> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
The difference between a currency and store of value is not an exact line, but however vague that line is it is somewhat clear on which side Bitcoin is, and it is not the currency side.
> It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
Issuing a transaction may be easy, but I don't think that's meaningful when people get hit with issues similar to "pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked" on the on and off-ramps.
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.
Global scale using 1% of world electricity that can do 7 transactions per second, because the thousands and thousands of nodes don't trust each other and all do the same work.
I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays?
I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should.
I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
This is a US issue. In the EU you can do an instant bank transfer below a certain amount at any time, for free (after they mandated the fees away recently), and many other countries have systems that allow instant bank transfers. You don’t need a completely different way of dealing with money to get improvements to the current system.
>I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit.
What sort of tactics or strategy do you use to trade it for a consistent profit? I assume you're referring to bitcoin here.
Also, the banking hours thing is absurd, and way too common not only with banks but also some online payments processors, like, for example, the utter dumpster fire, parasitic garbage company that is Paypal. Dealing with that one alone (and with banks in certain contexts) alone makes one fully sympathize with so much of what crypto is supposed to (and to a pretty decent degree does) offer.
When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot of countrys have different and strange systems.
The value is in the network itself. Lots of people think that its the digital tokens or coins that have value, but its the system as a whole.
The value is also in the “need”. Corporate treasuries need a way to store wealth that doesn't inflate over time, gold inflates 2% per year, bitcoin 0% - so it fills an institutional need
Does Bitcoin still fit this need with the volatility Bitcoin sees? Do corporations really want to put their stored value it something so unpredictable?
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc is still not a proper currency.
Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
I don’t think it really does offer that escape, now that there’s so much institutional investment in it. It’s essentially tied to the decisions of 5 or 6 monetary policy committees, in the same way APPL is, because the risk free rate from the Fed or ECB is still the most significant factor in capital flows.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.
> I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting the $$$ going into btc
That’s the opposite of stability unless you have an entirely static economy with no growth.
Adopting an extremely deflationary asset as a “currency” is one way to get the no growth part I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t be stable.
We’ve (well some, anyway..) learnt that lesson with the gold standard and permanent boom and bust cycles prior to the 1930s. It was anything but stable in the short/medium term.
Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems unneccesarry and overcomplicated.
Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the money?
Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created (barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that underpins the security of the network.
Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world.
My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems.
All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.
It’s not clear to me that most of those use cases will be served better by a blockchain rather than a regular centralized service… but also examples like the camera don’t really work, because someone could still use the camera to photograph a generated image (for example), or hack the camera itself.
On top of that, up until this point in time, Bitcoin has been the opposite of secure. The entire history of it is filled with people constantly losing money and being scammed with no real recourse.
> Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created
What about the other thousands of other public blockchains, many of which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
> In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality
... Metaverse anytime now.
> there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system.
Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted systems.
> In fact, I think we NEED it
... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
> and should as a society happily bear the power consumption
In contrast, I think if we were to eliminate Bitcoin and other crypto, we'd save 1% of electricity with very few negative side effects, but a significant reduction in crime, frauds, and scams.
> already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine.
Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures and hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted centralized camera producers which could publish the public keys of each sold camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains would add any value. The signature of the picture embedded in the picture speaks for itself.
> My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous.
Gott forbid.
> When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain.
Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less disillusioned?
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
- custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins.
- the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions
- scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second)
- most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect
- most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible
- etc...
HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful.
Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
- demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline.
- first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck
- demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link:
- transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge).
- operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction
- quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ...
- pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue.
- you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice.
- it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them.
- etc ... the list is long
TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.
All of the "you can anonymously and safely hold tons of wealth that can't be taken from you" points you make fall apart when the following two are true:
- For the majority of financial transactions you might want to make, fiat is still what you need, because realistically very little IRL uses any L2 solution. Thus, you need a fiat off-ramp... Like an exchange.
- Exchanges mandate you identify yourself to them - KYC/AML and all. Governments might not be able to know which wallet is yours, but they sure as hell can and have secure those off-ramps this way.
