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.
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.
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.
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.
hOw dArE YoU AbAnDoN ThE FeDeRaL ReSeRvE SyStEm, YoU NaZi
Nothing is risk free, any fractional reserve asset that they tell you is "stable" really has the same volatility fundamentally, but as soon as the price goes up, they suppress it and put the profits in their own pockets. Once it goes down you won't notice until after a few weeks when inflation strikes and food and gas prices is suddenly up 50%.
Ride the wave and do your purchases when you get the most affordable price. Focus on buying supplies that you can stock up and keep for a very long time. And also make sure to have your own production, get chickens, a garden where you can grow plants, a well, solar panels and battery backup, try to not be dependent on the grids or the government. The lower monthly living costs you have, the better.
I think a good chunk of transactions are to launder dirty money, or to exchange money for unlawful/immortal actions. I'm talking things like drug running, human/sex trafficking, prostitution, hits.
Perhaps, all we see is transaction not what they where paying for. So this is all in your head. And even if some transactions does pay for illegal stuff that's just "guilt by association" which is a terrible argument. See anyone who want to pay for "immoral stuff" don't want to get caught, so what do they do? well obviously they pay with whatever has the best privacy and reasonable convenience.
I also think a majority of bitcoins are owned by a very few people. These people then have the financial means to mine more bitcoins and other crypto.
There's a rich list showing all the addresses with the most coins, pretty much all the major ones are exchange wallets, i.e shared wallets or DeFi smart contracts which means multiple people owns the coins in them, beside that there's millions of active wallets.
While unequal distribution is indeed a problem, keep in mind that the same applies to every fiat currency (top 1% of the richest owns 99% of the money) and gold (Rothschild owns at least 60% of all physical gold).
I think the acceptance of crypto in general planting the seeds for a one world currency. The government opposition you see now is mostly controlled.
While this might seem like a threat, the actual threat is all about country. A one-world currency doesn't have to be a bad thing in itself. 200 years ago and further back gold was the one world currency and it did work pretty well because nobody controlled it. Same applies to crypto.
Besides, with Bitcoin and Ethereum's scaling problem and slow block times there's already dozens of viable alternative cryptocurrencies that does a better job, not only generically speaking but coins that's targets specific industries. Take Sia coin and StorJ for instance, those are relevant if you need object storage (competes with Amazon S3 for 1/10 of the price) but you probably wouldn't use it to buy a cup of coffee.
Same thing if you gonna do something very illegal, or just secret. You'd probably use Monero because of it's privacy features.
Eventually a crypto might come along that promises stability, privacy, acceptance, and liquidity. But, that might have backdoors to allow govt to watch every transaction.
I doubt there will ever be one for everything, there's gonna be multiple coins in circulation with various usage areas, libraries and wallets are gonna improve so that it's easy for merchants and customers to use without risk of confusion. Also keep in mind that the cryptocurrency is not just a currency, it's a payment protocol for it's own blockchain and the relevant usage area is what that blockchain was designed to do.
What you really should fear here, is carbon credit, which by definition is not a cryptocurrency, but a smart contract on blockchain. This is just the back-end part of it tho and completely irrelevant to you as a user. The globalists plan is to devalueate the dollar and other fiat currencies until it's worthless, then they show up as saviors offering you carbon credit.
Now think of carbon credit as glorified digital food stamps, they will control the price of everything, they will control your salary, and just like your bank they can see your history and freeze your funds at any time for any reason. Unlike fiat it's also said carbon credit will have an expiry date which encourage a certain level of consumption, tho in reality you'll never have enough to live a decent life, just enough to survive.
This is how they force you to eat bugs, this is how they make you move into a pod, drink sewage and own nothing, because it'll be the only life you can afford.
I also remember Alex Jones mentioning that George Soros was once asking him to talkup and push bitcoin to his audience. I think this was a show with Joe Rogan.
