This comment reminds me of a financial radio show where the host is laying out economic scenarios. The bottom tier was what you mentioned. Gold is worthless at that point. The caller ask him if he owns any firearms and the host says "I don't discuss what is in my portfolio". That comment said it all
Except there’s nothing to make bitcoin valuable at all to most normies in a post-fiat world. Being able to buy and sell goods online when there’s no one getting paid to truck it out to me or worst at a post office to handle it for me until I come and get it doesn’t really work. Having someone show up and ask to get some diesel from a farm tank in exchange for some bitcoin? Or rather “part” of a bitcoin? Or some shitcoins? Good luck getting that trade to go through.
Maybe, just MAYBE there’s would be a chance for bitcoin to slip in as a dominant currency if it was the only game in town but with all the other coins like monaro, etherium, etc etc etc all eating each other to try and be worth something? There’s nothing to back up any shitcoin at all, or bitcoin. Don’t care if you bought it online or mined it yourself in your basement, it only has use as a medium for exchange if both parties agree to it, and most people simple don’t want or need to take these digital coins.
I would say that value is in having a secure and independent worldwide network for exchanging tokens that requires no 3rd-party trust. That is, bitcoin's value is in the utility of network and the technology itself. To say it has "no value" has never been a good argument. As the network becomes more decentralized its value goes up. As more farmers accept bitcoin as an alternative to government controlled currencies, its value goes up. Presumably, those farmers would have to have a reason to make the switch and that is becoming more likely every year.
To say it has no value relates to its lack of a physical state. Gold has value outside of being used for currency as it can be made into jewelry, tooth fillings, plate electronics for anti-corrosion and thermal characteristics, or just sit on your desk and keep your papers from flying off when the door opens. Fiat currency, if it goes completely worthless, could be burned for heat/cooking in the case of paper bills and melted down in the case of coins and made into something else. Bitcoin and digital currencies have none of these possibilities. They’re merely a digital token to be used for exchange and that’s it. No use outside of that, no way to use them for something else and if the network is compromised or taken down, then completely worthless is the proper description. It’s like an online game that shut off its servers. I had one billion VDollars in 10Six, then the owners shut the game down, now I have none, that kind of a deal.
I can see the point you're trying to make, but I'm not persuaded by the argument that everything needs to have secondary utility to be valuable. The food I eat is only valuable for one thing and then it becomes worthless after I'm finished consuming it (don't even try to make a point about humanure, haha!). I also don't buy the argument that bitcoin can be shut down like a game server because it's not centralized or controlled by anyone - if one server is shut down, another one can be started up anywhere in the world.
Its value would be destroyed if the encryption scheme is broken, but that's easier said than done. I guess I just see huge value in a means of exchange that is outside of government control, that anyone in the world can access with little expense, that does not require me to trust the people involved in the transaction and can't be counterfeited. It's a better form of money than we currently use... though there is still a ton of uncertainty surrounding crypto so I don't blame anyone for doubting it at this stage. Most of the people involved right now are mostly speculating in it, giving it bad impression for people who are risk-averse. It's not stable enough to be used as a day-to-day currency, yet.
I see you’re not starry eyed and can actually see some of the draw backs. That’s great, many pushing crypto see it as digital Jesus here to save the world with no flaws, and that’s just not the case.
As for the humanure lol, of course it has value! You can add a paper bag and leave it aflame on a doorstep for the entertainment value! In seriousness the food you consume gives you value and is a consumable good, and after you’ve consumed it, that’s end of transaction. You get your nutrition and calories and heal and repair your body with it, and excrete the waste and have no obligation to use it further. Most things you buy you expect to use more than once. We don’t have one time use tv’s for example. Repurposing items to extend the life of the resource is beneficial both for the environment(which if I’m honest is something I worry about the least) and for economical reasons. Using scrap metal to weld a plate on my tractor instead of going out and buying a new piece of steel is simply cheaper. When preparing for a “shit hits the fan” scenario, having everything be useful in more than one way is the only way to go. I can trade my alcohol I brewed at home for flour at a nearby Mennonite colony, distill it and use the alcohol to fuel my gasoline engines in vehicles, garden tiller etc, or I can simply drink it like I do. Raw goods have value in their initial state and can be used for trade or in other ways. Bitcoin simply can not. It’s an exchange token, nothing more. When prepping for the world going to hell, I don’t spend much time having a stash of digital tokens to order stuff from abroad since I can’t count on there being distribution networks to get me said goods, electricity to power the network or even my local area. And I can’t count on local people taking it since no one was taking it before things went to hell. Having goods and bullets stocked and prepared to me is a far better bet than gold or bitcoin. You can’t eat gold, you can’t eat bitcoin, but you can trade a side of beef for flour eggs and potato’s.
