You could understand the potential without psychic skills.
Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoThe problem with statements like “If you invested in Bitcoin back in 2009 you’d be rich now” is that you’d have to be clairvoyant to actually know that back then. And if you’re clairvoyant, the lottery offers a better return on investment than bitcoin.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Bitcoin is a purely speculative asset. It has potential the same way a lottery ticket does.
LibreHans@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Hm wat? It’s obvious that something useful and scarce will always go up against money a central bank can create out of thin air.
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Bitcoin is not useful, and its scarcity is debatable.
LibreHans@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
You mean bitcoin is not useful to you, it is very useful to lots of people. How is its scarcity debatable?
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Not useful to law abiding citizens, exactly. There’s plenty of people who are not law abiding citizens.
The scarcity is debatable because of forks. When a coin forks, then people need to settle which of the forks is the legitimate coin, and which one is the fork. There are several institutions and people who have influence over this discussion: Miners (They decide which fork to mine on), Exchanges (They decide who gets the old name and ticker symbol), platform landlords (they have significant ability to steer discourse), media (see previous). If enough of those came together, and decided that there should be 21 trillion bitcoin instead of 21 million, then there will soon be 21 trillion bitcoin.
While my example is far fetched, crypto currencies being forked to subvert their rules has already happened. For example, the ethereum/ethereum classic fork. The Ethereum blockchain got forked to roll back the hack of the DAO. Nothing the Hackers did violated Ethereum’s protocol, meaning that technically, they did nothing wrong. An example of a political decision which is harmful to the long term utility of the crypto currency would be the Bitcoin/Bitcoin cash fork. Bitcoin has a block size limit, which leads to a transaction limit of 7 transactions per second. This limit absolutely ruins Bitcoin’s potential utility, because even relatively small economies would be utterly choked with a 7 transaction limit. Still, miners profit from a tight transaction limit, and other institutions aren’t bothered by it, so they decided that the fork with the transaction limit was the legitimate one.
In conclusion, the 21 million bitcoin limit will remain as long as it is useful to the influential figures in the bitcoin ecosystem. See above for a rough listing of who those people are.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
In fact saying stuff like this is literally like seeing the winning lottery numbers on the telly and thinking, if only I played those numbers two days ago.