[mjburgess]

Sure, this is the defence. Some basic questions that would be asked in any (ordinary) policy proposal conversation:

* What are the major problems with existing currency systems?

* Which of these specific problems does crypto solve?

* What problems does crypto create? Are these less serious than the existing ones?

* How well/reliably does crypto solve them?

* Who are the stakeholders that will determine crypto adoption?

* Which of these stakeholders would switch to crypto, and why?

* Why wouldn't they?

* If crypto sees no widespread adoption, is there any market value to it as an asset? What would this value be? Why?

Let me remind you: crypto is backed by a highly centralised companies largely controlled by early adopters who hold the vast amount of the crypto value within the system; their relative control can only increase overtime as the asset is deflationary. The entire economy is determined by the immutable blockchain, unless its forked to preserve the interests of those with massive holdings. The immutability of the blockchain makes fraud irreversible, unless the chain is forked -- so fraud is only reversible against high stakeholders. The chain is incredibly operationally expensive to run, centralising service control to a few companies, and incredibly slow. The whole economy is public, so once your identitity is known, you're entire economic life is visibile to everyone -- making blackmail, fraud, and "ruthless and abtiary credit checks" easy.

We know what a society based on a deflationary stake captured-early is like: its called feudalism.

Crypto is an anti-democractic economically illiterate project to create a feudal society in which power is proportional to holdings; and redress requires convincing the powerful to "fork the economy".

If it had any chance of success at all, it would be necessary immediately to organize a massive political project to ensure it was stopped. The reality is its just a group of fanatics engaged in a get-rich-quick scheme thinking that in the future where they are rich, they'll have the power (by design of the system)!

Thankfully it's genuinely silly and ineffective, and the only thing crypto has ever done is be sold to the next fool along. No one really needs to worry, within the decade crypto will have collapsed. I'd say 5 years, but of course, bernie madeoff ran his greater-fool scheme for 30.

[sirspacey]

Genuinely curious - what forcing function will create this collapse in a decade?

It appears the “greater fool” + deflationary currency creates a sustainable feedback loop for rebound.

[ianai]

Why would anybody continue operating nodes once all the pre-programmed bitcoins are minted? It's currently minted over 18 million and the max is a little over 21 million. It rewards its miners with new btc every so often. If it loses miners then transactions take longer to complete. Paraphrasing from this: https://www.quora.com/What-if-everyone-stop-mining-Bitcoin

If the main developers decide, no, we can mint more coins then the premise gets even more muddy.

[nybble41]

> Why would anybody continue operating nodes once all the pre-programmed bitcoins are minted?

There are two parts to the reward for mining a block: newly minted bitcoins, which follow a fixed distribution and decrease over time (halving every four years), and transactions fees. The intent is that as the supply of new bitcoins decreases the transaction fees will make up the difference to sustain a reasonable level of competition among miners even with no new bitcoins entering circulation.

> If it loses miners then transactions take longer to complete.

Only in the short term. As long as the loss isn't too sudden, over time the difficulty will adjust until one block is once again being solved every ten minutes on average. (There is some risk from sudden reductions in the hash rate, as the adjustment takes some time—and that time is measured in blocks mined at the higher, unadjusted difficulty.)

[mjburgess]

I think people holding the major amounts know it's a scam. They're waiting for enough liquidity to exit.

Perhaps at some point it'll "go to the moon", and people will start to cash-out. In many ways, the more popular crypto becomes, the less stable/usable/sensible it will be.