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Someone just burned $8 million of bitcoin
(protos.com)
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If governments keep tracking more and more of what you do, or if they push us fully cashless so they can block transactions they don't like, a whole lot of people are gonna start learning about Bitcoin's value proposition. You only fail to see the value in it because it fails to provide value to you specifically.
Bitcoin is great for people that buy cp and narcotics online. Not any better than real money for normal people that don’t buy illegal stuff.
It already has at least one in that it isn't inflationary and so you don't lose any of your money's value over time as a foundational rule, and sort of another tangentially in that nobody can tamper with the money supply, so states can't debase the currency. There's still infrastructure issues in preparing for wider use, but I think people will eventually realize it has more value than none. It may still not be for everyone, but I think it will find its niche in the world.
Nobody can tamper with the supply?
How many crypto scams happen daily? How many people that have lifetime bans from securities are now in the crypto space?
Crypto is wildly volatile. Very few people have made money from it. Those few made massive amounts but the rest of the crypto bros believe it their head that they’re next. It’s so obvious that it’s almost sad.
Investing in the S&P 500 is safer and more reliable than any crypto or individual stock. No need to check it daily like a crackhead waiting for their next dopamine hit.
Nobody in the history of bitcoin had ever tampered with the money supply for it. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are immune to it, but not all. When I say that, I mean you can't create or destroy coins. You cannot impact the total supply of available money. Well, you can technically burn coins by sending them to uncontrolled addresses, but that doesn't destroy them, just leaves them in a very public box nobody has the key to.
But having a secure money supply does not prevent scammers, correct. It's extremely unfortunate and not something I condone, but it doesn't take away from what I said about the money supply.
Last I looked, everyone who held bitcoin for more than I think 3-4 years had turned a profit, and that's been true at almost every point in bitcoin's history. The overall crypto scene is rife with scam coins and people who think their near clone of bitcoin will replace it despite no real features to distinguish it.
Like I said, on a long enough time line, bitcoin has almost ALWAYS turned a profit, and at many points, it outperformed S&P. But if you wanna get into the broader crypto market, don't do that, it's rife with scams.
“A long enough timeline”
Dude crypto isn’t even 20 years old and didn’t hit the mainstream until the last 19 years.
You don’t even know why crypto goes up or down other than hype. There’s no balance sheet. No profits. No product. Nothing. Just a bunch of gambling addicts waiting to defend it because they know their just only keep value as long as long as it has positive press. How is it not just a pyramid scheme?
Like I said, the long enough timeline is all of like 4 years, assuming we speak specifically of bitcoin. If you held at least that long, no matter when you bought in, you turned a profit.
Bitcoin seeks to fulfill the role of a currency, but currencies are just as or more strongly ruled by the network effect than things like social media. It's almost impossible to see the usage it's capable of before it hits a critical mass of popularity. Even in spite of that, there are communities of people who make and sell things exclusively in cryptocurrency, typically bitcoin. They don't buy it and hold it as an investment. They actually use it as a routine, daily currency where they have complete freedom to transact with anyone, anywhere with no concern for processor fees, credit cards censoring their products, banks holding the money for days, authoritarian controls most people in here don't have to even think of, etc. I understand that the value proposition may not make sense to you, but there are people out there absolutely loving what it does for them and using it every single day as the currency people here think it will never be.
Bitcoin isn't that good at avoiding tracking. Cashless digital payment systems that offer privacy guarantees are possible (e.g. GNU Taler), but anyone who tries to accomplish that with blockchain is doomed to failure before they start. For the same reason why you can't cure illness with snake oil.
Not necessarily. If you transact directly on chain and ever transact with a point that ties your identity to your wallet address, sure, you're very easily tracked. If you put your coins on the lightning network, it uses a method similar to onion routing to pass the money through many nodes in the network in a way that guarantees that the money only sends if everyone cooperates so it can't be stolen in transit, and no transaction is written to the blockchain. Nobody who helped transfer the money knows where it finally landed, nobody publishes anything to the blockchain. Not really any way to trace a lightning transaction short of finding evidence of the invoice at both ends, but you already know who your end points are in that case.