Using bitcoin instead of USD for online exchanges may be in the cards but for day to do transactions on the local level, adoption will be painfully slow in rural areas, if it is at all. Look how long it took just to get interac/debit machines widespread. Cities are one thing but most of the world isn’t in a city.
Yeah, I agree with all of that... but for most people it's not reasonable to expect them to do things the old way and be self-sufficient. It's a way of life most people have moved away from, so these people need a common token of exchange. In a worst-case scenario these people probably won't have the resources to make it and you're right, bitcoin or gold wouldn't save them.
But what about a less severe scenario, like a slow descent into fiat currency endgame (which I find more likely than complete and sudden collapse), where people have time to adapt and make decisions to protect themselves. People would still be producing things, still go to work and earn a paycheck, but everyone is looking for a way to protect themselves from devaluation. They would naturally have to consider a competing currency, like crypto.
And long as people are given a choice and it’s brought in slow, adoption will go smooth. Businesses were used to dealing with cash and cheque, and when debt was introduced they still accepted cash and moved away from cheque’s due to the problems associated with them. Very few businesses don’t accept cash and all but the smallest businesses accept debit. If they can bring in bitcoin machines alongside the countries fiat, AND incorporate it into the same debit machine you’ll see ease of adoption. But if you have to have shopkeeps running two different machines, one for fiat one for crypto, keep track daily of what the crypto exchange is similar to say having an exchange rate for USD in a Canadian resterant, you’ve added a headache most small businesses don’t want to deal with. And another machine to cash out at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you just wanna go home not double your til work.
Add in this is only for one crypto currency, bitcoin. If you want multiple coins usable for commerce, I can’t see it being done outside of major retailers. Walmart, Amazon, maybe car dealerships would take monero instead of bitcoin but the local small grocery store or mom and pop hardware store won’t want bitcoin/ethereum/monero/doge etc etc coins to keep track of.
The "bitcoin machine" is something almost everyone already has - a smartphone. You scan a QR code posted at the register and send an amount agreed upon by the shop owner and customer. Failing that, you could use a cold wallet to authorize a transaction on the shop-owner's phone or computer. Bitcoin or any altcoin works the same way. I guess I just don't see this as a technological hurdle like you do.
200 Years ago and thousands of years before that, gold was the primary source of money. It worked even tho there was no (((middleman))) there to rip you off by stealing the value out of your money.
Bitcoin and other major decentralized cryptocurrencies are built on the same principles as the properties of gold, only digital. Which is exactly why it should work as a drop in replacement to digital banks, same way gold should be the perfect drop in replacement for cash.
It's time to smoke out the (((middlemen))) and reclaim the value of our money.
While I love the idea of getting rid of the middlemen (in everywhere from finance to useless middle management causing bloat in every business sector), bitcoin and digital coins still haven’t gotten there have they? When switching between digital coins, there’s still a fee. Many a time have I heard the digital coin bros complain about the gas fee on X, and the network servers them selves are a middle man. Unless you’re printed out the code to a bitcoin on a piece of paper, and handed it to someone else and exchanged a good or service for that, you need the network as a middle man. Hell, even doing it that way the guy you gave the printed out bitcoin code to still needs to do something on the network to add it to his wallet officially unless he’s just going to trade the paper to the next guy in the chain of trades.
There's a difference between a middleman with control and a middleman without control. The network is simply all the miners competing over the next block, anyone can become a miner and no single miner can censor or surveil particular transactions.
Sure lower fees would be cool, but it's not the money that I'm worried about. I don't mind paying for a digital transaction, as long as I can be 100% sure it arrives in full to where I sent it, without anyone fucking around trying to steal it from me, block it or reroute it.
But you still need trust in that system to be secure. Over 50% consensus of the severs required for a change to be accepted sounds good until some bad actor like a government or two or more working in cahoots decide to subvert it. There’s already work in progress to de-anonymize the TOR network, these agencies love control and there’s no way they won’t attempt the same for digital currencies.
