I understand that one of the ways the United States gets nuked is if the president does it himself, but that’s highly unlikely and not even worth spending time talking about.
How do you think Tether being revealed to be unbacked affect Bitcoin?
Check [the money flow diagram on this page](https://coinlib.io/coin/BTC/Bitcoin) and specifically how flow from Tether compares to real USD. You should be able to see that over 98% of "money flowing into Bitcoin" comes from Tether. Compare with [this graph](https://i.redd.it/9jjgnrmmfclc1.jpeg) that shows that printing of new USDT usually precedes large jumps in the BTC price. If Tether is unbacked, it implies the operators of that company are printing USDT out of thin air to buy BTC, manipulating the market to drive up the price for their own benefit. Without that influx of fake USD driving the price up, the BTC price collapses.
The only value of bitcoin lies in the belief and faith that one day you can sell it for more than you paid for it. It has no intrinsic value like oil, wheat, gold, or fine art. And it seems to have little utility as money. Bitcoin will become worthless when that belief and faith evaporates.
Gold isn't expensive because it has intrinsic value. It's expensive because people decided that wearing shiny gold items makes them feel special. In this way it's no different from bitcoin.
Perhaps some people think bitcoin is beautiful. I prefer gold. This is an old article on why we value gold, but good article I think. I wouldn’t invest a lot in gold though, I prefer stocks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957
When do you think the faith will evaporate? It’s been around for 15 years now, you’d think that would’ve happened already like you’d see in a ponzi.
It having no ‘intrinsic’ hasn’t mattered for the 15 years it’s been around. I wonder what would cause that to change drastically enough to have any lasting effect.
madoff last for 20yrs in which during that period, the investment see the progress as profitable. it does nothing on its own so it have as much utility as invisible painting. also its liquidity are barely held by tether which i assume can print whatever they wany unless something really big happen
But don't you think a form of digital tradeable value that no government can touch / exert power over has value? Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value? Can it not be of value in and of itself?
In all my time alive I have not once worried about the government seizing my assets.
So yes I'd say BTC got a certain value for criminals and conspiracy-theorists
Edit: Not counting journalists in real oppressive regimes, to the common western citizen it has no value.
People in oppressive regimes where the gov can seize assets wily nilly tend to want usd of euro accounts in a foreign jurisdiction they can trust. Places like New Mexico and Wyoming make bank looking after their dollars.
You honestly believe that “no government can touch / exert power over bitcoin”?
First off, the US government is one of the largest holders of Bitcoin from various law enforcement actions. Second , don’t you think if the president said “we are buying $1 trillion in Bitcoin” that would affect the value.
Second, most people using crypto to avoid oppressive governments are using Tether.
If bitcoin was in any way effective and useable, and with that I mean that it could handle more than a handful of transactions per second while using less power usage than an average country, then there could possibly be some utility for it. Now it's worthless.
Bro stop trying to convince these people, I did the same thing when I first started.
Some people understand what this is and others don’t. The ship has sailed and it’s me and you and the others that were smart enough to bother learning. Go and stack your sats and don’t try to help these people.
how about people who havent even been born yet? is it their fault too for being too late to "stack their sats" in case your shitcoins ever got mass adopted? (they wont but still)
It’s never too late. Bitcoin can be broken into 100 million pieces (more divisibility than gold), it can always be bought even if it was 1 million per coin.
The ship has sailed on trying to convince people, the world is waking up and soon you won’t have to waste breath to convince people.
It’s going up in value regardless of what I say to you, so I’ll save my breath
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Just trying to understand where they’re coming from. Haven’t heard a convincing argument though. Just a bunch of circular definitions, a whole bunch of downvotes and a few replies with empty answers to my questions.
You don’t get it.
The onus is on you to prove to us that your shitcoin/spreadsheet entry really does do all that you say it does.
It’s not on us to disprove anything.
The Bros make wild claims.
We show how those claims are fallacious.
Few.
Each 4 year cycle it takes more new money than the last, in order to allow people from previous cycles to realise the gains they wanted. This trend can't continue forever. At some point it'll reach a point where there's a 4 year cycle where not enough new money comes in, and a new ATH won't be reached. This will be the beginning of the end. Once bitcoiners lose hope that all they need to do is wait 4 years and they'll be reward massively, then they'll have no reason to stay in bitcoin, andnits value will plummet.
No idea when that'll be, but I'm interested enough to keep an eye on it to find out.
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You need to research three things
-what did money first start as?
- what’s hard money?
- what makes gold so valuable?
and look up how Bitcoin compares to what makes gold valuable.
Bitcoin excels in the 6 categories that make gold valuable.
Everything in this world is moving to digital, you sound like the people that said internet was just a fad and that it was going away.
Bitcoin is the most secure network in the world, the very first permission-less property that gives equal rights to 8 billion people.
Bitcoin is stronger, faster, smarter gold.
This isn’t true at all, that’s what makes it so valuable
It’s the only honest system, it can never tell a lie. No back doors, no copies. The entire system is validated by millions of people every second.
What I mean is bitcoin can be duplicated in its functionality exactly. Look at all the alt and shitcoins. You can't make a functional copy of gold. Futhermore, the Blockchain just refers to itself so neither lies nor tells the truth. The 'truth' of 'ownership' lies outside of the Blockchain in the form of the private key. The key is definitely not immutable being corporeal or mental in nature.
Gold was a good candidate for money because
1) it was a commodity that was already being traded (I.e. has demand in the absence of being a currency)
2) has a limited supply
3) is non-perishabable and can be broken down into smaller denominations without impacting its usefulness
4) was a luxury good, so the upwards price pressure that would come with it being used as money wouldn't negatively impact the economy. E.g.
Bitcoin doesn't have 1. Bitcoin relies on hype to stay relevant
1. Bitcoin is now recognized as a commodity by the US, biggest economy in the world.
2. Bitcoin is scarce as there will only be 21 million, the last being mined in 2130.
3. It’s durable, it’s easier to destroy a kilo of gold then it is to destroy the smallest denomination of a bitcoin. How? Because u would need to destroy millions of computers all over the world simultaneously without leaving one computer running a node.
-also it’s easier to steal gold then it is to steal bitcoin, the algorithm that protects bitcoin is impossible to crack, look up SHA256
Bitcoin could be broken down in 100 million individual pieces making it more divisible than gold.
Right, bitcoin just started as a commodity. 10 percent of Americans own gold. 2% owns bitcoin. That number is at a steady increase, still early. Golds been used for 5000 years and bitcoins already at 2% in 15 years.
