I wanted to respond, but your post doesn’t make any sense to me. Tell me what you think is wrong with what I posted and I’ll back it up.
I’m curious if you think the naming convention of bitcoin will eventually be a problem for the layman. I mean, hell, even right now, I know many people who would be remiss to spend 15K and get back what is essentially less than 1 of the thing they are purchasing.
Being able to tell someone you own 3/4 of a bitcoin sounds pretty fucking stupid even if it’s current worth is roughly 15K fiat dollars. Do you think it’s ever possible for this to catch on as a widespread store of value if people are converting the amount in their savings of a new car to a value that is essentially less than 1 unit of the thing they are purchasing?
Seems like a hard sell to the common man
The unit is arbitrary though. It can easily be divided by 100 or 1000 as it’s completely digital.
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Right. But that’s where the branding comes in. It’s called Bitcoin, and 1 Bitcoin = 20K(roughly, right now.) In order for me to have 1 bitcoin in my digital wallet, I have to part with 20K of my fiat dollars.
This isnt a hurdle for me. I understand basically how it works, but I’m talking about wide adoption. It’s similar to gold in that way. 1 ounce equals 11K (or whatever it’s at right now) but if I only have 5.5K fiat dollars to hit gold with then I end up with half an ounce.
So how do you get through to people that only owning half a thing is worth parting with many thousands of their current thing to do? The coronavirus is showing us that mannnnnnnny people dont understand a single thing about math, probability, or numbers in general. How do you get them to adopt something like this and tell them that buying a new TV will cost them .0042573 bitcoins? What average person do you know is going to be willing to do the math to subtract out .0042573 from their .5 to figure out how much bitcoin they have left. And this doesnt touch on the ever changing conversion rate. How do you convince somebody to pay for a TV with bitcoin when tomorrow the amount they just paid for the TV might double. How do you clear the cognitive hurdle of people thinking “Fuck, if I had just waited until today, this would have cost me 2,000 less than I spent yesterday”?
I doubt it. That sounds like a problem that will solve itself, and people will make up names for certain metric units of bitcoin, like millicoins, or micocoins, or whatever is the same order of magnitude as $1 for a longer time.
There is no reason 1 Bitcoin can’t be worth $10. It’s pure digital currency. It just means people who used to own 1 Bitcoin now own a bit more than 2,000 of them. Like a stock split.
For all its flaws (there are many), Bitcoin is the only mainstream source of money that’s free from government manipulation and supply control. In an era of limitless debt, money printer go brrrrrr, stock prices divorced from economic realities, and a rise in protectionism and nationalism, having an independent digital currency that’s accessible to all is intrinsically valuable, even if only as a check against future state overreach. Anyone who is in favor of global, open societies or hates the US Dollar reserve currency favoritism status which happens not be unconnected to US imperialism, should encourage Bitcoin’s growth.
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It seems pretty clear by now that Bitcoin isn’t ever going I be a thing people use for buying TVs and groceries and whatnot.
This is only a current truth though, correct? There is nothing to stop a government from outlawing the use of a specific currency within their borders.
Then maybe I misunderstand the purpose of bitcoin. Is it only useful as a store of value?
Well, the original purpose was that it would be a currency that people use to buy everyday stuff. After idk how many years, it’s pretty clear that almost no one is doing that. Mostly, people are buying BTC on the hopes that it will continue to skyrocket in dollar value.
Fiat money isn’t a tool of oppression so much as it’s something that’s not possible without it. Insofar as people cannot imagine a world without centrally controlled money, they cannot imagine a world without that oppression. Gold backed money wasn’t generally different in practice, but, like bitcoin (I think), doesn’t require the oppression. And certainly company scrip is more oppressive. But there have been other examples of money that weren’t.*
And yeah, I’m saying a centralized state will always be oppressive.
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The overwhelming majority of BTC purchases are to use them, not to store them speculatively. You’re just saying things that have no basis in reality.
These threads are always boring because the people that know very little about bitcoin talk a lot and the people that know a lot about bitcoin usually laugh and just keep scrolling.
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It depends what you mean by everyday use. If I go to a coffee shop in Philadelphia I’m not going to pay with bitcoin, just as I wouldn’t be spending euros or yen. For digital applications - transferring money, online purchases, investment products, supporting independent publishers, virtual assets - bitcoin use is more prevalent than ever.
I mean, none of the purchases I make in a standard day even have a Bitcoin option, or at least I’d have to go out of my way to pay via BTC. How many consumers have actually used Bitcoin?
The notion that typical people are going to be using Bitcoin when they buy a pizza sure hasn’t panned out. I’m sure there are places that take Bitcoin, but seems like a niche market to me.
Should I take BitCoin on Kroshopkin? @MysteryConman, what do you think? How about taking labor notes? Anyone want to start a labor note collective?
Carving out a worldwide niche market in the currency space after 10 years of existence seems like a pretty big accomplishment.
I much prefer money supply manipulation in the form of private and unknown actors.
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I guess, but it’s not what it was hyped up to be.
Who does the manipulation with bitcoin? (Legit question) Are different currencies set up differently?
Also, bitcoin boosters, is it even theoretically possible for these currencies to exist without state currencies for them to be exchanged in? Money is kind of an IOU to the state that the state never wants repaid. Bitcoin miners or whoever might be in control won’t operate on the same basis. ?