| HN Mirror

- "you can certainly expect a panic in all cryptocurrency markets"

- "but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin."

How do square these two parts of the sentence? The ability to cause a panic in the Bitcoin space on command by crashing another cryptocurrency sounds a lot like manipulation to me.

Direct implies that you can manipulate Bitcoin at the protocol/technology level.

These are indirect effects as they are events that occur outside of Bitcoin but cause people who have Bitcoin to sell or trade it.

You can cause panic in traditional finance markets, too. It's the exact same principle at play.

As an end user, why should I care about a technicality over how exactly someone is manipulating a currency that I own? Why does it matter whether manipulation is direct or indirect?

If the claim is that Bitcoin is only immune to specifically direct manipulation (where direct is a narrow sub-category of manipulation techniques), then... sure, maybe that's true, but it's also not that impressive and doesn't change all that much about the end-user's risks, since the more general forms of currency manipulation still seem to be entirely possible.

> You can cause panic in traditional finance markets, too. It's the exact same principle at play.

I don't think that's being debated, people are just pointing out that Bitcoin's price can be still be manipulated by powerful actors.

Bitcoin's price, yes, but not the actual currency itself. That will be the major psychological void to fill in for people: thinking about Bitcoin as a currency, not an investment or gambling device.

I expect that to take decades as the government/media are and will continue to attack Bitcoin and influence public opinion as it directly interferes with their business model.

Two things. First:

> Bitcoin's price, yes, but not the actual currency itself.

Again, as a user, who the heck cares? The Bitcoin in your wallet changes how much it's worth, it's the same outcome as normal currency manipulation. If the effects are the same, and the changes to the value of the currency are the same, then the specific details about how that effect was caused don't matter to end users.

Second:

> That will be the major psychological void to fill in for people: thinking about Bitcoin as a currency, not an investment or gambling device.

I just finished talking to someone a day ago on this very site who argued with me for ages that Bitcoin was a store of value and shouldn't be thought of a currency and accused me of not understanding the history of the coin because I pointed out correctly that many early proponents of Bitcoin were pushing it as a currency for regular everyday transactions.

And I am so not willing to have the same exact conversation a second time just with the the details and direction swapped out. All of these arguments always being with, "hah, people should research Bitcoin more before criticizing it", even though everyone in the community who says that is constantly making contradictory claims while arguing that they represent some kind of community consensus or coordinated effort.

But to summarize the problems with the specific claim being made this time around:

Bitcoin is bad at everyday transactions for a dozen reasons that have been already explored in depth over and over again in the past and that are easy to research. If your goal is to make an everyday transactable currency, Bitcoin is a bad choice for that, for obvious reasons -- even without getting into the technical reasons why a deflationary asset is in general a bad fit for transactions, all you need to do is look at the history of Bitcoin's price; that's not a chart that indicates a healthy currency intended to be used for normal purchases. Honestly, the characterization of Bitcoin as a rarely-transferred store of value is a stronger argument, and even that isn't a particularly strong argument.

rootusrootus 1478 days ago

First BTC has to do better than USD at transactions. It clearly isn't there now, and I'm not sure I see a path where it achieves that. USD will continue to exist as long as the US Government does, and if that falls, then, well, I've got other problems more pressing.

yunohn 1478 days ago

Stock markets aren’t manipulated at the technology level either - it’s large flows of capital, insider trading, pumping dumping, and other shady business.

vkou 1478 days ago

> but it has no direct means of manipulating Bitcoin.

Imagine I am the director of Tether.

I print $1 billion in Tether out of thin air.

I then buy bitcoin with it on a UST/BTC exchange.

Bitcoin price goes up.

That's not a direct means of manipulation.

Direct or not, in that scenario the Bitcoin price is still being artificially increased for the benefit of a private malevolent actor.

If you want to call that something other than manipulation, then :shrug:, more power to you. But my main takeaway is still going to be that banannaise's original comment seems to be mostly accurate.

> But my main takeaway is still going to be that banannaise's original comment seems to be mostly accurate.

I'd highly recommend taking the time to rethink that position. The systems being implemented now will permanently enslave you. Bitcoin is the only escape. And no, I'm not being hyperbolic.

> The systems being implemented now will permanently enslave you.

Recognizing that there are significant problems with current financial systems does not automatically imply that Bitcoin in specific is a reasonable or feasible alternative to those systems.

Candy bars are unhealthy for me, and I can recognize that, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to eat dirt. In other words, it's not enough for Bitcoin proponents to point out that traditional fiat systems have problems, they need to prove that Bitcoin meaningfully solves those problems or improves upon them. All of you've done so far in this thread is argue about how narrowly people should apply the word "manipulation", you haven't demonstrated that banannaise's original comment is wrong in a way that ordinary currency users would care about.

I think most of the real-world evidence we have shows that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just as manipulable as existing systems regardless of whether or not they have a fixed supply, and in fact are currently somehow impossibly managing to be regularly manipulated to an even higher degree than existing fiat systems.

rglover 1477 days ago

> you haven't demonstrated that banannaise's original comment is wrong in a way that ordinary currency users would care about.

I already did but you didn't like my answer.