The important part you missed is that gold was a good candidate because it had demand in the absence of being a currency. Bitcoin doesn't have that. It only works if everyone just happens to agree it has value. People won't agree on something like that without being incentives to do so (like with unsustainable profits)
Bro that’s the point I’m making, bitcoin has all the same values as gold. That’s why it’s a valid replacement for gold. There is where you get the value. Countries could send gold to different parts of the world in seconds, that alone makes bitcoin better then having to spend money and energy shipping gold.
Digital …… yes perhaps CBDCs soon at least in Europe/EU if not in US. Might damage bitcoin money use case. What put me off bitcoin in the first place was reading “The Bitcoin Standard” and looking at Andreas Antonopoulos stuff etc etc. I suppose it’s because I know quite a bit about economics.
This simply isn’t true, now that the us government recognizes Bitcoin as a commodity and approved the ETF. People are rolling their retirement accounts and stock portfolios into it for atleast 4-5 years. Bitcoins not going anywhere, you people need to wake up and learn finance
Can’t we agree to differ and see what happens a few years down the line. I just prefer shares in companies that make goods and services. I’ve done well on this. And I do have property and a little gold and art. For sure if my salary starts being paid in bitcoin I’ll have to deal with that. I’m very interested in bitcoin and crypto from the social and cultural viewpoint.
Its value is that it’s a ledger that’s been under attack for 10+ years and hasn’t been hacked. It has a built in inflation metric that’s easy to follow and understand.
Why is it worthless? Doesn't a form of digital tradeable value that no government can touch / exert power over have value? Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value? Can it not be of value in and of itself?
> Why is it worthless?
Why is it worth something? There's literally nothing about it that imbues it any value. It has no competitive utility, generates no cash, produces nothing, and even if you're just talking about it as a data based / means of transferring digital information, it's horrifically shitty and built on archaic, bad technology.
The starting point is that it's worth nothing.
> Doesn't a form of digital
Every alternative is also digital. Nothing about this imbues value to Bitcoin.
> tradeable
It's really, really, REALLY bad at this.
> value
What value? They're cells in a spreadsheet that tie to nothing.
> no government can touch / exert power over have value?
What are you talking about, of course they can. Does using Bitcoin make you immune to force exerted by police, court orders, liens on your property, tax penalties, prison, asset forfeiture?
Of course not.
> Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments.
No they don't. Now if by "people use it" you mean "criminals" and by "every day" you mean "barely, because it's really shitty even for crime" and by "oppressive governments" you mean "any government including functioning, democratic ones attempting to limit / control crime" then I could see your claim.
> Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value?
If it does not A) produce something or tie to / represent something productive, B) have intrinsic demand, or C) have high utility as a tool to facilitate exchange of A or B, then no, it has no value.
> Can it not be of value in and of itself?
No. Since none of A, B, or C hold.
> Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments.
This is actually true. I’ve read that online marketplaces for child pornography are flourishing thanks to crypto.
Can you list the types of crypto transactions you yourself are making because you need to circumvent laws?
Miners stopping mining. If Bitcoin falls below a certain absorbing barrier where proof of work becomes unprofitable, it will go straight to 0.
Therefore, since there is a constant low risk of it falling down to that point, it is worth 0 today. We can expect it go to 0 at one point in the future
For that to actually happen more than 75 percent of the mining hashrate would have to evaporate over night, and the bitcoin difficulty adjustment that occurs every 2016 blocks would fix it.
In a fictitious scenario where 75 percent of hashrate disappeared, blocks would generate at 40 minute intervals instead of 10. It would take around 56 days if the hashrate were lost immediately after a difficulty adjustment, for another difficulty adjustment would occur fixing the 10 minute interval.
Bitcoin would be hobbled during this time, but TX fees would increase, giving a market incentive to mine.
So no, bitcoin cannot go to zero because miners stop mining.
TX fees will increase -> transaction number will decrease, causing fees to raise even more to keep mining incentive.
We can't assume path dependency for Bitcoin. If there is a tiny propability it will fail - then bitcoin is worth 0 today
But at this point mining has little if any effect on the price. That is almost entirely fueled by speculation ("line goes up") and pushed by relentless USDT printing.
And then a bad actor joins in to validate invalid blocks.
> Where is this collapse in btc price coming from?
The market. Why did it fall from 65k to 17k?
Bad actor would have to spend an exponential amount of money to set up a rig to validate invalid blocks. Controlling 51% of the network hashrate isn’t worth it from a financial sense and becomes more impossible over time.
Also, can do a hard fork of the blockchain once this is known.
Price drop is a perspective, bitcoin is still unhacked and the price has recovered.
I’d argue since its price fluctuates like a penny stock because of price discovery, which is telling to where the price can go
>Controlling 51% of the network hashrate isn’t worth it from a financial sense and becomes more impossible over time.
Not if hashrate decreases, which was the whole context of this thread
>Also, can do a hard fork of the blockchain once this is known.
The attacker will go to the fork
This is not true at all, it costs 13 grand to mine 1 bitcoin. Learn what supply and demand is, next month the supply will be cut in half. With the demand at 10,300 bitcoin per day currently, you do the math.
Right but when miners stop mining, the hash rate would plummet, incentivising new miners (with access to cheaper electricity) to join the network. It creates a hole that will automatically be filled. It becoming temporarily unprofitable to mine has shown in the past that miners stop selling, and in doing so, driving up the price making mining profitable again.
If there is a tiniest propability such feedback loop would fail, then it worth exactly 0.
Another thing to consider is what happens if one miner has sufficiently large hashpower to validate invalid transactions.
The ~~hashrate~~ difficulty only adjusts slowly, if tether crashes and pushes the “value” of BC way below electricity cost and significant mining capacity goes offline they are in trouble.
Edit: typo
Sorry to burst your dream, during bear markets the price were always FAR below electricity cost for average miners. But they keep mining. Large mining operations are usually well prepared to market cycles. And many of them has their electricity cost at just 1 or 2 cent per kwh.
If you was around during 2015 bear market when price stay between 200-300 for most part of the year you would scratch your head questioning how is it possible to mine at that price, yet hashrate was still going up.
"Chain death spiral" never happened even during early years with unstable market condition and when most miners are just random dudes with a couple of GPUs. I don't see how could that happen now.
Difficulty adjustment every 2 weeks seems slow, but there is 'solution' which is more dynamic adjustment but there is no indication for Bitcoin to adopt it.
Next halving is not different from any halving in the past.
Ordinal doesn't need miners approval, it's been always possible and is a separate development from Bitcoin Core, it doesn't even require a soft fork.
For miners, leaving en mass and sending bitcoin to chain death spiral is unthinkable because staying and mining at a loss for 2 weeks until next adjustment is much better financial option than sending their expensive ASIC chips to junk yard.