I've seen plenty of pro-BTC arguments on a technical level about privacy, resilience, independence from central banks, etc. but fundamentally I've never seen anyone able to come up with something that can out "your opponent is the government and no technical project can overcome a legal obstacle".
You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you being disingenuous on purpose or what?
The only answer that makes sense to me is this: BitCoin is a scam started by the oil industry as a way to tie currency to exponentially hungry power consumption.
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.
Recently, he just passed on.
His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.
Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic. A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
>I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
you are correct at first pass, but it's a fact wallets have been cracked many times, perhaps at least 100s of millions of dollars. The "keyspace" for the cracked wallet is a subset of the nominal keyspace - the much smaller space covered by either a flawed random number generator (RNG), or the whole brainwallet fiasco, or a RNG where a seed is crackable (e.g. milliseconds since 1970 or unix epoch - some cracks, whitehat, have used this method). That's all what we know in the whitehat space, surely other tricks exist in the blackhat space
As Bitcoin increases in value, the reward for breaking into wallets grows. Satoshi’s is the ultimate target here, followed by wallets used to burn currencies. Some of these look like they’d only be brute forceable and that takes more time and energy than we think is plausible, but I suspect people will find the system isn’t as secure as expected in some weird and wacky ways as this bounty grows.
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.
What? Satoshi's last publicly known email was on April, 2011 to Gavin [0], stating the following:
"I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."
Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden disappearance is always going to be mysterious
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
Not quite that simple, that’s vulnerable to an Eve-Alice-Eve attack. If $1B in BTC moves around in short succession the TXs can be linked easily. You need a mixer that splits up the amount to be paid out, and even then it needs to be done piecemeal.
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
You would have to arrange a bunch of off market transactions, Probably spread over several different exchanges. Doable, but I reckon you would end up with closer to 6 billion
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
Other currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
The expected discounted value of all bitcoin's future cash flows is zero. This is because the only cash flow that a bitcoin investor can expect from an investment in bitcoins is the revenue from selling the bitcoins in the market... and the market value of something that has no use case and is held for speculative purposes only (i.e. has no intrinsic value) will tend to zero in the long run.
A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the currency doesn't drop to zero.
It's not backed by a government, and while some may say that's a good thing, I think it is not.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
A shared history (which pseudonyms lack),
An external authority (which decentralization avoids), or
A system of credible, enforceable consequences (which requires identity or stake).
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless:
There’s a future cost to cheating (reputation loss that matters),
There’s a benefit to cooperation over time (e.g. recurring jobs),
Or there's a credible mechanism to enforce fairness (e.g. escrow and arbitration).
But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.
More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
You trust X because X has a good rep.
X has a good rep because others say so.
You trust those others because…?
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.
And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
In Weimar Germany, the collapse of political and institutional trust after WWI led to hyperinflation, with prices doubling every few days.
In Zimbabwe, trust in government policy collapsed alongside the economy, and the currency became worthless.
In Venezuela, rampant inflation was fueled not just by bad economic policy but by the public’s loss of faith in any institutional ability to right the course.
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.
Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Money only works if you believe it will still work tomorrow.
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.
And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Bitcoin (capital B) is valuable. An individual BTC is not, but that's true of any currency. We can argue until the cows come home about how valuable these things really are. Speculation in these markets makes it too difficult to judge. People will bet on these things not because they are delivering lots of value to us right now or in the future, but just because they think they'll still be around in the future. That gives monopolists like the ones above the advantage, regardless of value delivered.
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
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But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
Well given that you basically can't spend bitcoin anywhere, it's definitely not a currency.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
With KYC and other regulations ramping up, how true is this in practice?
I guess you can get some of that benefit with a wallet only you control. But most folks can barely handle using a custodial wallet.
Transactions are also public by default, for better and worse.
Issuing a transaction may be easy, but I don't think that's meaningful when people get hit with issues similar to "pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked" on the on and off-ramps.
It is an investment vehicle, not a functional currency. For most people you can't use it as a currency if you tried.
