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by spenczar5 3107 days ago
That's a strange thing to say. I think of a "fiat currency" being one which 1. is not backed by a physical good, like gold, and 2. is recognized by a government, so you can pay taxes and fines with it. Why would it be beneficial that you cannot pay your taxes with Bitcoin?
2 comments
mulmen 3107 days ago
My understanding is that the mining metaphor is supposed to be reminiscent of gold's scarcity.

It is also my understanding that the crypto- in cryptocurrency enables anonymous trade. This would seem to preclude the need to even pay taxes since no government could even track the transactions. As I understand it this is the primary value proposition of Bitcoin.

Why would you want to pay taxes to the US government in any currency other than the US Dollar? I really don't understand the value there. Do people pay US income taxes in Euros? Why? How?

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njarboe 3107 days ago
fiat - an arbitrary decree or pronouncement, especially by a person or group of persons having absolute authority to enforce it.

The amount fiat currency can be doubled overnight by the authority over the fiat currency. Stealing, in effect, from all of the people holding that currency. Non-fiat, like gold or bitcoin (at least this is what the true believers believe), have a high amount of work that needs to be done to just get a little bit more of it. No grabbing half the currency overnight.

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aboodman 3107 days ago
Nit, but an interesting subtle one:

bitcoin-core can double the amount of bitcoin overnight. They can commit new code which does that and shows up in the next client.

But, that would presumably be noticed: either in the oss repo, or in the blockchain itself.

So I think more accurately, it's sort of in between a fiat currency and a commodity. It's a fiat currency whose operation is completely transparent.

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CrystalLangUser 3107 days ago
Well, they could but the entire community can just fork. Miners are under no obligation to stick with a crazy change like that. The core developers would only shoot themselves in the foot and make themselves never to be trusted again.

And with Bitcoin Cash gaining in popularity, a fork is not an impossibility. In fact, BCH is popular because it's actually usable unlike BTC at the moment (extremely high fees, slow confirmation times).

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