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Make sure not to keep your Bitcoin in South Korea!
North Korean hackers target Bitcoin to bypass US and China sanctions, claim researchers
I don't know anything about Bitcoin, but those who do may have an interest in these (critical opinions) :
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...n-fraud-jp-morgan-cryptocurrency-drug-dealers
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-investors-bitcoin-could-lose-money-fca-warns
A bitcoin balance means something too, it means someone either directly went to the expense to mine them, or someone else exchanged some fiat, item or service of value for them. We know a balance can't be obtained any other way. I take your point though, they represent something different, they are not born out of debt (which some take as a positive!).These days they do, like BTC, inhabit a digital world, they are mere numbers in our bank accounts. But these numbers mean something, they are evidence that we have a debt from society.
Correct.Now with BTC ALL you have is a number in an account. Other than the entitlement to transfer this number to another account there is no other claim on society or anybody else, implicit or otherwise.
I really hope I have not mislead anyone with any of my comments, I've aimed to be clear about technical facts, but have also shared some of my own opinions, which are just that. I agree with what you've said about mining but I have a couple of comments.Is it a fraud? I certainly would not accuse its enthusiasts including those in this forum of being frauds in the colloquial sense. But its terminology is borderline fraudulent. Calling itself a currency in the first place is a bit shaky but where things get distinctly suspect is in the "mining" metaphor. fpalb has given us an excellent and stark description of the process. Here's how the metaphor goes. The miners expend enormous amounts of electricity and CPU power to extract as the reward for this effort fresh new BTC. This is highly suggestive and seductive. It suggests that an awful lot of effort was needed to find something of value. In fact nothing of value is found. At the end of the effort, if they win the race against other miners, they are alloted new BTC as a simple number in their account. The BTC could have been added without any of this effort. Its a game, an incredibly crude brute force game of trial and error, totally artificially devised to manage the development of the BTC supply. There is no added value whatsoever here, though I will not get on the high horse of the negative environmental value of the electricity usage (after all I am not convinced of that one either).
The next part of grasping bitcoin is making the leap to understand that if something can act as a money, and enough people decide to use it as money, then for all intents and purposes it is money, regardless of any unrelated industrial, ornamental uses or backing by an authority.
Bitcoin can survive just fine without governments endorsing or accepting it, just as it does today. There's some people out there buying their first bitcoins today with income they received in fiat, and there's guys like me who've been holding for a few years selling off some into fiat to pay taxes. I get what you're saying, there isn't a closed loop of bitcoin transactions and there won't be any time soon. As I mentioned in another thread the bigger concern for bitcoin right now is scaling the transaction capacity anyway.maybe, but when so much of the money supply is controlled by governments and central banks then bitcoin will need to be used and accepted by governments, highly unlikely that govenments will give up using currencies they issue and control for one they dont. For example many people receive most of their income as welfare issued in £,$ etc, they are not going to convert to bitcoin, thats a big stream not going to bitcoin. On the other side you must pay your tax in £,$ etc, so even if you receive income in bitcoin it must be converted out to £,$ etc, thats another bitcoin chain that drys up when it meets government. So governments still hold the key to how far bitcoin goes.
Brendan, do you really think bitcoins are in a physical location? LOL
the price mania eventually tanking - that is fair enough, as distinct to him saying bitcoin or crypto currencies themselves are worthless.
Just to advise that "wrong" is an absolute state - it is not subject to gradation.
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