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From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT (english.elpais.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 7 months ago (15 children)

Yeah, but a currency practically needs a military and an economy to back it.

Who is going to stop me from fucking with the bitcoin supply if I own the US economy?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (13 children)

    That's the point of crypto - unless you can alter 51% of the blockchain, you can't.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (12 children)

    You misunderstand, if I own the GDP of a world power, what's preventing me from buying a ton of Bitcoin and fucking with the supply that way?

    Crypto nowadays looks like a pump and dump free for all.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (11 children)

    How is buying the asset fucking with the supply?

    If you mean hoarding it, that's pretty much all Bitcoin is good for.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (10 children)

    The supply of an asset is the volume of that asset available for purchase.

    If I buy all of that, supply becomes zero.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (9 children)

    The price goes up as you buy it.

    You could attempt to corner the market, but in doing so, you're also going to be massively enriching the current holders.

    What point would taking the entire supply do - especially since you can easily just start another blockchain?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (6 children)

    You buy enough to raise the price, announce that you're buying it, schmucks try to get in on the wave, you dump while tweeting diamond hands.

    Repeat.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    Again, why?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    To make money

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    The government you're talking about can print money at will.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    But that increases the money supply. This way they can take money from other people. For example Russia can get USD without printing and inflating RUB.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's just FOREX with extra steps?

    If Russia controls the entire supply of Bitcoin (which is what you're saying) then why would anyone with USD want to buy it? At that point, being owned by Russia entirely, it's just a Russian currency.

    The whole supposed attraction of Bitcoin is that it's not a government currency, and the supply isn't controlled by a central bank. Ethereum has additional uses to that, but that's still one of the prime factors as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Not the entire supply, just enough to affect prices. Basically the stock market but without even the appearance of it not being manipulated to hell.

    And it's not Russia, or not just them, anyone with enough money to play can fuck people with sub-8 figure net worths over.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    @mattyroses @HK65 starting another blcokchain is not as easy as copy the blockchain unless you convince the majority of people that your fork is better than the previous one

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Sure, there's a large network advantage.

    But here you're talking about a hypothetical where, for some reason, a major government has bought up all blockchain tokens and won't release them. So nobody's on the original one anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, it also needs to derive its value from somewhere. Any stable nation's fiat derives its value from the fact that the government is believed trustworthy in matters of printing money and that in order to deal with that government you have to use that currency. An Australian could do all their financial life in etherium assuming everyone takes and offers it, right up until tax time where they have to convert a lot of ETH values into AUD, then trade some ETH for AUD in order to pay taxes. And if they receive any money from their government you bet your ass they aren't being given ETH. If they trust the Australian government even a little they're probably not jumping through those hoops.

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