With banks, employees and owners are known and public record and if there’s fuckery, you have someone to go after legally. With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense. You’re just shit out of luck. Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure. You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them.
With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised. How can you be sure of this? How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
No, you don't need to trust anything, in fact you shouldn't trust the system, that's the whole point. You can verify the distribution of mining hash rate at any time.
And over 50% is certainly not a requirement, think of it as a lottery, you provide 0.000001% of the networks hash rate, then that's your probability to crack the next block if you solo mine, many are mining via pools which gets the reward more often only to share it. Most pools are based and backs down if they become too large to avoid getting close to 50%.
If you have more than 50% of the hash rate you can do a few things to fuck around, but only to transactions, this includes delaying transactions and stuff like that. But why would you? if you control that much, it means you'd just spent billions maybe even trillions of dollars on hardware, you probably own a couple of nuclear power plants dedicated for your miners and a bunch of warehouses to house them. And by doing that investment, you'll earn about $2M dollars per hour just from the mining itself. Why waste so much money to destroy something that will come back moments later with a new mining algorithm that makes your hardware useless.
With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense
Do you really want that? think of how that would work for your gold or your car. You would have to not own it and let someone else guard it for you. Do you really wanna go down on your knees, take your hat off and say "please" every time you wanna use your car? I'd rather take my chances and risk getting car jacked. And if someone tries to steal it, I blow their head off.
Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure.
Because exchanges is essentially banks, and banks gets hacked all the time. Not your key not your coins. Think of gold once again, if someone breaks into a vault and steal your gold, that's a vault problem and not a gold problem.
You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them. With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised.
There's plenty of indicators showing weather or not the network is under risk of being compromised. Mining distribution is the most important one. So far Bitcoin has never even been close to be compromised.
How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
Bitcoins current total hash rate is about 200EH/s, know your metric prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, where Exa is 2¹⁸, for reference, a high end GPU does at most 300MH/s and a intel Xeon high end server CPU with 64 or 128 cores does 20MH/s at most. That's 2⁶. This means: 18 - 6 = 12 hence 2¹², and divide by 2 to get 50%.
Hence you would need 500 billion high end servers or over a million Antminer ASIC devices. But that's not entirely true, because this assumes half of the current hash rate, if you inject more hashrate yourself, the total hashrate must double, hence double this to 1 trillion high end servers, or at least 2 million Ant miner devices. Which would require many Gigawatts of power and lot's of cooling of you run a centralized operation.
I'm sure because I would notice if the hashrate suddenly doubled, but as said earlier, I doubt any government in the world would waste billions and billions of dollars just to temporary compromise the Bitcoin blockchain, seeing that Bitcoin could easily fork and switch to scrypt, or some ASIC resistant algorithm.
Why would you fuck around with translations and delaying and cancelling them? These are people who love and covet control, the money to them is simply a number on the screen. They don’t have to work and toil in a coal mine to make a living, they can just type on a keyboard or more likely tell an underling to approve the project and poof the money they need into existence. They don’t play by the same rules we’re forced to.
I think something was lost in translation in regards to owning my car or a gold bar. If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance or other holdings they have. There’s people to sue or charge with fraud. My car or a gold bar in my possession I have no need for anyone so permission to use so not really a fair analogy. Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance
No, see this is the exact point I'm trying to make. You just assume they will be nice and fix it for you. This is still relying on a middleman, which is the exact thing you should not do, if you really prefer freedom and control over your own assets.
My car or a gold bar in my possession
Yes, because you understand how stupid it would be to let someone else guard it for you. This is why you still have full control over your car and your gold. Now treat your crypto wallet just like your car, I'm not asking you to build a garage for it and polish and vax it every year but make sure it's a hardware wallet or on a slip of paper or sheet of metal, something physical you can hide in a good place. And don't forget backups.
Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
MtGOX has paid back everything that got stolen already, this was done a few years ago, and it's a perfect example of why you shouldn't trust or rely on middlemen. People who had their coins there learned the hard way.
This comment reminds me of a financial radio show where the host is laying out economic scenarios. The bottom tier was what you mentioned. Gold is worthless at that point. The caller ask him if he owns any firearms and the host says "I don't discuss what is in my portfolio". That comment said it all
this post is 1h old. your $0.02 isn't worth $0.02 anymore...
