[berkes]

Nobody wants US greenbacks. You can't even use them to stay warm for long.

What people want is the value it represents in a way they can manage that value.

I don't want fictional numbers in some asset fund that say I own zero point not not not 1 percent of some company in stocks either. Or even numbers that say I have money on an account. I don't want gold in my sock-drawer, either. It's the value this represents (and the trust that this value will give me real stuff that I actually need, like a pizza, in future).

Bitcoin, to many, over the years, has acquired this too. There's real and obvious proof that people trust that Bitcoin has value. Not all people. But enough.

[bb88]

The US greenback is defended by a country with a very strong defense that includes a nuclear weapon arsenal.

How does bitcoin defend itself?

[berkes]

> How does bitcoin defend itself?

By being peer-to-peer, distributed, international and permissionless. As long as there are people invested in it (in the broad sense) it will continue to exist.

It's defense mainly is "energy wasted" as in: one acqcuires bitcoins by proving one has burned ridiculous amounts of energy¹. And a attack would need one to burn more energy than half of all others doing the same. Energy comes at a short term cost², and the amounts that Bitcoin requires in order for one to attack it, currently are unnatainable. Not even the largest nations have enough energy to waste/redirect to overtake, or shut down bitcoin.

So far, all attempts at stopping it (for groups of people, citizens of a country, as a whole etc) through legislation, network blockades, have failed and so far it's defended itself perfectly. Certain use-cases have been blocked successfully, and in many cases bitcoin suffered severe losses (china-bans-bitcoin meme).

But, AFAIK, not a single soldier has been killed to defend bitcoin. Not a single bomb detonated over civillians and not a single war-crime committed, yet bitcoin runs fine. So, if that's whats needed to make "greenbacks" valuable, then how can people honestly think thats a good system?

¹ (yes, in a time of an energy crisis...)

² (and long term, but no-one is paying that anyway for the last 100+ years, yet we all are paying for it).

[tugu77]

Yeah, especially the people scamming others.