Comment on Anon gives up on Bitcoin in 2010
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoyou’re thinking about it way too traditionally, bitcoin isn’t used to trade goods and services on the free market (Aside from illegal goods and services maybe)
It’s traditionally used a “anonymous” or “non legal identity based” payment method, let’s say i wanted to wire you 20000 USD because you gave me some access to some highly illegal leaked government documents from the country of “oops all government corruption”
It’d be stupid for me to pay you in any form of traceable currency, bitcoin may be traceable, but unless you get access to the private keys, isn’t particularly meaningful, and even if you did, it’s highly unregulated, and there’s no clear path tracing when it comes to the actual money, like with USD for example, which is entirely serialized.
Certain VPN providers will actually accept bitcoin as payment, as it’s more secure than legally identifying payment information.
A lot of dark web services will also use crypto, again for security/anonymity.
I think given how big bitcoin currently is, the bubble may burst, but it will always exist, and it will always be around, for the trading of more illicit goods, or at the very least, more anonymous transfers of money.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sure, occasionally Bitcoin is useful for paying for illegal things, or for paying ransom after a ransomware attack. The thing is, that that basically makes it a payment gateway. You convert your dollars into bitcoin and make the payment. There’s no reason to hold onto bitcoin. You get it and then you use it. For that purpose, it doesn’t matter if the exchange rate is $100k per bitcoin, or $1 per 100 k bitcoins. Since you’re spending it as soon as you get it, you don’t care.
The dollar value of bitcoin only matters to people who are holding it as some kind of “investment”. If those people become convinced that the next sucker is about to cash out, they might cash out before that sucker, and the price of bitcoin could plunge to zero.
Bitcoin might always exist, but it might always exist like old Italian Lira coins. They’re cool collectors items, but have almost no real value anymore.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
sort of, it’s actually more complicated than that.
For reasons known to banks, and primarily banks, putting money into bitcoin is really easy, converting money out of bitcoin is a lot and i mean, a lot harder.
Pulling money out of bitcoin is essentially money laundering as far as your bank cares. A lot of early investors in bitcoin, still hold most of their money as bitcoin, or other crypto, because getting a payout of several million dollars is not very easy, from the exchanges, or the bank, which is not going to be particularly happy with you randomly declaring you have a few million in bitcoin.
There’s also the convenience factor, having some amount of money in your bitcoin wallet is useful, in the same way that having cash in your wallet is also, generally useful. Especially if you more regularly use it.
this would technically be true assuming this to be statically true, it’s not. As evidenced by the value of bitcoin changing. People are clearly willing to put money into bitcoin, and then hold it, to a significant enough degree that it causes changes in the value. That’s the whole point in speculative investment, that’s where that value comes from in the first place, it’s a self reinforcing cycle.
this isn’t actually true at all, the dollar value of bitcoin changes so rapidly it’s important to do transactions fairly quickly, and with an accurate enough conversion, that at the time of the transaction, the nominal value is closely achieved.
theoretically maybe, but this would require literally everybody to cash out of bitcoin, just look at stock markets, when the valuation of a company rises higher than it should, it will come back down, and when it’s lower than it should, likewise, it rises to where it should.
If bitcoin DID magically lose ALL investors, it would be stupid for both you and me to not invest in millions of bitcoin at the price of 0 dollars, considering that it’s such a massive crypto currency, it’s incredibly hard for it to get rugged or pulled, and will most certainly continue to see use, causing it’s price to rise in the future, being an incredibly productive investment for us.
that’s another potential, but you would have to see the exchanges die completely, which is again, unlikely. Transaction fees are a good business to be in.