Except there’s nothing to make bitcoin valuable at all to most normies in a post-fiat world. Being able to buy and sell goods online when there’s no one getting paid to truck it out to me or worst at a post office to handle it for me until I come and get it doesn’t really work. Having someone show up and ask to get some diesel from a farm tank in exchange for some bitcoin? Or rather “part” of a bitcoin? Or some shitcoins? Good luck getting that trade to go through. Maybe, just MAYBE there’s would be a chance for bitcoin to slip in as a dominant currency if it was the only game in town but with all the other coins like monaro, etherium, etc etc etc all eating each other to try and be worth something? There’s nothing to back up any shitcoin at all, or bitcoin. Don’t care if you bought it online or mined it yourself in your basement, it only has use as a medium for exchange if both parties agree to it, and most people simple don’t want or need to take these digital coins.
I would say that value is in having a secure and independent worldwide network for exchanging tokens that requires no 3rd-party trust. That is, bitcoin's value is in the utility of network and the technology itself. To say it has "no value" has never been a good argument. As the network becomes more decentralized its value goes up. As more farmers accept bitcoin as an alternative to government controlled currencies, its value goes up. Presumably, those farmers would have to have a reason to make the switch and that is becoming more likely every year.
To say it has no value relates to its lack of a physical state. Gold has value outside of being used for currency as it can be made into jewelry, tooth fillings, plate electronics for anti-corrosion and thermal characteristics, or just sit on your desk and keep your papers from flying off when the door opens. Fiat currency, if it goes completely worthless, could be burned for heat/cooking in the case of paper bills and melted down in the case of coins and made into something else. Bitcoin and digital currencies have none of these possibilities. They’re merely a digital token to be used for exchange and that’s it. No use outside of that, no way to use them for something else and if the network is compromised or taken down, then completely worthless is the proper description. It’s like an online game that shut off its servers. I had one billion VDollars in 10Six, then the owners shut the game down, now I have none, that kind of a deal.
I can see the point you're trying to make, but I'm not persuaded by the argument that everything needs to have secondary utility to be valuable. The food I eat is only valuable for one thing and then it becomes worthless after I'm finished consuming it (don't even try to make a point about humanure, haha!). I also don't buy the argument that bitcoin can be shut down like a game server because it's not centralized or controlled by anyone - if one server is shut down, another one can be started up anywhere in the world.
Its value would be destroyed if the encryption scheme is broken, but that's easier said than done. I guess I just see huge value in a means of exchange that is outside of government control, that anyone in the world can access with little expense, that does not require me to trust the people involved in the transaction and can't be counterfeited. It's a better form of money than we currently use... though there is still a ton of uncertainty surrounding crypto so I don't blame anyone for doubting it at this stage. Most of the people involved right now are mostly speculating in it, giving it bad impression for people who are risk-averse. It's not stable enough to be used as a day-to-day currency, yet.
I see you’re not starry eyed and can actually see some of the draw backs. That’s great, many pushing crypto see it as digital Jesus here to save the world with no flaws, and that’s just not the case. As for the humanure lol, of course it has value! You can add a paper bag and leave it aflame on a doorstep for the entertainment value! In seriousness the food you consume gives you value and is a consumable good, and after you’ve consumed it, that’s end of transaction. You get your nutrition and calories and heal and repair your body with it, and excrete the waste and have no obligation to use it further. Most things you buy you expect to use more than once. We don’t have one time use tv’s for example. Repurposing items to extend the life of the resource is beneficial both for the environment(which if I’m honest is something I worry about the least) and for economical reasons. Using scrap metal to weld a plate on my tractor instead of going out and buying a new piece of steel is simply cheaper. When preparing for a “shit hits the fan” scenario, having everything be useful in more than one way is the only way to go. I can trade my alcohol I brewed at home for flour at a nearby Mennonite colony, distill it and use the alcohol to fuel my gasoline engines in vehicles, garden tiller etc, or I can simply drink it like I do. Raw goods have value in their initial state and can be used for trade or in other ways. Bitcoin simply can not. It’s an exchange token, nothing more. When prepping for the world going to hell, I don’t spend much time having a stash of digital tokens to order stuff from abroad since I can’t count on there being distribution networks to get me said goods, electricity to power the network or even my local area. And I can’t count on local people taking it since no one was taking it before things went to hell. Having goods and bullets stocked and prepared to me is a far better bet than gold or bitcoin. You can’t eat gold, you can’t eat bitcoin, but you can trade a side of beef for flour eggs and potato’s. Using bitcoin instead of USD for online exchanges may be in the cards but for day to do transactions on the local level, adoption will be painfully slow in rural areas, if it is at all. Look how long it took just to get interac/debit machines widespread. Cities are one thing but most of the world isn’t in a city.