More guilt by association, AJ would have called Soros out if he tried something like that. Besides, Soros have an extremely diversified portfolio including all different fiat currencies, precious metals, stocks and crypto too obviously, he then manipulate the markets and play all these assets against each others in ways that would have been illegal for people like us, but when Soros does it it's ok. 🤡
Every time you get scared during a market crash and panic sell, Soros is there to scoop up the value, then he steals the value fro your devalueated "safe heaven", which is the dollar before you buy back at loss. Of course this process takes a few months so you might not even notice, but at some point you'll notice how much more expensive everything is and how you suddenly can't afford the stuff you used to be able to afford.
You don't crack "crypto" with quantum computers, you may be able to brute force a specific algorithm a million times faster than a regular computer or ASIC chip can do. Fact is, ASIC's are already faster than quantum computers. Thing about quantum computers is that they're only good for very specific tasks, anything else they'll be just as slow as any other computer.
Banks own and control cash, it's a centralized system out of the people's control already. Pointless to fight for that. Gold and silver coins would be more realistic, but since the stores goes cashless too you're limited to digital assets. Which leaves the banks, or crypto as the only choice.
Crypto is the most strategic choice, the country has some of the worlds best internet coverage and plenty of energy sources. Big box stores and banks will collapse long before the connectivity or the grid becomes unusable, and the day any of the grids goes down, no medium of exchange matters.
People would starve and freeze to death in days, so you really don't need a currency for a SHTF situation, only food, firewood and a couple of guns, all in a strategic location you can easily defend from an army of zombies.
Hold, it's not a loss until you sell for a price lower than what you bought for. But you're right, it's pretty retarded to buy at the top, during all the hype ;-)
It's called fake paper assets, (((they))) use the same method to manipulate precious metals, stocks and the housing market. Heck all markets are manipulated. That still doesn't mean you can create assets out of thin air, only paper.
The solution is simple, stop buying their fake paper and buy the assets directly. And don't panic sell at the bottom just because they use their papers to create an artificial crash.
You understand that data must reside somewhere, right?
So does every physical object, storage disks are just more sensitive then many physical objects but in return offers the ability to keep multiple copies of it's data. This is about fire safety, safety from theft or similar unforeseen events. Tell me, how do you protect physical objects, why why exactly if that method better than the methods you use to store digital data?
In order to accomplish this they end up on servers
You do understand that a server is just a computer, you can own a computer and you can own the property where said computer is stored. Tell me, how exactly do you store your files today? do you keep everything local or do you use "the cloud".
Do you honestly believe that data is free from scrutiny when it passes thru servers owned by NOT YOU?
Do you think your physical items are safe, when anyone at any time could easily break into your home through the door or a window and steal whatever they want. And the only protection at best will be you holding a gun, what if there's 10 of them and you're alone, pop, you're dead, now they take anything they want.
"but its encrypted"
Try brute force your way through AES-256 bit encryption, that's 2²⁵⁶ keys that you need to test. They have not cracked all encryption algorithms, that's pure and simple propaganda. What they do is to obtain the key, because obtaining the key is like stealing the gold you keep in your safe. See above once again, 10 armed burglars walks in, pop, you're dead, boom now you're safe is blown open and there is your gold, and your encryption key.
You think they'll build a billion dollar cluster just to steal your personal files? which won't be enough to crack the encryption in a billion years anyway. Keep dreaming. Besides, cryptocurrency can be forked from any any block and a new encryption algorithm put in place. If they ever cracked the encryption used by a cryptocurrency and started to steal coins, a majority would agree to reverse the chain, fork and put in place a different algorithm that has not yet been cracked.
SOP --> if man can make it, man can unmake it.
Wrong, you forgot the control aspect. If man can't control it, man can't change it. Oh an you forgot to answer the main question, what's your opinion on amazon S3 in comparison of blockchain based object storage if you had to use either one to backup your files.
So in your world, this project for instance: https://www.storj.io/ is a scam. But Amazon S3 is not a scam? explain that please.
Look at the code and there's a key difference to notice. While people may be completely retarded with their personal files, putting them on goolag drive or similar centralized service they don't control, for "convenience" it should be said that doing so is exactly like keeping your gold in someone else's vault.
Then there's local storage, anything you put on a secure encrypted disk at home is under your control and secure. But here's another problem, disks are sensitive to damage. If your house burns down you can usually recover any gold you hide in your mattress or your safe, just needs to move all the trash first. A disk on the other hand is destroyed.