Sort of like gold I guess.
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
edit: typo
Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
An unrivalled opportunity to fleece the gullible, and for criminals to move assets around without law enforcement supervision.
That's about it. The three categories of users are hopeful fools, criminals, and scammers.
Of course, membership of any one group does not preclude membership of the others, and some are all 3.
It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.
I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays?
I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should.
I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
What sort of tactics or strategy do you use to trade it for a consistent profit? I assume you're referring to bitcoin here.
Also, the banking hours thing is absurd, and way too common not only with banks but also some online payments processors, like, for example, the utter dumpster fire, parasitic garbage company that is Paypal. Dealing with that one alone (and with banks in certain contexts) alone makes one fully sympathize with so much of what crypto is supposed to (and to a pretty decent degree does) offer.
The value is also in the “need”. Corporate treasuries need a way to store wealth that doesn't inflate over time, gold inflates 2% per year, bitcoin 0% - so it fills an institutional need
Ok, so then they're not a bitcoin thing then right?
I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week?
It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.
Can't do that with Gold.
How does that help, when the value it translates to doesn't stay the same? Also the conversion value will be impacted by changes in fiat currency.
But yeah, put 1% of your savings in each of the 20,000 coins with strictly limited supply. Their value must surely rise, right.
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting the $$$ going into btc
That’s the opposite of stability unless you have an entirely static economy with no growth.
Adopting an extremely deflationary asset as a “currency” is one way to get the no growth part I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t be stable.
We’ve (well some, anyway..) learnt that lesson with the gold standard and permanent boom and bust cycles prior to the 1930s. It was anything but stable in the short/medium term.
Hahaha what? Bitcoin has insane volatility.
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Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world.
My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems.
All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.
Reality is that you can’t bootstrap trust.
On top of that, up until this point in time, Bitcoin has been the opposite of secure. The entire history of it is filled with people constantly losing money and being scammed with no real recourse.
What about the other thousands of other public blockchains, many of which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
> In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality
... Metaverse anytime now.
> there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system.
Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted systems.
> In fact, I think we NEED it
... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
> and should as a society happily bear the power consumption
In contrast, I think if we were to eliminate Bitcoin and other crypto, we'd save 1% of electricity with very few negative side effects, but a significant reduction in crime, frauds, and scams.
> already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine.
Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures and hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted centralized camera producers which could publish the public keys of each sold camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains would add any value. The signature of the picture embedded in the picture speaks for itself.
> My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous.
Gott forbid.
> When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain.
Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful.Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.- For the majority of financial transactions you might want to make, fiat is still what you need, because realistically very little IRL uses any L2 solution. Thus, you need a fiat off-ramp... Like an exchange. - Exchanges mandate you identify yourself to them - KYC/AML and all. Governments might not be able to know which wallet is yours, but they sure as hell can and have secure those off-ramps this way.
I've seen plenty of pro-BTC arguments on a technical level about privacy, resilience, independence from central banks, etc. but fundamentally I've never seen anyone able to come up with something that can out "your opponent is the government and no technical project can overcome a legal obstacle".
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Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
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https://x.com/howelzy
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)
Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.
Recently, he just passed on.
His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.
Like, sequential? Because if you were brute forcing...
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
you are correct at first pass, but it's a fact wallets have been cracked many times, perhaps at least 100s of millions of dollars. The "keyspace" for the cracked wallet is a subset of the nominal keyspace - the much smaller space covered by either a flawed random number generator (RNG), or the whole brainwallet fiasco, or a RNG where a seed is crackable (e.g. milliseconds since 1970 or unix epoch - some cracks, whitehat, have used this method). That's all what we know in the whitehat space, surely other tricks exist in the blackhat space
I've been wondering the same. But in this case it's multiple wallets, so it's very unlikely.
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?
guessing a whale's key? zero
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
"I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them."
Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden disappearance is always going to be mysterious
[0] - https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/gavin-andrese...
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
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[0] - https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/28/198238/monero-likely-pum...
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Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
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I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds.
BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
A fiat currency that is issued by the government has no intrinsic value either, but there's one crucial difference compared to a cryptocurrency: in the case of a government-issued fiat currency the central bank will intervene the market, by making use of its prerogative to conduct monetary policy, to ensure price of the currency doesn't drop to zero.
Without institutional backing, crypto is just a number in a database that people agree is worth something—for now.
If that collective belief evaporates, there’s no court, no army, no tax base, and no GDP to catch it. Contrast this with fiat currency, which—while not backed by gold—is backed by coercive power and taxation.
Let’s start from something even more fundamental. How do you bootstrap trust? Suppose two pseudonymous entities online want to exchange money for services. Such a system will likely need a reputation system to establish the trustworthiness of entities. That system needs to be tolerant to Sybil attacks (i.e., forging multiple identities), while also ensuring the service provider isn’t exploited by a buyer who refuses to pay after receiving the work.
But this exposes a deeper issue: trust cannot be bootstrapped from scratch. It needs either:
Without these, any trust system collapses into a prisoner’s dilemma. Each actor is incentivized to defect (cheat) unless: But even escrow only works when dispute resolution is possible and trusted. And dispute resolution requires either a neutral arbitrator (who must have their own identity and incentives) or hard-coded, binary rules, which rarely capture the complexity of creative or service work.More fundamentally, trust-based systems are built on recursive assumptions:
Eventually, without a root of trust—whether a state, a court, a verified identity, or long-standing social capital—the entire structure becomes circular. There’s no ground truth. Just reputation built on sand.And so, the real limitation isn’t crypto per se—it’s that trustless systems don’t exist. At best, we shift trust: from institutions to code, from names to keys, from legal consequences to probabilistic deterrents. But the requirement for trust itself never goes away.
In a pseudonymous setting, the cost of betrayal is minimal. A buyer can stiff a seller and vanish. A seller can deliver garbage or nothing. Reputation can be reset at will unless there’s an expensive cost to identity creation or a strongly linked personal history—which violates pseudonymity.
Thus, bootstrapping trust in such environments is not just technically hard—it is philosophically incoherent without compromising at least one of the pillars: privacy, decentralization, or enforceability.
It follows that if you can’t bootstrap trust, you can’t bootstrap anything that depends on it—including money. Money, at its core, is a social contract, a belief system upheld by collective trust. We accept currency in exchange for goods or services because we trust that others will accept it from us in turn. That belief is reinforced by institutional structures: central banks, governments, legal systems, and ultimately, enforcement mechanisms.
But the moment that trust breaks down, the system unravels. If people no longer trust that their money will hold value tomorrow, they will try to offload it as fast as possible, converting it into hard goods, foreign currency, or anything perceived as more stable. This behavior accelerates inflation—sometimes catastrophically.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in history:
The underlying mechanism is always the same: money ceases to function as a store of value when the population no longer trusts the system that issues and manages it. Once the shared illusion cracks, even fiat currency—backed by laws, taxes, and armies—can become just colored paper.Now contrast that with crypto. Cryptocurrencies claim to solve this by removing central authorities and placing trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. But this is not true trustlessness—it's merely replacing institutional trust with collective belief in code and game theory. And the cracks are showing: when confidence drops, as in market crashes or protocol failures, value disappears just as quickly—if not faster—than in fiat regimes.
So the uncomfortable truth is this:
Without enforceable trust, money becomes unstable. Without shared trust, money becomes meaningless.And that brings us back to the core issue: you cannot build a functioning economy without some root of trust. Whether that root is institutional, social, or cryptographic, it must be anchored, persistent, and costly to betray. If it’s not, the system becomes inherently fragile.
The reason I used pseudonymous here is exactly because we assumed govs are bad. If govs are good, then crypto degenerates to just a slower system for transactions.
Since we're on the topic of being objective, how is, objectively, something that trades at close to 110k USD per token, "worthless"?
I believe the word "objective" does not, objectively, have the same objective meaning for everyone.
nVidia Microsoft Apple Amazon Google
BTC's marketcap is also larger than all the silver in the world...
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It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
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