Yep — just as real as Mt. Gox!
6 Likes
Which may or may not work in my country, won’t be accepted it many places here anyway and definitely not to pay my mortgage. Oh and after all the transaction costs I’d lose money anyway.
3 Likes
Those are fair points.
Although in the long run, Bitcoin will reduce transaction costs (and the power of banks). We’re not quite there yet.
1 Like
why?
Bit coin transactions per se are already among the cheapest on the planet. It’s transaction costs between Bitcoin to anything else that are crushing – and will remain so until there are trusted 3rd parties to make those transactions. You know-- things like banks.
3 Likes
The carbon footprint of every bitcoin transaction is horrendous. It will always be more expensive because it uses many times more energy and resource than a bank transaction.
3 Likes
I don’t view a Bitcoin exchange as a bank. I do see the available exchanges becoming more trusted and reliable, with lower spreads and fees.
But hey, I’m not really an advocate. I think Bitcoin has some good and some bad aspects. In particular, I worry about the deflationary tendencies. Oh, and all the wacko libertarians infesting every Bitcoin community I’ve ever participated in!
1 Like
Problem meet cause, cause meet problem
3 Likes
I’ve heard all sorts of techno utopian promises over the years but the ones around Bitcoin tend to raise the bar to new heights. The next bag of digital hot air is going to have a hard time competing.
5 Likes
Hmm…I have a credit card here, backed by a real bank, issued with Coinbase that draws on my account in bitcoins at the current rate of btc to usd. You can’t get one of these?
Japan doesn’t have Visa? My experience between Tokyo and Kyoto says it does. I wonder how I paid for my hotel and train fees.
As I understand debit cards sometimes don’t play right on the SWIFT network much less the Zengin network used in Japan. In any case credit cards are still far from universal here.
That almost sounds like poor working people cause idle rich people to steal stuff.
I find this comparison to be unfair to sewer rats. Rats got to live somewhere.
3 Likes
No kleptocrats or poor people were harmed during the making of this film
1 Like
Hey, Bitcoin may taste like pumpkin pie but I’d never know 'cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker!
7 Likes
What you’re referencing here is that it takes a LOT more electricity to update the bitcoin ledger than it does for a centralized bank ledger.
Consider that security is a necessity in both cases, but you’re only including the costs of securing bitcoin, not securing the central bank. How would we determine the carbon footprint of a central bank’s security? I don’t have a clear answer. But it involves accounting for stuff like phone operators, branch locations, security guards, vehicle fleets and trans-continental flights. Bitcoin is able to secure transactions without any of these things, but I’m not aware of a national/international bank that can provide security without them.
2 Likes
These regulations may be billed as a way for the public to “rein in the excesses” of capitalist markets, but they aren’t really. They’re tools which the state uses to extend their control over organizations and networks which depend on market transactions. For example, organized crime, insurgencies, anti-establishment counter-cultures, etc.
How many seconds of volcanic activity or an Indonesian forest fire does all the bitcoin operation equal to?
Let’s have some perspective.
While mismanagement of a gold standard is a bad idea, the idea itself is not bad when you consider the alternatives - one of which we have today in the form of fractional reserve banking.
But your neo-liberal sensibilities can rest assured that we won’t be going back to a gold standard any time soon, because the system that replaced it has ensured it wouldn’t survive.
Blog - Positive Money (wishful thinking)
(Nice Godwins Law flirtation there, BTW!)
1 Like
You’re right. We’re not going to agree.
Given the severity of the 1906 and 1929 crashes relative to, say, what happened in 1973 or 2008, I’d say fractional reserve banking looks pretty good in comparison. And let’s not even talk about the panic of 1873, which lead to a six year depression, or the Panic of 1837 which set the stage for the American Civil War.
Are fractional reserve banking and fiat currency a perfect solution? of course not. Just ask Zimbabwe. But almost no-one under the age of 40 in a G-7 nation has seen a major inflation, let alone a hyper-inflation. Almost no one still alive has experienced the economic horrors of the depressions and panics that were a structural feature of economies tied to the gold standard.
On the whole, the current system, even with its evident flaws, looks a whole lot better than what it replaced.
5 Likes
The love of the gold standard is a lot like the anti-vaccine stance. By not having lived in the past we don’t really have the experience of what it was like, so we don’t see just how bad things were that we went through the extraordinary measures we did to address them.
4 Likes