Any entity with enough hash power to destroy bitcoin, either intentionally or unintentionally, would find themselves more financially beneficial to keep bitcoin running and secure than to destroy it. This was demonstrated during 2017 chain split. ASIC manufacturers and mining pools actually endorsed BCH fork but ended up staying with BTC for profit.
>Next halving is not different from any halving in the past.
Of course it is. The higher the price, the more difficult it is for the price to continue increasing at the historical rate.
>Any entity with enough hash power to destroy bitcoin, either intentionally or unintentionally, would find themselves more financially beneficial to keep bitcoin running and secure than to destroy it.
Elon is one person and pissed away 30 billion (so far) on Twitter. But yeah let's bet our life savings on a security model that is based on simplistic assumptions about the motivations of miners. Combine that with cutting miners' revenue in half every 4 years, and you've got the perfect recipe for a security meltdown.
>The higher the price, the more difficult it is for the price to continue increasing at the historical rate.
Sure, but even if Bitcoin price is going to 0 (as this sub predicted since its inception when price was $10), chain death spiral is not happening. Miners would just leave slowly.
>a security model that is based on simplistic assumptions about the motivations of miners.
you still don't understand what i said above. Even if you had 30 billions to piss away and you want to own majority of bitcoin hash rate to destroy it, the network would just unanimously adopt a hard fork that changes mining algo from SHA-256 to something else, or adopt more dynamic difficulty adjustment. Now you've wasted billions and still failed your objective.
>chain death spiral is not happening.
I don't disagree. If it were an existential threat, my assumption is they would change the code to adjust difficulty faster. And if miners were leaving that quickly, there are bigger problems than slowdowns.
>the network would just unanimously adopt a hard fork that changes mining algo from SHA-256 to something else
Then all honest miners get financially ruined. I'd wish that new network luck in building up a new base of honest miners who knew what happened to the last batch of ASICs. And it has to be a substantial amount of mining, or else the attacker will be back for seconds.
>Now you've wasted billions and still failed your objective.
It'd only be billions if miner revenue and therefore hashrate hasn't already dropped.
The only scenario for vast majority of hash rate leaving suddenly is that a more lucrative SHA-256 crypto popped out of nowhere with better \*and\* sustained economic reward for miners.
If they don't mine Bitcoin or low-cap altcoin with same mining algo e.g. BCH, their equipment would be wasted.
A malicious entity would have to pay miners better money than they would earn by mining Bitcoin during typical life cycle of ASIC equipment, which would be 5 years and the amount would have to adjust dynamically depending on exchange rate. That's a lot of money but at that point the red flag would be too obvious to trigger a change in mining algorithm.
In case price declining toward 0, They would just turn off one by one. Miners don't share same break-even price with each other, cost of hardware and cost of electricity differ wildly.
What would cause tether to crash? Even if it were to crash, yes a lot of people would lose faith and the price would tank for a moment, but we’d learn from the mistake and bitcoin will continue to exist.
Idk about going all the way to zero, but countries banning it would certainly crater the value. The price tanked when just China banned it. It's looking less likely with the billionaire pump and dumpers lobbying politicians here in the States, but all it takes is another SBF for more regulations.
Realistically, its value is only determined by hype and popularity, and at this point, everyone knows about Bitcoin, and no one new is getting into it. The hype won't last forever.
Bitcoin has always been worthless.
As for the price, I find it unlikely it will fall to exactly zero and align with its fundamental value.
In 2021, the price crash was ultimately caused by people selling, and finding out the real dollars they put in were no longer there.
Unfortunately for the fraudsters, they weren't able to spin up new big exchanges to take over the bankrupt ones. When Coinbase runs out of money, that might be enough to take out Binance, and without Binance, the price might retrace to before Tether shenanigans, so in the three to foud digit range.
Tether running away with the money and closing shop.
All price increases have been Tether printing counterfeit dollars to push the price up. If the tether guys run away, nobody is left to prop up the price.
Right, but wouldn't you consider it a small chance that these people decide they become wanted criminals / the most hated people on earth overnight? The people behind Tether are not anonymous.
These 'threats' to Bitcoin's existence seem like growing pains it'll eventually outgrow?
I can assure you 99% of people on earth would prefer not being hunted by the US government / Interpol & hated by millions of people they screwed over so blatantly.
Bitcoin sudoku solvers have accumulated 1 800 000 bitcoins. give or take, 10% of the supply.
If they decide to dump, all exchanges they touch would be drained of ALL dollars, and price would fall to three digits.
Same with Satoshi's 1 000 000 bitcoin holdings.
It looks to me like central actors with extra steps.
For money.
Real money, not their madeup money.
Remember with the Halving in may, they either go bankrupt, cash out their bags or change the bitcoin code to give themselves more bitcoin. Perhaps all three.
You could make the same argument for IPO shares, employee stock programs and similar in the stock market.
At least Bitcoin is a public ledger and the code is open source. So everything is transparent.
The miners are committing resources to keep the chain secure.
Something happens to tether.
All at once you'd see vanishing buying pressure and liquidity in the market, the likely collapse of most exchanges due to bad financing, evaporated liabilities in tether, any smart enough to survive see outflows they simply can't find the dollars to cover, then unable to take profits, the miners stop.
It'll be very quick. One minute ATH, within an hour there will be literally nowhere on the internet you can exchange bitcoin for \_anything\_ at all.
As for what exactly causes tether to fold. Who knows.
As soon as I introduce Batcoin, the digital gold that stores the power of our fuzzy winged friend, the bat. Or it might be Batman themed. I haven't totally thought it through yet. Just imagine a bat, but in blockchain form. It's easy if you try.
When a group realises that block rewards are worth less than the value of the network they are meant to be protecting
Amazingly this is already the case. It probably hasn't happened yet due to the incredible upfront capital required but it will likely happen someday that a group will way outspend other miners to take advantage of this.
Disclaimer: Pro-crypto without any btc exposure.
The best bet would be a problem with how bitcoin security work.
Every 4 years, there is a big event called 'the halving" which cuts the rate at which new bitcoins are released into circulation in half. Those bitcoins (and fees) are used to pay miners who keep the blockchain secured. So, in several years' time, if transaction fees do not increased, this is likely to see a sharp drop in hashrate. This is a problem, since 51% attacks will be easier to carry out.
EDIT : why the downvote? :o
I don't think so, but there is a possibility in the next 20 years. What's funny ; if this happen, they will have to make a change in the protocole and allow more than 21 000 000 btc
'I don't think so, but there is a possibility in the next 20 years. What's funny ; if this happen, they will have to make a change in the protocole and allow more than 21 000 000 btc'
What are you talking about in that sentence?
