
And for that you don't even need a functional cryptocurrency.
It just keeps on existing.
I don't doubt the faithful's ability to conjure up some other BS story for why it's worth owning, but there has to be something.
This is also true of Boeing, Citigroup and the Argentinian peso.
Looking at the actual quotes on that website, I'm struggling to find the word death (or a synonym). Instead, it's a collection of criticisms. Many of them wrong. But not many showing thoughtless dismissal.
Start at the bottom of https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts and scroll up. You will find many prominent declarations of imminent death or failure, including "So, That's The End of Bitcoin Then" (2011), "Bitcoin Sees the Grim Reaper" (2013), and "An Early Obituary for Bitcoin" (2014).
A number of them suggest that it'll become worthless in the future, but that's certainly not saying it's dead now.
Hope your belief in the system has paid off incredibly well for you.
That is not in itself a recommendation. You could say the same of most infectious diseases and parasites, or antisocial acts.
I wish COVID had that ROI.
It had it... for some, same as BTC.
Seriously though, bitcoin has always been highly volatile, is this really a story?
At this point, Bitcoin is fully mainstream and the biggest fools have bought in. People hoped that the Trump election would mean a new giant pot of dumb money (government/tax dollars) would buy bitcoin, but now that they've realized Trump will just issue his own crypto memecoins that bet is unwinding.
I don't see where the buying is going to come from in the future. Every cab driver and retiree and stay-at-home-mom already knows about bitcoin. Maybe Tether prints another imaginary 10 billion dollars to buy bitcoin and prop up the price though, so it could still maintain for a while.
Sure, you can create a new blockchain, but you probably won't overtake the first and most popular, however good your tech is. Also, your comment suggests, as it is often the case, that new blockchains are created not because they are better than all other cryptocurrencies, but rather as a pump-and-dump scheme, and that's the primary reason the whole field has such a terrible reputation.
In any case, first-mover advantage is another reason why it's highly likely Bitcoin will remain the cryptocurrency with the largest market cap.
Everyone already knows BTC will be back at 110 in a few months. It might dip to 30 first, who the hell knows.
They can all sell massively to drive the price down, then all re-buy massively?
