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by Capira 1959 days ago
This nails it!
1 comments

Unless your fiat money is not actually real and is just a made up number by the Fed. Bitcoin may not be useful in the local store, but if it can make fiscal, fair rules that the globe works within - I’ll take that.

The other mad comparison is that Bitcoin is globally distributed. If Argentina was globally distributed it would eat far more energy than Bitcoin.

What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack.

For the local store, there’s always Nano currency.

Fiat only needs to hold its value for as long as it takes you to purchase assets and investments with. At 2% inflation it does. End of story.

Anywhere you drag your thesis out beyond that needs to take into account that you are fighting a straw-man. That's not what currency is for. Currency is a temporary, intentionally lossy (to encourage investment and velocity of money), store of value and medium of exchange. It is not an investment. It is not a long-term store of value.

> What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack.

Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over.

> Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over.

What attack are you imagining? Chinese miners cooperate to do a double-spend... on who? And how does it help them to destroy international trust in the coin and make their own assets worthless?

They can nuke the currency by executing a 51% attack on anyone. There’s no fundamental value to Bitcoin except faith/trust. Kill the trust kill the chain.
I have been hearing this argument for over a decade now.

In another decade, when this mythical attack on this scale l (as it applies to BTC. Some smaller coins have been attacked, but they are nowhere on the same scale) continues to fail to materialize, are you going to say the same thing?

I just want to know how many decades from now of your position being falsified, that you need to wait for you to change your mind.

Or will you never change you mind? Is you position truly unfalsifiable, no many how many decades go by?

> as it applies to BTC. Some smaller coins have been attacked, but they are nowhere on the same scale

So what I'm hearing is everyone knows it can and does happen at a smaller scale but you just can't bring yourself to believe it could ever happen on a bigger scale. This seems like the creationism vs evolution argument.

I find this particular criticism of the currency pretty weak too for what it's worth as It's got much bigger issues. Like the sheer magnitude of its waste.

However, I do find the argument disqualifying when petitioning to make Bitcoin the "one world currency" when 70% of the hashpower is in a totalitarian ethnostate that can just screw it up at will. Conceptually it amounts to giving up sovereignty of your currency to the PRC.

The "fair players" could simply coordinate to make a hard fork from before the attack.
They sure could, with the remaining 30% of the hash power. Thing is, continuously forking isn't a recipe for a store of value or currency or anything else.