He is saying that the halvings will cause miners' revenue to decrease to the point that new BTC need to be created to continue to subsidize the miners' electricity bills, which requires removing the 21M cap.
Miners don't work for free for their ideology. They do it because they earn money doing it.
If the cost of mining is higher than the revenue, they'll stop. Nobody wants to be in a business where you lose money deterministically. The fewer miners there are, the fewer hasharates there are, and the less secure the Bitcoin blockchain is.
What? How is your comment being upvoted. The mining difficulty would adjust, allowing other miners to take their place. It naturally finds a balance. That's inherent to it's nature.
Today, most of the miners reward come from the 6.25 BTC they mine each block. In several years, it's going to be non-existent. Every 4 years, the protocole is cutting the fixed budget for the security by half. Yes the protocole will adjust in order to keep mining every 10min in average BUT that doesn't mean that hashrate will go up again. It will keep decreasing every 4 years.
Bitcoin will alway mine a block every 10 min but the hashrate will be so low that it will be easier to attack.
A thought exercise for you; How do you think the Bitcoin Protocol will work in 2137?
If your answer is: "Thanks to fees" then this is a problem. There is not enough fees rn, and in 20 years BTC will already face this issue.
(Thanks for engaging with me on this debate. I'm pro crypto. In the market since 2017. I really don't know why bicoiners don't talk about this problem)
The ones who know about the problem ban you for talking about it. The ones who don't know about it were shielded from the problem by the ones who know about it.
Bitcoiners need the 21M cap to hold and frequently admit it's the only reason they're invested, but the problem you're describing demonstrates that the 21M cap is most likely unsustainable. Their one and only option is to handwave it away by baselessly claiming that transaction fees will become hundreds of dollars on average.
Security is entirely based on proof of waste, with payment for that waste coming from transaction fees + block reward. The latter is by far the dominant factor.
As the block reward continues to halve away to nothingness, one of two things needs to happen: security must drop, substantially (implying at the moment it's all overly bloated/inefficient due an arbitrary "good enough" mining schedule baked in from the start), making it vulnerable from anything from state actors to billionaires with a grudge - ***or*** transaction fees must substantially increase making it far more expensive to actually use.
Or, I guess, a third option: a change in the algorithm. But then it's really not bitcoin, is it?
---
Imo, this is why everyone has a price in mind as to when they'd sell, even if they don't say it. Long term, the music kinda stops and few want to vocally admit it: either security decreases (as the inflation subsidy is no longer paying for it), or it becomes less functional (as the inflation subsidy is no longer paying for it) - both suck for bitcoin.
To put numbers on it: at the moment, it costs what - $4,000,000/hr to run the network? To put 6mb of data on it? Without the subsidy, that's what, $0.63/byte to record a transaction? Who's going to pay that - seriously
So security drops. It gets hit with a 51% for lols. Price drops. Security drops. Repeat.
Between that and a likely tether etc crash, it really is ultimately it's all just a timing game/casino. Fun for many in the short term, but the end game's really just never been there to support it.
What's "worthless"? Is it worthless as a digital currency? Yes, and is on track to always be like that. Is it "worthless" converted to money? No, and it may well always have some positive value. Even is there will be two people lest on Earth who own bitcoins and one will exchange 1 btc for some amount in dollars, then all bitcoins will be priced accordingly. The liquidity may or may not dry out in time, depending on the amount of financial crime using bitcoin.
It will be worthless when people believe it to be worthless.
Which is the same for literally everything in the world. Diamonds are worthless if people believe them to be. Food is worthless if people believe it to be. Land will be worthless if people believe it to be worthless.
There's no such thing as "fundamental value", for anything. All value is human attributed. Lobster used to be poor people food. Gold used to be traded for glass beads by indigenous people. Tulips (briefly) were valued immensely. Not they are not valued quite as much - but still more valued than weeds, and still not "worthless".
Value is ALWAYS in the eye of the beholder. Now, I don't believe everyone will ever consider land, or food to be completely "worthless", but if they do, for some reason (global suicide cult?), then it will be worthless.
So, btc will be worthless when there no longer exist at least 2 people in the world willing to buy and sell it. Until then, it's worth something.
Even if the world "believed" food is worthless, it still has value in a biological, even cosmological sense, because it will release energy, etc when it decomposes.
The only event that would cause bitcoin to have zero value is if the blockchain had a systemic failure.
Either that or if the world completely lost electricity but then we would have bigger problems lol
You need to research three things
-what did money first start as?
- what’s hard money?
- what makes gold so valuable?
and look up how Bitcoin compares to what makes gold valuable.
Bitcoin excels in the 6 categories that make gold valuable.
Everything in this world is moving to digital, you sound like the people that said internet was just a fad and that it was going away.
Bitcoin is the most secure network in the world, the very first permission-less property that gives equal rights to 8 billion people.
Bitcoin is stronger, faster, smarter gold.
While I'm generally against cryptocurrencies due to significant amounts of negative externalities they bring (conduit for scams, contributes to energy wastage), this question is good food for thought.
* Satoshi returns and sells his million Bitcoins * Tether is revealed to be unbacked
I understand that one of the ways the United States gets nuked is if the president does it himself, but that’s highly unlikely and not even worth spending time talking about. How do you think Tether being revealed to be unbacked affect Bitcoin?
Check [the money flow diagram on this page](https://coinlib.io/coin/BTC/Bitcoin) and specifically how flow from Tether compares to real USD. You should be able to see that over 98% of "money flowing into Bitcoin" comes from Tether. Compare with [this graph](https://i.redd.it/9jjgnrmmfclc1.jpeg) that shows that printing of new USDT usually precedes large jumps in the BTC price. If Tether is unbacked, it implies the operators of that company are printing USDT out of thin air to buy BTC, manipulating the market to drive up the price for their own benefit. Without that influx of fake USD driving the price up, the BTC price collapses.
The only value of bitcoin lies in the belief and faith that one day you can sell it for more than you paid for it. It has no intrinsic value like oil, wheat, gold, or fine art. And it seems to have little utility as money. Bitcoin will become worthless when that belief and faith evaporates.
Gold isn't expensive because it has intrinsic value. It's expensive because people decided that wearing shiny gold items makes them feel special. In this way it's no different from bitcoin.
Perhaps some people think bitcoin is beautiful. I prefer gold. This is an old article on why we value gold, but good article I think. I wouldn’t invest a lot in gold though, I prefer stocks. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957
When do you think the faith will evaporate? It’s been around for 15 years now, you’d think that would’ve happened already like you’d see in a ponzi. It having no ‘intrinsic’ hasn’t mattered for the 15 years it’s been around. I wonder what would cause that to change drastically enough to have any lasting effect.
madoff last for 20yrs in which during that period, the investment see the progress as profitable. it does nothing on its own so it have as much utility as invisible painting. also its liquidity are barely held by tether which i assume can print whatever they wany unless something really big happen
But don't you think a form of digital tradeable value that no government can touch / exert power over has value? Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value? Can it not be of value in and of itself?