Yeah, I agree with all of that... but for most people it's not reasonable to expect them to do things the old way and be self-sufficient. It's a way of life most people have moved away from, so these people need a common token of exchange. In a worst-case scenario these people probably won't have the resources to make it and you're right, bitcoin or gold wouldn't save them.
But what about a less severe scenario, like a slow descent into fiat currency endgame (which I find more likely than complete and sudden collapse), where people have time to adapt and make decisions to protect themselves. People would still be producing things, still go to work and earn a paycheck, but everyone is looking for a way to protect themselves from devaluation. They would naturally have to consider a competing currency, like crypto.
And long as people are given a choice and it’s brought in slow, adoption will go smooth. Businesses were used to dealing with cash and cheque, and when debt was introduced they still accepted cash and moved away from cheque’s due to the problems associated with them. Very few businesses don’t accept cash and all but the smallest businesses accept debit. If they can bring in bitcoin machines alongside the countries fiat, AND incorporate it into the same debit machine you’ll see ease of adoption. But if you have to have shopkeeps running two different machines, one for fiat one for crypto, keep track daily of what the crypto exchange is similar to say having an exchange rate for USD in a Canadian resterant, you’ve added a headache most small businesses don’t want to deal with. And another machine to cash out at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you just wanna go home not double your til work. Add in this is only for one crypto currency, bitcoin. If you want multiple coins usable for commerce, I can’t see it being done outside of major retailers. Walmart, Amazon, maybe car dealerships would take monero instead of bitcoin but the local small grocery store or mom and pop hardware store won’t want bitcoin/ethereum/monero/doge etc etc coins to keep track of.
The "bitcoin machine" is something almost everyone already has - a smartphone. You scan a QR code posted at the register and send an amount agreed upon by the shop owner and customer. Failing that, you could use a cold wallet to authorize a transaction on the shop-owner's phone or computer. Bitcoin or any altcoin works the same way. I guess I just don't see this as a technological hurdle like you do.
not yet. 🍿
I think you’ll see people trade a truck for a cow before you see Billie-joe trade bitcoin to Jim-Bob for a tractor.
200 Years ago and thousands of years before that, gold was the primary source of money. It worked even tho there was no (((middleman))) there to rip you off by stealing the value out of your money.
Bitcoin and other major decentralized cryptocurrencies are built on the same principles as the properties of gold, only digital. Which is exactly why it should work as a drop in replacement to digital banks, same way gold should be the perfect drop in replacement for cash.
It's time to smoke out the (((middlemen))) and reclaim the value of our money.
While I love the idea of getting rid of the middlemen (in everywhere from finance to useless middle management causing bloat in every business sector), bitcoin and digital coins still haven’t gotten there have they? When switching between digital coins, there’s still a fee. Many a time have I heard the digital coin bros complain about the gas fee on X, and the network servers them selves are a middle man. Unless you’re printed out the code to a bitcoin on a piece of paper, and handed it to someone else and exchanged a good or service for that, you need the network as a middle man. Hell, even doing it that way the guy you gave the printed out bitcoin code to still needs to do something on the network to add it to his wallet officially unless he’s just going to trade the paper to the next guy in the chain of trades.
There's a difference between a middleman with control and a middleman without control. The network is simply all the miners competing over the next block, anyone can become a miner and no single miner can censor or surveil particular transactions.
Sure lower fees would be cool, but it's not the money that I'm worried about. I don't mind paying for a digital transaction, as long as I can be 100% sure it arrives in full to where I sent it, without anyone fucking around trying to steal it from me, block it or reroute it.
But you still need trust in that system to be secure. Over 50% consensus of the severs required for a change to be accepted sounds good until some bad actor like a government or two or more working in cahoots decide to subvert it. There’s already work in progress to de-anonymize the TOR network, these agencies love control and there’s no way they won’t attempt the same for digital currencies. With banks, employees and owners are known and public record and if there’s fuckery, you have someone to go after legally. With the bitcoin network, if a person gets scammed there’s no one to turn to for recompense. You’re just shit out of luck. Exchanges have been hacked and people have lost millions, so you can trust them to be secure. You have to go through hoops and store your coins in offline wallets, and then incur risks when you put them online to use them. With the network decentralized, there’s no governing body to oversee and provide security, you HAVE to trust that the network hasn’t been compromised. How can you be sure of this? How can you check to see that China hasn’t infected 3000 servers and placed 20000 more online and gained 51% control and now determines what is and what’s isn’t an authorized transaction?
