@Laurelai It amazes me how emotional people get about blockchain. I have yet to see a sober evaluation of blockchain tech that concluded that it was never useful.
@kara @Laurelai There are lots of criticisms like "it's not really decentralized because of pool mining" and "it's easy to attack because you don't really need a majority of hashing power" and "it'll destroy the planet because it uses too much energy". The first hasn't been a problem in practice; the incentives for miners are "better" than the incentives for central banks. For the second I say "well then feel free to go make your billions breaking it".
@kara @Laurelai Bitcoin has the largest bug bounty in history by several orders of magnitude. And the third one I've addressed before but it boils down to the fact that the electricity must be paid for by some combination of transaction fees and block rewards, so it has to grow far more slowly than the transaction rate in the long run, but that there will also be technological advancements to reduce it.
@Laurelai @kara People have used stones as currency. I think people overestimate the need for a government to create a demand for a currency via taxation. People will use cryptocurrency because it will allow them to bypass the traditional payment providers and banks and the censorship that they engage in.
@seanl @Laurelai @kara
I'm with Sean in that it's a damn clever solution to the problem of replicating a physical transaction (I give it to you, I don't have it any more) without having to trust a central authority; computers couldn't do that! I can see why people are drawn to it.
What a shame it doesn't appear to scale. I really like the idea of digital cash. But bitcoin now requires a central server and folk are saying it was "always for investment". It wasn't.
@shadowfirebird @seanl @kara Most fiat currency is in computers tbh and you kinda want a central authority so that the government can issue currency when needed to expand the economy
@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
well, if there is a central authority and it's the government, then it's not *fiat* currency. :) If you don't like the idea of fiat currency then you're unlikely to like bitcoin. Which is fair enough.
@shadowfirebird @seanl @kara i.....what? No. Fiat is issued by the government.
@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
Argh, sorry, yes, I'm exactly 180° wrong. 6:40am here. The term I'm thinking of is "scrip". Bitcoin was supposed to be scrip, not fiat currency. It's not suitable as such.
I stand by what I said, just with … different words? :D
@shadowfirebird @Laurelai @shadowfirebird @kara No competition among exchange media means there's nothing to enforce fiscal and monetary discipline; the government can always steal from savers by printing more money.
Expanding the money supply does not expand the economy, because prices just rise to compensate. In the US because they've created a 2-tier economy it's house and stock prices that rise to compensate.
@shadowfirebird @Laurelai @kara Another way to look at it is that no competition means the population is a captive audience for the government/central bank to steal from at will.
Also, there's always competition among assets to hold your wealth in. The question is just whether you want only the rich to have access to alternative assets with which to escape theft through inflation or if you want the middle class to have it too.
@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @kara Inflation is affected by the rate of expansion of the money supply, which is affected in part by interest rates yes. Taxation doesn't affect the money supply because the government just turns around and spends it. And even if they pay down the debt the central bank will just turn around and monetize more of it to offset the downward pressure that puts on interest rates
@seanl @shadowfirebird @kara No some of it is destroyed, thats how MMT works.
@seanl @shadowfirebird @kara Inflation is controlled by taxes and interest rates though, and if anything having a unified currency for the world would make tax evasion even harder