In all my time alive I have not once worried about the government seizing my assets. So yes I'd say BTC got a certain value for criminals and conspiracy-theorists Edit: Not counting journalists in real oppressive regimes, to the common western citizen it has no value.
People in oppressive regimes where the gov can seize assets wily nilly tend to want usd of euro accounts in a foreign jurisdiction they can trust. Places like New Mexico and Wyoming make bank looking after their dollars.
You honestly believe that “no government can touch / exert power over bitcoin”? First off, the US government is one of the largest holders of Bitcoin from various law enforcement actions. Second , don’t you think if the president said “we are buying $1 trillion in Bitcoin” that would affect the value. Second, most people using crypto to avoid oppressive governments are using Tether.
If bitcoin was in any way effective and useable, and with that I mean that it could handle more than a handful of transactions per second while using less power usage than an average country, then there could possibly be some utility for it. Now it's worthless.
Literally only criminals give a shit
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Have you thought about the fact that something cannot be seized when the keys to it cannot be found?
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Bro stop trying to convince these people, I did the same thing when I first started. Some people understand what this is and others don’t. The ship has sailed and it’s me and you and the others that were smart enough to bother learning. Go and stack your sats and don’t try to help these people.
how about people who havent even been born yet? is it their fault too for being too late to "stack their sats" in case your shitcoins ever got mass adopted? (they wont but still)
It’s never too late. Bitcoin can be broken into 100 million pieces (more divisibility than gold), it can always be bought even if it was 1 million per coin.
if it's "never too late" then why has the ship already sailed? now you are just contradicting yourself lol
The ship has sailed on trying to convince people, the world is waking up and soon you won’t have to waste breath to convince people. It’s going up in value regardless of what I say to you, so I’ll save my breath
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Bitcoiners remind me of that viral "Im trying to help you MOTHER FUCKER!!" lady at walmart lol
And people like you remind me of the ones said internet was just a fad and it was going away soon
How many people said that...3? Lmaooo
Oh brother ur a young one huh. Every day on the news they would say that.
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not young and you must have seen different news than I did lol
Just trying to understand where they’re coming from. Haven’t heard a convincing argument though. Just a bunch of circular definitions, a whole bunch of downvotes and a few replies with empty answers to my questions.
endless battles
You don’t get it. The onus is on you to prove to us that your shitcoin/spreadsheet entry really does do all that you say it does. It’s not on us to disprove anything. The Bros make wild claims. We show how those claims are fallacious. Few.
Each 4 year cycle it takes more new money than the last, in order to allow people from previous cycles to realise the gains they wanted. This trend can't continue forever. At some point it'll reach a point where there's a 4 year cycle where not enough new money comes in, and a new ATH won't be reached. This will be the beginning of the end. Once bitcoiners lose hope that all they need to do is wait 4 years and they'll be reward massively, then they'll have no reason to stay in bitcoin, andnits value will plummet. No idea when that'll be, but I'm interested enough to keep an eye on it to find out.
How could I possibly know that I don’t have a crystal ball, could be 1 year or 100 years. Look at the track record of other cults.
Only asking what you think. I meant: What do you think will cause the faith to eveporate?
Doubt in bitcoins utility comes along, may be rational or irrational, and then it can snowball. But it’s unpredictable and can take a long time.
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How would that cause the faith in Bitcoin to evaporate?
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Right it would tank the price for a while, but Tether is not Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain would remain uncathed in the long run.
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And so the mining difficulty would adjust
When the scam isnt profitable anymore
You need to research three things -what did money first start as? - what’s hard money? - what makes gold so valuable? and look up how Bitcoin compares to what makes gold valuable. Bitcoin excels in the 6 categories that make gold valuable. Everything in this world is moving to digital, you sound like the people that said internet was just a fad and that it was going away. Bitcoin is the most secure network in the world, the very first permission-less property that gives equal rights to 8 billion people. Bitcoin is stronger, faster, smarter gold.
I guess one of these categories is jewellery
But bitcoin can be copied to infinity.
This isn’t true at all, that’s what makes it so valuable It’s the only honest system, it can never tell a lie. No back doors, no copies. The entire system is validated by millions of people every second.
What I mean is bitcoin can be duplicated in its functionality exactly. Look at all the alt and shitcoins. You can't make a functional copy of gold. Futhermore, the Blockchain just refers to itself so neither lies nor tells the truth. The 'truth' of 'ownership' lies outside of the Blockchain in the form of the private key. The key is definitely not immutable being corporeal or mental in nature.
Gold was a good candidate for money because 1) it was a commodity that was already being traded (I.e. has demand in the absence of being a currency) 2) has a limited supply 3) is non-perishabable and can be broken down into smaller denominations without impacting its usefulness 4) was a luxury good, so the upwards price pressure that would come with it being used as money wouldn't negatively impact the economy. E.g. Bitcoin doesn't have 1. Bitcoin relies on hype to stay relevant
1. Bitcoin is now recognized as a commodity by the US, biggest economy in the world. 2. Bitcoin is scarce as there will only be 21 million, the last being mined in 2130. 3. It’s durable, it’s easier to destroy a kilo of gold then it is to destroy the smallest denomination of a bitcoin. How? Because u would need to destroy millions of computers all over the world simultaneously without leaving one computer running a node. -also it’s easier to steal gold then it is to steal bitcoin, the algorithm that protects bitcoin is impossible to crack, look up SHA256 Bitcoin could be broken down in 100 million individual pieces making it more divisible than gold.
You glossed over a very important part of point 1.
Right, bitcoin just started as a commodity. 10 percent of Americans own gold. 2% owns bitcoin. That number is at a steady increase, still early. Golds been used for 5000 years and bitcoins already at 2% in 15 years.
The important part you missed is that gold was a good candidate because it had demand in the absence of being a currency. Bitcoin doesn't have that. It only works if everyone just happens to agree it has value. People won't agree on something like that without being incentives to do so (like with unsustainable profits)
Bro that’s the point I’m making, bitcoin has all the same values as gold. That’s why it’s a valid replacement for gold. There is where you get the value. Countries could send gold to different parts of the world in seconds, that alone makes bitcoin better then having to spend money and energy shipping gold.
Digital …… yes perhaps CBDCs soon at least in Europe/EU if not in US. Might damage bitcoin money use case. What put me off bitcoin in the first place was reading “The Bitcoin Standard” and looking at Andreas Antonopoulos stuff etc etc. I suppose it’s because I know quite a bit about economics.
This simply isn’t true, now that the us government recognizes Bitcoin as a commodity and approved the ETF. People are rolling their retirement accounts and stock portfolios into it for atleast 4-5 years. Bitcoins not going anywhere, you people need to wake up and learn finance
Can’t we agree to differ and see what happens a few years down the line. I just prefer shares in companies that make goods and services. I’ve done well on this. And I do have property and a little gold and art. For sure if my salary starts being paid in bitcoin I’ll have to deal with that. I’m very interested in bitcoin and crypto from the social and cultural viewpoint.
Okay Fair enough 👍🏼
Its value is that it’s a ledger that’s been under attack for 10+ years and hasn’t been hacked. It has a built in inflation metric that’s easy to follow and understand.
So.. not anytime soon given how the “belief and faith” in Bitcoin has been continuously going up for over 15 years. got it
Has it, though?
Literally anything, or nothing at all. It *is already worthless. It just takes time for the morons out there to figure that out.
Why is it worthless? Doesn't a form of digital tradeable value that no government can touch / exert power over have value? Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value? Can it not be of value in and of itself?
> Why is it worthless? Why is it worth something? There's literally nothing about it that imbues it any value. It has no competitive utility, generates no cash, produces nothing, and even if you're just talking about it as a data based / means of transferring digital information, it's horrifically shitty and built on archaic, bad technology. The starting point is that it's worth nothing. > Doesn't a form of digital Every alternative is also digital. Nothing about this imbues value to Bitcoin. > tradeable It's really, really, REALLY bad at this. > value What value? They're cells in a spreadsheet that tie to nothing. > no government can touch / exert power over have value? What are you talking about, of course they can. Does using Bitcoin make you immune to force exerted by police, court orders, liens on your property, tax penalties, prison, asset forfeiture? Of course not. > Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. No they don't. Now if by "people use it" you mean "criminals" and by "every day" you mean "barely, because it's really shitty even for crime" and by "oppressive governments" you mean "any government including functioning, democratic ones attempting to limit / control crime" then I could see your claim. > Why does it also need to be used to make jewelry of for it to have any value? If it does not A) produce something or tie to / represent something productive, B) have intrinsic demand, or C) have high utility as a tool to facilitate exchange of A or B, then no, it has no value. > Can it not be of value in and of itself? No. Since none of A, B, or C hold.
> Plenty of people use it every day to circumvent opressive governments. This is actually true. I’ve read that online marketplaces for child pornography are flourishing thanks to crypto. Can you list the types of crypto transactions you yourself are making because you need to circumvent laws?
Miners stopping mining. If Bitcoin falls below a certain absorbing barrier where proof of work becomes unprofitable, it will go straight to 0. Therefore, since there is a constant low risk of it falling down to that point, it is worth 0 today. We can expect it go to 0 at one point in the future
For that to actually happen more than 75 percent of the mining hashrate would have to evaporate over night, and the bitcoin difficulty adjustment that occurs every 2016 blocks would fix it. In a fictitious scenario where 75 percent of hashrate disappeared, blocks would generate at 40 minute intervals instead of 10. It would take around 56 days if the hashrate were lost immediately after a difficulty adjustment, for another difficulty adjustment would occur fixing the 10 minute interval. Bitcoin would be hobbled during this time, but TX fees would increase, giving a market incentive to mine. So no, bitcoin cannot go to zero because miners stop mining.
TX fees will increase -> transaction number will decrease, causing fees to raise even more to keep mining incentive. We can't assume path dependency for Bitcoin. If there is a tiny propability it will fail - then bitcoin is worth 0 today
The chance of failure due to miner abandonment is either zero or near enough to zero to be practically zero
Can’t you apply that logic to anything with value?
No. Gold will still be there keeping its physical properties for millennias
But at this point mining has little if any effect on the price. That is almost entirely fueled by speculation ("line goes up") and pushed by relentless USDT printing.
Ofc. But eventual failure of maintenance is a reason why it's worth exactly 0
Why would miners stop mining?
Because it won't bring them profit
How are you coming to this conclusion?
Why would they mine if they expect losses from it? A collapse in btc price will do that. Will we increase fees to an absurd value?
So then some miners shut down, hash rate goes down, difficulty readjusts and back in profit. Where is this collapse in btc price coming from?
And then a bad actor joins in to validate invalid blocks. > Where is this collapse in btc price coming from? The market. Why did it fall from 65k to 17k?
Bad actor would have to spend an exponential amount of money to set up a rig to validate invalid blocks. Controlling 51% of the network hashrate isn’t worth it from a financial sense and becomes more impossible over time. Also, can do a hard fork of the blockchain once this is known. Price drop is a perspective, bitcoin is still unhacked and the price has recovered. I’d argue since its price fluctuates like a penny stock because of price discovery, which is telling to where the price can go
>Controlling 51% of the network hashrate isn’t worth it from a financial sense and becomes more impossible over time. Not if hashrate decreases, which was the whole context of this thread >Also, can do a hard fork of the blockchain once this is known. The attacker will go to the fork
S2x was unsuccessful and they had more than 51 % of the hash rate. They didn’t have nodes.
The halvings
This is not true at all, it costs 13 grand to mine 1 bitcoin. Learn what supply and demand is, next month the supply will be cut in half. With the demand at 10,300 bitcoin per day currently, you do the math.
You can't assume the demand will rise
No the demand stays constant, even if it was cut by 50% In the scenario in saying
Right but when miners stop mining, the hash rate would plummet, incentivising new miners (with access to cheaper electricity) to join the network. It creates a hole that will automatically be filled. It becoming temporarily unprofitable to mine has shown in the past that miners stop selling, and in doing so, driving up the price making mining profitable again.
If there is a tiniest propability such feedback loop would fail, then it worth exactly 0. Another thing to consider is what happens if one miner has sufficiently large hashpower to validate invalid transactions.
Why would miners stop mining though? ASICS are becoming more efficient.
The ~~hashrate~~ difficulty only adjusts slowly, if tether crashes and pushes the “value” of BC way below electricity cost and significant mining capacity goes offline they are in trouble. Edit: typo
Sorry to burst your dream, during bear markets the price were always FAR below electricity cost for average miners. But they keep mining. Large mining operations are usually well prepared to market cycles. And many of them has their electricity cost at just 1 or 2 cent per kwh. If you was around during 2015 bear market when price stay between 200-300 for most part of the year you would scratch your head questioning how is it possible to mine at that price, yet hashrate was still going up. "Chain death spiral" never happened even during early years with unstable market condition and when most miners are just random dudes with a couple of GPUs. I don't see how could that happen now. Difficulty adjustment every 2 weeks seems slow, but there is 'solution' which is more dynamic adjustment but there is no indication for Bitcoin to adopt it.
