[acdha]

> Making it illegal just makes it that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array running tor and a miner. … The market will provide.

This is wishful thinking: Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it. If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly. Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.

[notch656a]

>Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.

A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.

>If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly.

So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.

>Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.

Then someone smarter than me wins the mining rewards.

[acdha]

> >Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.

> A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.

That’s not what we’re talking about, but it shows where your misunderstanding lies. The current value of a Bitcoin is what you can sell it for — there’s no intrinsic value and while Bitcoin is a fiat currency it’s much weaker than anything else because there isn’t any sort of guaranteed demand created by things like the need to pay taxes or handle government contracts. If 1 BTC is $10,000 today, it could be $5,000 or $50,000 tomorrow based solely on how much someone is willing to give you at that time. That’s why it’s so volatile historically and one of two reasons why it’s not widely used other than for speculation — no business wants unpredictable spikes in the difference between what they paid for their inputs and what they receive from their customers.

This is important to understand because what you’re doing is tossing out a big number by multiplying all of the coins by the recent hard currency exchange rate. That’s not accurate, however, unless you know that there are buyers collectively sitting on $1T USD willing to buy all of those Bitcoins. If I buy one Bitcoin for $1M that does not mean that the value of everyone else’s Bitcoins suddenly changed because nobody else is crazy enough to overpay by that much. Similarly, if I think the bubble is popping and start selling, I may not find a buyer if many people decide to wait and see — and since very few people need Bitcoin, there isn’t any pressure to push them off of the fence like there is with a fiat currency backed by a sovereign state.

> So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.

Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.

[notch656a]

So short bitcoin, if you think it's worth nothing. Good luck, acdha. We're both saying it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it, I'm just acknowledging that happens to be quite a lot.

>but it shows where your misunderstanding lies

I understand market cap is different than the current volume buyers will buy at this moment. You've basically just provided an essay on what market cap is. There's no misunderstanding. Is this supposed to disprove the gigantic valuation assigned to bitcoin?

>Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.

This is why most black markets now use Monero or similar privacy coins. If a currency will buy drugs, then it will always be able to buy money since drugs are worth money.