Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dlubarov 2840 days ago
> there is nothing stopping the Bitcoin network, for instance, from deciding it wants to inflate after it has mined all the coins

But at least it would be up to a community of users, rather than government decree. I doubt any of the crypto communities would decide to have ~10% long term inflation like USD.

> The fact that the vast majority of mining is controlled by a handful of Chinese companies and that this is seen as preferable to The Fed for deciding whether or not to inflate seems crazy to me.

Also a fair point against Bitcoin, but I think the future is PoS.

> No, because anyone who wants to make a serious business out of these will be required to become a Money Services Business, and have a Know Your Customer (KYC) process. As I mentioned in my previous posts: we've thought about this problem before, we don't want money floating around that isn't easily traceable, and so we already have laws governing this stuff.

Right, I'm not saying that ZEC will let people get around KYC controls etc. Businesses will need to apply the same processes when accepting a large ZEC deposit or a large suitcase of cash. I'm just saying that crypto privacy can be as good as cash.

> If a currency is truly deflationary consumers wont want to spend it

I doubt low-inflation currencies would actually change spending/hoarding behavior significantly. People who want to hoard wealth can do so already, with gold, land, TIPS, etc.

There would be a shift in the assets used for savings, from gold etc. to crypto, but that doesn't mean less economic activity. Currency that's "locked up" in long term savings just doesn't affect the economy (unless there's some reason to believe that velocity will change). For some evidence look at M2 supply, M2 velocity and the CPI.

1 comments

> But at least it would be up to a community of users, rather than government decree. I doubt any of the crypto communities would decide to have ~10% long term inflation like USD.

Voting which is heavily centralized to a few massive owners is not a significant improvement on The Fed, I'm sorry, that's just ridiculous.

> Also a fair point against Bitcoin, but I think the future is PoS.

PoS has huge numbers of different problems, mainly that it is a system designed around plutocracy.

> I'm just saying that crypto privacy can be as good as cash.

And I'm saying that if the crypto currencies that actually allowed for cash-like privacy levels (ie anonymous transactions etc.) actually reached any level of scale FINRA would immediately shut them down. Anonymous transactions are not a technical feat, they are a political one. Again, the guys with guns already decided we don't get anonymous transactions so just writing the code for it isn't going to change things.

> I doubt low-inflation currencies would actually change spending/hoarding behavior significantly. People who want to hoard wealth can do so already, with gold, land, TIPS, etc.

Right, and the thing those things have in common is that they are "Not Currencies."