[once_inc]

I'd like to counter that with the opinion that for most people, controlling their own keys isn't a priority. These are the people that don't even know there isn't any gold backing the dollar, or where money comes from. For these people, Bitcoin offers the option of digitally native money that is well suited for a rapidly digitizing world. They won't feel any problems holding their bitcoin in a walled garden maintained by banks or money transfer companies, and won't consider the counterparty-risk as something they need to be worried about.

[arcticbull]

Why would the dollar be backed by gold? You know that ended in 1933 right? I'd say 89 years is long enough for folks to have figured it out, but I'm always open to surprises.

[once_inc]

Please re-read my post. I specifically speak of people using money without being aware of all the specifics. Noting that the dollar is not backed by gold.

That ended in 1971 by the way, when Nixon ended the gold standard for the US dollar because the government needed money to pay for the war in Vietnam.

[arcticbull]

Double-check what happened in 1971. FDR took the US off the gold standard in 1933. From this point forward until present, there was never again domestic convertibility of notes for gold. Nixon ended Bretton Woods (which started in 1944) - but that pertained solely to international convertibility of notes for gold in foreign exchange. It was not the gold standard. It was occasionally referred to as the 'gold exchange standard.'

It's just popular to ascribe this to Nixon because you know, Nixon bad. Watergate, etc. But not everything a bad leader does is bad - Nixon gave us the EPA too. Stopped rivers catching on fire and everything.

Money is already digital.

[alchemist1e9]

> Money is already digital.

We know, which being in a centralized MySQL database at the Fed made bailing out all the US elites in 2008 very easy.

[arcticbull]

The Fed didn't bail out anyone in 2008. Treasury did. Also, the bail-outs weren't grants, they were loans, and they have been re-paid yielding $110B in profit so far with plenty more to come. [1]

I was opposed to bail-outs in 2008 personally, but in retrospect it's very difficult to look back and say that it was anything other than an unequivocal success. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were saved and it was super profitable. With that in mind, I'd suggest a new stalking horse.

Also of note, I said the dollar was digital, not that it was centralized. The Fed doesn't have a central representation of all dollars in existence, the M numbers are estimates. The Federal Reserve System is a federated system, and money is created when loans are taken out at retail banks.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

[alchemist1e9]

Yes they did, Maiden Lane [1], which was distinct from TARP you are referring to. I had a somewhat upfront seat at that time and the unequivocal success narrative is, in my opinion, extremely dishonest and manipulative.

We haven’t even started to talk about QE which is actually why the Fed and TARP bailouts (aka investments) ended up being profitable. There are a huge number of losers from 2008 which can’t be seen from a superficial surface view, instead it requires playing out an alternate reality where liquidations were forced, and that is a complex and difficult discussion. Paulson was a brilliant spin doctor and so successful that his fake stories of hundreds of thousands of jobs saved and ATMs that didn’t run out of money is being taken as real history, instead of the evil deceptive game it was to insure all his people continued to dominate global finance. It would take a long discussion to try and explain to you how profoundly unethical and manipulative were the actions they took and the effects those actions still have today in terms of extreme inequality, caused not by capitalism itself, but this crony capitalism.

Bitcoin was born from this reality and highly motivated by it. For a certain generation of finance technologists who had a close view of the inner workings of the system it was obviously rotten and corrupt to the core. The core being fiat.

If you are trying to pretend that by explaining M1 and M3 and the creation of money supply you claim somehow USD is “federated” and not centralized then in my opinion you don’t actually understand what you think you do.

Maybe read up on the Fed window and QE mechanisms and their balance sheet. USD is centralized with Fedwire, OCC, Treasury, Swift, BIS and all their regulatory operations, so they have very good information on most digital dollars in existence and certainly have incredible control over their creation and destruction.

Bitcoin is likely here to stay and in my personal experience most people who hate on it were once believers who bought high then sold low after one of its crashes. they now how a very bitter taste and have decided there is some fundamental flaw with it as an idea, mostly motivated by their own emotions and not logic. the other haters tend to have some deranged love of governments and see it correctly as a challenge to government power so attempt to discredit it, I feel mostly out of anxiety the government isn’t what they think it is and it scares them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Lane_Transactions