History has repeatedly shown that being able to print money is a critical tool during financial crises. No one likes their money being debased, but they like economic depressions even less.
There is a reason that nations have abandoned the gold standard.
Gold's physical characteristics tended towards centralization. Centralizing gave the institutions controlling the gold strong incentives to allow debasement of gold-backed money, as it gave those institutions handsome profits and strong political control.
History has repeated shown us that printing money in a crisis just makes it worse, eventually. Taking that away is hard, but honesty is the best policy, even if it hurts at first.
The reason we ditched the gold standard was for deviance. It’s very hard to fight wars if you can’t print the money. Ww1 ww2 Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq … try that on gold.
Bitcoin = End of all war.
I mean most wars happened before I the World Wars. Like the overwhelming majority of wars happened on a gold standard. Bitcoin would probably make us too poor for war though.
As people have pointed out this means that the US or wherever can print money and controls your monetary policy, but that's actually the least of the problems. Euros and US Dollars in large quantities, and digitally transferrable versions of them, can essentially only exist as numbers in databases controlled by the US and EU government respectively. So by adopting them as your country's currency, you're effectively giving them control over your money. They get to decide whether it continues to exist, whether you get to access it, whether it gets transferred to some well-connected megacorporations in those countries that bribed your former leader into a dodgy deal... In short, it gives a whole bunch of control to powerful entities who have tended to use their powers in ways that have not been good for developing countries at all.
Ethereum is not Bitcoin. Ethereum just showed the world Botcoin's unique value compared to Ethereum and the thousands of crypto projects so often conflated with Bitcoin.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
I just don't see the relevance considering the absolutely insane amount of things that have happened that would cause nobody to act in this fashion again, namely...uh...many public people are using the project publicly.
The fork stuck because it was still an alpha, as far as society was concerned.
It's currently in a grey area between a social movement and a FOSS project, and it simply started as a FOSS project.
I think it's important to characterize what occurred with this context. Devs won't get another chance at that without the project (and movement!) ending — and everyone knows it.
You are always tied to the monetary and fiscal policy of the majority of a currency’s participants.
Can you make your own currency? Of course. How will you back it? Who will trust it? Who governs those policies? These are people problems people want to solve without people (crypto folks), with expected results (speed running financial regulation). They came at the king (reserve currencies) and missed by a mile.
Correct, but historically the price had been stable and predictable.
Imo you're just trading "beholden to the usgovt" with "beholden to miners, whales and wall street" plus wild price swings. Former or latter may be preferable for certain reasons, but for fiscal stability or day-to-day use the choice seems obvious to me.
Sure, but the ECB or Federal Reserve can print money, and you don't control them. If your goal is a mathematically guaranteed money supply (this would not be my goal, fwiw), BTC is superior.
I am not sure what libertarian really means but the idea that the rich of the past deserve to control the present and future strikes me as secretly authoritarian.
Except in bitcoin, having a large share from the past doesn't directly confer control in the present, since it's not a proof of stake system.
If it's actually used as a currency, a person with a large stockpile will gradually lose their relative share over time as they consume, since you don't generate interest on it.
It's also confusing to me that people can hold the cognitive dissonance of defending a post gold standard, infinitely inflatable currency with a negative view income inequality, which only started increasing drastically after we abandoned the gold standard.
An inflationary currency benefits the wealthy asset owners more than the working class almost by design. Asset owners get to borrow against their assets and pay it back in a depreciating currency, while at the same time getting to use a psychological magic trick to make poorly educated employees think they're getting a pay raise, when in real terms they're getting a pay cut.
If I was a greedy rich person who wanted to make sure I could never lose my wealth, I would build a financial system on a currency that inflates away by design.
A small amount of inflation (1-2% per year) is required or else you'd get deflation. Deflation is an almost guarenteed death spiral for an economy as everything grindes to a halt because not spending makes you richer.
What does that even mean? Is there any fiat currency system you can point to where elite insiders don't get special access to the money printer before us plebs do?
In addition, bitcoin limits government power. Most autocracies fund their operations with inflation. Even in liberal democracies, deficit spending funded with inflation is not really what people have voted for. People are fine with taxes to the extent they have voted for them, but that should be enough. Inflation is a way to covertly siphon wealth from citizens on top of tax revenues.
> autocracies fund their operations with inflation
There is limited evidence for connecting countries' foreign debt levels to their degree of democratization [1].
More pointedly, there is ample evidence--millenia of it!--for empires on commodity money waging war and whatnot and having a fine time of it.
> deficit spending funded with inflation is not really what people have voted for
Deficit spending / bond issuance is voted on at multiple levels of government practically every cycle. People have voted for this. Because the alternative is austerity, and fanatical governments that pursue that for its own sake tend to get replaced.
Well, you are right in that people usually do vote for more government spending. The problem exists in all kinds of governments.
Anyway, my point was that bitcoin can limit government spending and protect individuals against inflation due to government spending. It doesn't mean that a rich nation couldn't wage war.
It would be deeply unpopular as it could only be funded by austerity at home, and it would be very short.
I believe Bitcoin standard world is post war. It is uneconomical, and that hits the people very hard very quickly. No home propaganda could convince the people it was just…
There is a reason that nations have abandoned the gold standard.