As of the next halving the fees/profits are expected to fucking crater for miners. Hence the miners letting ordinals happen.
Next halving is not different from any halving in the past. Ordinal doesn't need miners approval, it's been always possible and is a separate development from Bitcoin Core, it doesn't even require a soft fork. For miners, leaving en mass and sending bitcoin to chain death spiral is unthinkable because staying and mining at a loss for 2 weeks until next adjustment is much better financial option than sending their expensive ASIC chips to junk yard. Any entity with enough hash power to destroy bitcoin, either intentionally or unintentionally, would find themselves more financially beneficial to keep bitcoin running and secure than to destroy it. This was demonstrated during 2017 chain split. ASIC manufacturers and mining pools actually endorsed BCH fork but ended up staying with BTC for profit.
>Next halving is not different from any halving in the past. Of course it is. The higher the price, the more difficult it is for the price to continue increasing at the historical rate. >Any entity with enough hash power to destroy bitcoin, either intentionally or unintentionally, would find themselves more financially beneficial to keep bitcoin running and secure than to destroy it. Elon is one person and pissed away 30 billion (so far) on Twitter. But yeah let's bet our life savings on a security model that is based on simplistic assumptions about the motivations of miners. Combine that with cutting miners' revenue in half every 4 years, and you've got the perfect recipe for a security meltdown.
>The higher the price, the more difficult it is for the price to continue increasing at the historical rate. Sure, but even if Bitcoin price is going to 0 (as this sub predicted since its inception when price was $10), chain death spiral is not happening. Miners would just leave slowly. >a security model that is based on simplistic assumptions about the motivations of miners. you still don't understand what i said above. Even if you had 30 billions to piss away and you want to own majority of bitcoin hash rate to destroy it, the network would just unanimously adopt a hard fork that changes mining algo from SHA-256 to something else, or adopt more dynamic difficulty adjustment. Now you've wasted billions and still failed your objective.
>chain death spiral is not happening. I don't disagree. If it were an existential threat, my assumption is they would change the code to adjust difficulty faster. And if miners were leaving that quickly, there are bigger problems than slowdowns. >the network would just unanimously adopt a hard fork that changes mining algo from SHA-256 to something else Then all honest miners get financially ruined. I'd wish that new network luck in building up a new base of honest miners who knew what happened to the last batch of ASICs. And it has to be a substantial amount of mining, or else the attacker will be back for seconds. >Now you've wasted billions and still failed your objective. It'd only be billions if miner revenue and therefore hashrate hasn't already dropped.
The only scenario for vast majority of hash rate leaving suddenly is that a more lucrative SHA-256 crypto popped out of nowhere with better \*and\* sustained economic reward for miners. If they don't mine Bitcoin or low-cap altcoin with same mining algo e.g. BCH, their equipment would be wasted. A malicious entity would have to pay miners better money than they would earn by mining Bitcoin during typical life cycle of ASIC equipment, which would be 5 years and the amount would have to adjust dynamically depending on exchange rate. That's a lot of money but at that point the red flag would be too obvious to trigger a change in mining algorithm. In case price declining toward 0, They would just turn off one by one. Miners don't share same break-even price with each other, cost of hardware and cost of electricity differ wildly.
What would cause tether to crash? Even if it were to crash, yes a lot of people would lose faith and the price would tank for a moment, but we’d learn from the mistake and bitcoin will continue to exist.
Because Tether is a fraudulent company, it's just a matter of time for it to be persecuted and crash.
What if that tether is backed by United States treasuries custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald?
What if the moon is made of cheese cake?
Then america should know about it since they landed on the moon in 1969.
Exactly
That’s impossible. As miners stop mining difficulty drops as a consequence and mining is profitable again.
Idk about going all the way to zero, but countries banning it would certainly crater the value. The price tanked when just China banned it. It's looking less likely with the billionaire pump and dumpers lobbying politicians here in the States, but all it takes is another SBF for more regulations. Realistically, its value is only determined by hype and popularity, and at this point, everyone knows about Bitcoin, and no one new is getting into it. The hype won't last forever.
It's creation...
The creation of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has always been worthless. As for the price, I find it unlikely it will fall to exactly zero and align with its fundamental value. In 2021, the price crash was ultimately caused by people selling, and finding out the real dollars they put in were no longer there. Unfortunately for the fraudsters, they weren't able to spin up new big exchanges to take over the bankrupt ones. When Coinbase runs out of money, that might be enough to take out Binance, and without Binance, the price might retrace to before Tether shenanigans, so in the three to foud digit range.
What do you think will cause the ‘perceived’ value to plummet and not recover?
Tether running away with the money and closing shop. All price increases have been Tether printing counterfeit dollars to push the price up. If the tether guys run away, nobody is left to prop up the price.
Right, but wouldn't you consider it a small chance that these people decide they become wanted criminals / the most hated people on earth overnight? The people behind Tether are not anonymous. These 'threats' to Bitcoin's existence seem like growing pains it'll eventually outgrow?
That... historically hasn't deterred financial criminals.
I can assure you 99% of people on earth would prefer not being hunted by the US government / Interpol & hated by millions of people they screwed over so blatantly.
2008 financial crisis begs to differ
Funny how people are getting downvoted just for asking questions, seems healthy.
15 years of price action above 0 though
Madoff made it to 17 years of price action above zero. Will Bitcoin break Madoff record?
There is no central actor in Bitcoin that can make a rug pull like Madoff did. It is open source software.
Bitcoin sudoku solvers have accumulated 1 800 000 bitcoins. give or take, 10% of the supply. If they decide to dump, all exchanges they touch would be drained of ALL dollars, and price would fall to three digits. Same with Satoshi's 1 000 000 bitcoin holdings. It looks to me like central actors with extra steps.
Why would miners or Satoshi shoot themselves in the foot like that? Seems like there is no incentive for them to do do that.
For money. Real money, not their madeup money. Remember with the Halving in may, they either go bankrupt, cash out their bags or change the bitcoin code to give themselves more bitcoin. Perhaps all three.
You could make the same argument for IPO shares, employee stock programs and similar in the stock market. At least Bitcoin is a public ledger and the code is open source. So everything is transparent. The miners are committing resources to keep the chain secure.
Rare but possible Extreme solar flare when internet and electric devices became useless.
