The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

xenon

Anyone use tether when banking between coins?

Could be a bigger Ponzi scheme than madoff:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether

Ivorythumper

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

LuFins Dad

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

xenon

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

LuFins Dad

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

xenon

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

I never pay any interest on cards but still use them for all my transactions. I use the cards for convenience and online transactions.

I also don’t think pure coins would offer a credit platform - or if they did the incentives and prices wouldn’t be so different from current credit prices.

But credit is a different mechanism from currency.

xenon

The only advantage I hear for crypto is that it’s the payment tech of the future.

But, modern credit card payments are all based on modern SW tech.

Yeah - they don’t use a decentralized ledger, but has trustworthiness of the Visa / MC / Chase bank ledger been a problem for anyone here?

There are also human-based mechanisms like disputes and chargebacks built into their process that provide utility.

I just don’t know what the problem is that cryptocurrency is trying to solve.

What’s the vision for any easy future? Cross-border transactions?

LuFins Dad

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

I never pay any interest on cards but still use them for all my transactions. I use the cards for convenience and online transactions.

I also don’t think pure coins would offer a credit platform - or if they did the incentives and prices wouldn’t be so different from current credit prices.

But credit is a different mechanism from currency.

I'm not saying that Crypto will offer "credit" (though there is some research in that arena).

My comparison is using Crypto for a "cash" payment vs using a credit card. While you may get your card paid off every month, a lot of people don't. They intend to, but they miss it. If this didn't happen, the credit cards wouldn't be in business. Even for you, however, Crypto would still be a more secure payment option. A lot lower risk of fraud and personal identity theft. It will also be easier and cheaper for you to send and receive funds personally. Yes, Venmo works pretty well, but there is still a lot of personal security risk there.

Overseas payments are far easier, cheaper, and more secure. I recently received an EFT for a piano purchase where the customer sent the money from their German Bank. It took 7 days and 2 additional banks to take care of the proper handshakes and receive the money.

Doctor Phibes

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

I just don’t know what the problem is that cryptocurrency is trying to solve.

It seems to mainly be trying to solve the problem of people who don't like working for a living never having any money.

xenon

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

I never pay any interest on cards but still use them for all my transactions. I use the cards for convenience and online transactions.

I also don’t think pure coins would offer a credit platform - or if they did the incentives and prices wouldn’t be so different from current credit prices.

But credit is a different mechanism from currency.

I'm not saying that Crypto will offer "credit" (though there is some research in that arena).

My comparison is using Crypto for a "cash" payment vs using a credit card. While you may get your card paid off every month, a lot of people don't. They intend to, but they miss it. If this didn't happen, the credit cards wouldn't be in business. Even for you, however, Crypto would still be a more secure payment option. A lot lower risk of fraud and personal identity theft. It will also be easier and cheaper for you to send and receive funds personally. Yes, Venmo works pretty well, but there is still a lot of personal security risk there.

Overseas payments are far easier, cheaper, and more secure. I recently received an EFT for a piano purchase where the customer sent the money from their German Bank. It took 7 days and 2 additional banks to take care of the proper handshakes and receive the money.

I get all those benefits, but they’re incremental (which would only come with monstrous disruption to the current system. And it’s not clear that the current system couldn’t be updated to deliver them).

Crypto tech is being priced as if it’s the next internet.

Klaus

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

I never pay any interest on cards but still use them for all my transactions. I use the cards for convenience and online transactions.

I also don’t think pure coins would offer a credit platform - or if they did the incentives and prices wouldn’t be so different from current credit prices.

But credit is a different mechanism from currency.

I'm not saying that Crypto will offer "credit" (though there is some research in that arena).

My comparison is using Crypto for a "cash" payment vs using a credit card. While you may get your card paid off every month, a lot of people don't. They intend to, but they miss it. If this didn't happen, the credit cards wouldn't be in business. Even for you, however, Crypto would still be a more secure payment option. A lot lower risk of fraud and personal identity theft. It will also be easier and cheaper for you to send and receive funds personally. Yes, Venmo works pretty well, but there is still a lot of personal security risk there.

Overseas payments are far easier, cheaper, and more secure. I recently received an EFT for a piano purchase where the customer sent the money from their German Bank. It took 7 days and 2 additional banks to take care of the proper handshakes and receive the money.

I get all those benefits, but they’re incremental (which would only come with monstrous disruption to the current system. And it’s not clear that the current system couldn’t be updated to deliver them).

Crypto tech is being priced as if it’s the next internet.

I think those things are not the point of crypto.

From my perspective, there are two main points:

Crypto-Money: A currency that isn't controlled by any government and has predictable inflation. That's huge.
Smart contracts and everything associated to it ("dApps" etc.). If companies like Chainlink are successful and "off-chain" data and things become available "on the chain", then this can revolutionalize how we do business.

There's still a lot of uncertainty whether this will all work out, and maybe it will all have disappeared in 10 years - there's still many major question marks - , but the potential to be at least just as revolutionary as the internet itself is certainly there.

xenon

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

the problem of decimalization

If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.

Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?

Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…

Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.

There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.

I still don’t know what the pain points in the current MC/Visa platform are for consumers that crypto would solve.

How would my life be different if Amazon and all other retailers accepted Future Coin?

Well, instead of paying 16% interest you could be making 16% interest for one...

I never pay any interest on cards but still use them for all my transactions. I use the cards for convenience and online transactions.

I also don’t think pure coins would offer a credit platform - or if they did the incentives and prices wouldn’t be so different from current credit prices.

But credit is a different mechanism from currency.

I'm not saying that Crypto will offer "credit" (though there is some research in that arena).

My comparison is using Crypto for a "cash" payment vs using a credit card. While you may get your card paid off every month, a lot of people don't. They intend to, but they miss it. If this didn't happen, the credit cards wouldn't be in business. Even for you, however, Crypto would still be a more secure payment option. A lot lower risk of fraud and personal identity theft. It will also be easier and cheaper for you to send and receive funds personally. Yes, Venmo works pretty well, but there is still a lot of personal security risk there.

Overseas payments are far easier, cheaper, and more secure. I recently received an EFT for a piano purchase where the customer sent the money from their German Bank. It took 7 days and 2 additional banks to take care of the proper handshakes and receive the money.

I get all those benefits, but they’re incremental (which would only come with monstrous disruption to the current system. And it’s not clear that the current system couldn’t be updated to deliver them).

Crypto tech is being priced as if it’s the next internet.

I think those things are not the point of crypto.

From my perspective, there are two main points:

Crypto-Money: A currency that isn't controlled by any government and has predictable inflation. That's huge.

Smart contracts and everything associated to it ("dApps" etc.). If companies like Chainlink are successful and "off-chain" data and things become available "on the chain", then this can revolutionalize how we do business.

There's still a lot of uncertainty whether this will all work out, and maybe it will all have disappeared in 10 years - there's still many major question marks - , but the potential to be at least just as revolutionary as the internet itself is certainly there.

Number 1 I agree with. There's value in that, and I think Bitcoin is the closest to being that. But - I think much of the heart of the argument overlaps very squarely with the argument for the gold standard.

I have other hot takes on Bitcoin... but I'll keep them to myself to prevent branding myself more of a luddite than I already have.

Klaus

@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:

But - I think much of the heart of the argument overlaps very squarely with the argument for the gold standard.

But gold isn't a digital currency. For instance, it's hard to carry it to other countries. It's easy to make its use illegal. Transactions are costly and slow.

The New Coffee Room

The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread