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by njarboe 3104 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.
1 comments
aboodman 3104 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 3104 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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