[_ph_]

you're not seeing the forest behind the trees. bitcoin like cash is permissionless, private and fungible (to some extent). these properties enable illegal activities both in cash and in bitcoin. with cash it happens in face to face exchanges, with bitcoin it happens over the network.

Well, and that was the difference I was pointing out to. Bitcoin allows unchecked transactions about the network, this is not possible with cash and international cash transfer is strictly regulated - and when done electronically, carefully watched. That is the significant difference.

yeah, that's why there's definitely no illegal activities going on involving cash. /s

no need for that snotty remark, I have written myself that there are criminal transactions with cash, but they are limited by physical proximity.

uninflatable, scarce commodity/currency and transaction platform that is impossible to censor. you sure have a high bar for something having "practical value"...

it is actually deflatory, which is a bad thing for a currency. This basically bans all commercial use.

the largest practical value of bitcoin is that i have full ownership of my money, not some ephemeral record in some bank's database which can be destroyed/modified by bank's employees or devalued by monetary policy.

Not only do Bitcoin exchanges have a horrible track record about keeping your coins secure, it is grotesque that you fear the monetary policy for your "moneys value", when Bitcoin can collapse to 0 any time enough people lose interest in it for speculation.

[mirimir]

> Not only do Bitcoin exchanges have a horrible track record about keeping your coins secure ...

I've been using Bitcoin since it first went public. And I have never used an exchange. They want to know too much, for one thing, with all that KYC bullshit. And as you say, they can't be trusted.

But I have used less formal exhange services. And although I've been ripped off a few times, it's worked well for the most part.

> ... it is grotesque that you fear the monetary policy for your "moneys value", when Bitcoin can collapse to 0 any time enough people lose interest in it for speculation.

You keep saying that, but the data doesn't support it. Just look at Bitcoin price history. I used a nine-month moving average for price. And plotted log price, to clearly show older prices.[0]

After the peak in early 2013, price bottomed at ~50% of peak, until the next peak. After the peak in late 2013, price bottomed at ~20% of peak, until the next peak. And the bottom was about twice the previous bottom. After the peak at the end of 2017, price bottomed at ~50% of peak, during early 2019. And the bottom was ~17 times the previous bottom.

So there hasn't been any "collapse to 0".

0) https://keybase.pub/mirimir/Bitcoin-history.png

[keymone]

> that was the difference I was pointing out to. Bitcoin allows unchecked transactions about the network [...] That is the significant difference.

that is a very arbitrary difference for you to ignore that there are orders of magnitude more illegal transactions happening in cash than in cryptocurrencies. also "let's ban cryptocurrencies because bad people do bad things" is the same argument as "let's ban cryptography because bad people communicate about bad things".

> it is actually deflatory, which is a bad thing for a currency. This basically bans all commercial use.

gold is strictly speaking deflationary - there is limited amount of it to be mined and bar some large deposit discoveries, "emission rate" will be going down. what gold lacks to be succesfull in economic activities is convenience of not having to transport it around along with transactions, which is something bitcoin has.

deflationary nature argument is not very convincing to me, because there is a feedback loop between valuation and liquidity. the less liquidity there is in an assets - less valuable it becomes, incentivizing hoarders to keep spending.

> Not only do Bitcoin exchanges have a horrible track record about keeping your coins secure

oh boy.. you're arguing about something you haven't spent any significant time researching. it's rule #1 and rule #2 of cryptocurrencies - if you don't own the private key - it's not your crypto!

you've picked literally the worst strawman to attack here. horrible track record of exchanges is exactly the kind of issues of existing financial system that bitcoin prevents, just under magnifying glass:

- when you send crypto to the exchange you trade something you own for a record in a database, but bitcoin can solve that problem with payment channels and multisignature wallets - something you cannot do with traditional currencies without trusting some third party

- there is little to no transparency about actual holdings of cryptocurreny - again, bitcoin solves that problem because you can cryptographically prove how much you have access to with digital signatures, something you again cannot do with traditional currencies without trusting a third party

- exchange's assets can be seized by government where it resides - something that bitcoin solves by design - nobody can take your bitcoins without knowing your private key, again not possible with traditional currencies - also by design

> it is grotesque that you fear the monetary policy for your "moneys value", when Bitcoin can collapse to 0 any time enough people lose interest in it for speculation

guess what, USD can go to 0 for all the same reasons Bitcoin can, plus one more - printing trillions of it. can't print trillions of Bitcoin by design, which is exactly why i and plenty others value it.

hopefully i gave you something new to consider.