Now with crypto and blockchains you'll get decentralized and distributed encrypted storage for your files. This means that your data is synchronized across many disks spread over the world and you're in control thanks to your key, which you can make backup copies of.
Now this solves the recovery issue. If you're out with your boat and have your gold with you, then your boat sinks at the deepest spot in the ocean, you'll know where your gold is, but you can never recover it. With crypto you may have a backup key somewhere else which allow you to access your coins, even if one of your keys sunk with the boat.
Those who want to control you will do anything to convince you that "it's a scam", in reality it's a tool you can use to take back control over what's yours. We can control physical items we own, why not have full control over digital items too.
Fedcoin can't exist without capitalism, it would have no chance to compete with crypto in today's free market world, and provide no benefit over traditional digital banking. I think in the future it's either crypto or some sort of glorified foodstamps, Soviet style. It'll be the end of capitalism basically and they're gonna make it really inconvenient to use, buy or hold crypto in the short term, might even be attempts to regulate it.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they used their regular technicalities to trick people into selling, so that as much people as possible fall down the black hole where fiat goes down, thereby forcing the majority into dependency through glorified digital food stamps, known as carbon credit. It's gonna be "for the environment" too.
Which is all part of their plan, they create artificial volatility and gamble to enrich themselves. The real scam is and has always been fiat currency, and it's insane how everyone just accept to value stuff with real market value in fiat currency.
See this is how the world will lose, people are gonna panic because of the volatility, then sell everything they own of value. Bam, Klaus Schwabs dream comes true, you own nothing, you live in a pod, you eat bugs and so on.
If you got crypto and precious metals, hold hard onto it, and get more if you can. Crypto is compatible with Visa and Mastercard these days you won't even need a bank to buy stuff in regular stores, or to pay your bills, plus that more places start to accept crypto natively.
Once fiat collapses only precious metals and some cryptos will survive as money, real market valued money. Everyone who held fiat will be broke and miserable, with no other choice than accepting their carbon credit, which is basically just glorified Soviet style food stamps.
Look into the financial system of the Soviet union, that's their end goal, there's not gonna be any Fedcoin or central bank digital currency. All of those would require a capitalist foundation. The new world order is pure communist, money or currency is not for the people under communism. It's for the elite only, and they're gonna do fine with precious metals and crypto as store of value and to purchase stuff from each others on the free elite market.
But what are you touching? some worthless slip of paper... it's the same scam, medium doesn't matter. And if the medium matter to you, and you prefer physical, then you should use precious metals because those are market valued.
I've seen a few power, internet and server outages in cashless hell in my days, the modern day world is so dependent on digital stuff that you won't be able to pay with cash if the digital system goes down. Not to mention the huge risk, there's no verification in cash, you have no way to know if it's real or fake.
Plus that any day M$ could release a printer driver update, which would allow any fool trying to counterfeit cash through their home color printer will succeed, that's blocked today by most printers by design but could easily change with the flip of a switch.
Bitcoin and most other large coins are peer to peer, that's the most redundant design a digital system can have. It'd take a global permanent outage to eliminate it, and if that where to happen we'd have bigger issues to worry about anyway. Why would anyone need money, when there's no market? Should the society ever recover from a full collapse bartering will work just fine.
That's like saying http is bad because shitty websites dominate the internet.
That was the whole point, it was never supposed to be paired with fiat through centralized KYC exchanges. First purchase ever made with Bitcoin was two pizzas back in 2010, no fiat involved, just a peer-to-peer transaction directly after the guy ordering the pizza and the delivery man agreed on the payment because they both understood the point of Bitcoin.
Give people freedom, and they'll throw it away... Ignorance is strength as they said in 1984.
I have to disagree with you on this one. Here in cashless hell we have 6 major banks, if you're a member of the Russian mafia coming in with a sack of drug money in cash they roll out the red carpet for you can lick your ass, then gladly launder the money for you.
Otherwise, if you're an honest person trying to deposit cash, they just seize it and label you a drug dealer. You have no rights, guilty until proven innocent. While crypto exchanges are far from perfect, they're not nearly as bad as these 6 shitty banks.
Enjoy living in a free country while it lasts.