No, you don't need to trust anything, in fact you shouldn't trust the system, that's the whole point. You can verify the distribution of mining hash rate at any time.
And over 50% is certainly not a requirement, think of it as a lottery, you provide 0.000001% of the networks hash rate, then that's your probability to crack the next block if you solo mine, many are mining via pools which gets the reward more often only to share it. Most pools are based and backs down if they become too large to avoid getting close to 50%.
If you have more than 50% of the hash rate you can do a few things to fuck around, but only to transactions, this includes delaying transactions and stuff like that. But why would you? if you control that much, it means you'd just spent billions maybe even trillions of dollars on hardware, you probably own a couple of nuclear power plants dedicated for your miners and a bunch of warehouses to house them. And by doing that investment, you'll earn about $2M dollars per hour just from the mining itself. Why waste so much money to destroy something that will come back moments later with a new mining algorithm that makes your hardware useless.
Do you really want that? think of how that would work for your gold or your car. You would have to not own it and let someone else guard it for you. Do you really wanna go down on your knees, take your hat off and say "please" every time you wanna use your car? I'd rather take my chances and risk getting car jacked. And if someone tries to steal it, I blow their head off.
Because exchanges is essentially banks, and banks gets hacked all the time. Not your key not your coins. Think of gold once again, if someone breaks into a vault and steal your gold, that's a vault problem and not a gold problem.
There's plenty of indicators showing weather or not the network is under risk of being compromised. Mining distribution is the most important one. So far Bitcoin has never even been close to be compromised.
Bitcoins current total hash rate is about 200EH/s, know your metric prefixes, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, where Exa is 2¹⁸, for reference, a high end GPU does at most 300MH/s and a intel Xeon high end server CPU with 64 or 128 cores does 20MH/s at most. That's 2⁶. This means: 18 - 6 = 12 hence 2¹², and divide by 2 to get 50%.
Hence you would need 500 billion high end servers or over a million Antminer ASIC devices. But that's not entirely true, because this assumes half of the current hash rate, if you inject more hashrate yourself, the total hashrate must double, hence double this to 1 trillion high end servers, or at least 2 million Ant miner devices. Which would require many Gigawatts of power and lot's of cooling of you run a centralized operation.
I'm sure because I would notice if the hashrate suddenly doubled, but as said earlier, I doubt any government in the world would waste billions and billions of dollars just to temporary compromise the Bitcoin blockchain, seeing that Bitcoin could easily fork and switch to scrypt, or some ASIC resistant algorithm.
Why would you fuck around with translations and delaying and cancelling them? These are people who love and covet control, the money to them is simply a number on the screen. They don’t have to work and toil in a coal mine to make a living, they can just type on a keyboard or more likely tell an underling to approve the project and poof the money they need into existence. They don’t play by the same rules we’re forced to.
I think something was lost in translation in regards to owning my car or a gold bar. If I place money in the bank, and someone steals that money, the bank is responsible for ensuring I get my money back via their insurance or other holdings they have. There’s people to sue or charge with fraud. My car or a gold bar in my possession I have no need for anyone so permission to use so not really a fair analogy. Try getting money back from MtGOX if you had coins stored there.
No, see this is the exact point I'm trying to make. You just assume they will be nice and fix it for you. This is still relying on a middleman, which is the exact thing you should not do, if you really prefer freedom and control over your own assets.
Yes, because you understand how stupid it would be to let someone else guard it for you. This is why you still have full control over your car and your gold. Now treat your crypto wallet just like your car, I'm not asking you to build a garage for it and polish and vax it every year but make sure it's a hardware wallet or on a slip of paper or sheet of metal, something physical you can hide in a good place. And don't forget backups.
MtGOX has paid back everything that got stolen already, this was done a few years ago, and it's a perfect example of why you shouldn't trust or rely on middlemen. People who had their coins there learned the hard way.
Your 2 cents? Wow, that's like Seven Million Dego.