It highlights the role that Tether plays. "[W]henever Bitcoin’s price began to fall, Tether was issued by Bitfinex and sent to two other exchanges, where it was used to buy Bitcoin – which would then rise in price."
Not quite correct. The wealthy and powerful can be wealthy and powerful and express their interests. They just have no special powers, as crypto currencies aim to be permissionless and deregulated.
That means price manipulation or other financial games are largely quite ok by crypto standards so long as anyone is invited. It’s anti-bank and anti-government.. not anti-capitalist or anti-finance.
Whether you are on board with this vision or if it’s good for society is another issue, but crypto is largely fulfilling its goals in my opinion.
To some, these are important goals; to others they are troublesome things to get rid of because they believe centralized economic systems are superior and inherently more trustful and less prone to abuse by criminals and terrorists, or that the perceived ecological impacts crypto mining are excessive.
There are valid points on both sides, but it'll be extremely hard for me to change my position on crypto when it's become a personal lifeline for so long.
iPhones wont sell well because they don't have keyboards. All you can do is download fart apps? Waste of money.
Etc.
Most technology that is rejected is rejected for good reasons, but few remember those technologies. In a few years Bitcoin will only be remembered in footnotes like the tulip bulb craze.
And year after year it sets higher lows, and new highs.
Transactions go up, users go up, dollar value goes up. New technology like lightning gets developed, it gets cheaper/faster (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning).
But hey, the price is down 50% this year, so we can call it a failure.
Watch this and tell me they're not about to run out of greater fools.
- an asset that cannot easily be seized (safe, mobile, relatively easy to recover with seed words)
- an asset that cannot easily be debased (good at storing value)
- a network that is permissionless to participate in (no requirement for citizenship or identification, just software)
- a network that is censorship resistant (interact with willing parties, pseudo-anonymously).
What you mean to say is that YOU have no use for it. That's fine, you most likely have elite banking access, access to stable and liquid stock and bond markets, forex markets, etc.
Look up Turkey's double digit yearly inflation rate over the last couple decades. Look up the capital controls imposed by Lebanon.
> an asset that cannot easily be seized (safe, mobile, relatively easy to recover with seed words)
the us government was able to chase back bitcoin payments made to hackers
- an asset that cannot easily be debased (good at storing value)
bitcoin in it self is not an asset, just like paper money by itself is worthless.
- a network that is permissionless to participate in (no requirement for citizenship or identification, just software)
i'm not sure if it's as permissionless as you think. you would still need an internet connection, which in most cases require identification to setup. regular people aren't gonna implement the software themselves, so they have to get it from somewhere. the most widely distributed bitcoin wallets are not permissionless.
- a network that is censorship resistant (interact with willing parties, pseudo-anonymously).
if you're trading bitcoin through an exchange (i.e 99% of the users), it's not anonymous.
People often analyze Bitcoin's price volatility, the way it is manipulated in unregulated trade. They then assert that this asset must be as valueless and useless as the patterns it trades under. Bitcoin the asset is no longer separable from the hustlers profiting from it. Bitcoin, the network, the platform, the technology, somehow becomes the scam.
iphone was better than conventional phones in every aspect.
what are some of the things that bitcoin does better than conventional banking?
sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911974
Ballmer's thoughts were rational at the time, but wrong.