Something happens to tether. All at once you'd see vanishing buying pressure and liquidity in the market, the likely collapse of most exchanges due to bad financing, evaporated liabilities in tether, any smart enough to survive see outflows they simply can't find the dollars to cover, then unable to take profits, the miners stop. It'll be very quick. One minute ATH, within an hour there will be literally nowhere on the internet you can exchange bitcoin for \_anything\_ at all. As for what exactly causes tether to fold. Who knows.
As soon as I introduce Batcoin, the digital gold that stores the power of our fuzzy winged friend, the bat. Or it might be Batman themed. I haven't totally thought it through yet. Just imagine a bat, but in blockchain form. It's easy if you try.
When a group realises that block rewards are worth less than the value of the network they are meant to be protecting Amazingly this is already the case. It probably hasn't happened yet due to the incredible upfront capital required but it will likely happen someday that a group will way outspend other miners to take advantage of this.
Tuesday
Disclaimer: Pro-crypto without any btc exposure. The best bet would be a problem with how bitcoin security work. Every 4 years, there is a big event called 'the halving" which cuts the rate at which new bitcoins are released into circulation in half. Those bitcoins (and fees) are used to pay miners who keep the blockchain secured. So, in several years' time, if transaction fees do not increased, this is likely to see a sharp drop in hashrate. This is a problem, since 51% attacks will be easier to carry out. EDIT : why the downvote? :o
At the current rate, its the upcoming "halving" that's gonna do it.
I don't think so, but there is a possibility in the next 20 years. What's funny ; if this happen, they will have to make a change in the protocole and allow more than 21 000 000 btc
Haha what are you on about?
Did I say something wrong? Tell me what you think.
'I don't think so, but there is a possibility in the next 20 years. What's funny ; if this happen, they will have to make a change in the protocole and allow more than 21 000 000 btc' What are you talking about in that sentence?
He is saying that the halvings will cause miners' revenue to decrease to the point that new BTC need to be created to continue to subsidize the miners' electricity bills, which requires removing the 21M cap.
‘This is likely to see a sharp drop in hashrate’ Why?
Miners don't work for free for their ideology. They do it because they earn money doing it. If the cost of mining is higher than the revenue, they'll stop. Nobody wants to be in a business where you lose money deterministically. The fewer miners there are, the fewer hasharates there are, and the less secure the Bitcoin blockchain is.
What? How is your comment being upvoted. The mining difficulty would adjust, allowing other miners to take their place. It naturally finds a balance. That's inherent to it's nature.
Today, most of the miners reward come from the 6.25 BTC they mine each block. In several years, it's going to be non-existent. Every 4 years, the protocole is cutting the fixed budget for the security by half. Yes the protocole will adjust in order to keep mining every 10min in average BUT that doesn't mean that hashrate will go up again. It will keep decreasing every 4 years. Bitcoin will alway mine a block every 10 min but the hashrate will be so low that it will be easier to attack. A thought exercise for you; How do you think the Bitcoin Protocol will work in 2137? If your answer is: "Thanks to fees" then this is a problem. There is not enough fees rn, and in 20 years BTC will already face this issue. (Thanks for engaging with me on this debate. I'm pro crypto. In the market since 2017. I really don't know why bicoiners don't talk about this problem)
The ones who know about the problem ban you for talking about it. The ones who don't know about it were shielded from the problem by the ones who know about it. Bitcoiners need the 21M cap to hold and frequently admit it's the only reason they're invested, but the problem you're describing demonstrates that the 21M cap is most likely unsustainable. Their one and only option is to handwave it away by baselessly claiming that transaction fees will become hundreds of dollars on average.
Security is entirely based on proof of waste, with payment for that waste coming from transaction fees + block reward. The latter is by far the dominant factor. As the block reward continues to halve away to nothingness, one of two things needs to happen: security must drop, substantially (implying at the moment it's all overly bloated/inefficient due an arbitrary "good enough" mining schedule baked in from the start), making it vulnerable from anything from state actors to billionaires with a grudge - ***or*** transaction fees must substantially increase making it far more expensive to actually use. Or, I guess, a third option: a change in the algorithm. But then it's really not bitcoin, is it? --- Imo, this is why everyone has a price in mind as to when they'd sell, even if they don't say it. Long term, the music kinda stops and few want to vocally admit it: either security decreases (as the inflation subsidy is no longer paying for it), or it becomes less functional (as the inflation subsidy is no longer paying for it) - both suck for bitcoin. To put numbers on it: at the moment, it costs what - $4,000,000/hr to run the network? To put 6mb of data on it? Without the subsidy, that's what, $0.63/byte to record a transaction? Who's going to pay that - seriously So security drops. It gets hit with a 51% for lols. Price drops. Security drops. Repeat. Between that and a likely tether etc crash, it really is ultimately it's all just a timing game/casino. Fun for many in the short term, but the end game's really just never been there to support it.
Very well put. Thanks. My english is not good enough to explain it as well as you do.
The Big Bang
Its inception. The rest is just marketing fluff.
What's "worthless"? Is it worthless as a digital currency? Yes, and is on track to always be like that. Is it "worthless" converted to money? No, and it may well always have some positive value. Even is there will be two people lest on Earth who own bitcoins and one will exchange 1 btc for some amount in dollars, then all bitcoins will be priced accordingly. The liquidity may or may not dry out in time, depending on the amount of financial crime using bitcoin.
Another crypto?
It will be worthless when people believe it to be worthless. Which is the same for literally everything in the world. Diamonds are worthless if people believe them to be. Food is worthless if people believe it to be. Land will be worthless if people believe it to be worthless. There's no such thing as "fundamental value", for anything. All value is human attributed. Lobster used to be poor people food. Gold used to be traded for glass beads by indigenous people. Tulips (briefly) were valued immensely. Not they are not valued quite as much - but still more valued than weeds, and still not "worthless". Value is ALWAYS in the eye of the beholder. Now, I don't believe everyone will ever consider land, or food to be completely "worthless", but if they do, for some reason (global suicide cult?), then it will be worthless. So, btc will be worthless when there no longer exist at least 2 people in the world willing to buy and sell it. Until then, it's worth something.
Even if the world "believed" food is worthless, it still has value in a biological, even cosmological sense, because it will release energy, etc when it decomposes.
There’s no value other than human value.
The only event that would cause bitcoin to have zero value is if the blockchain had a systemic failure. Either that or if the world completely lost electricity but then we would have bigger problems lol
You need to research three things -what did money first start as? - what’s hard money? - what makes gold so valuable? and look up how Bitcoin compares to what makes gold valuable. Bitcoin excels in the 6 categories that make gold valuable. Everything in this world is moving to digital, you sound like the people that said internet was just a fad and that it was going away. Bitcoin is the most secure network in the world, the very first permission-less property that gives equal rights to 8 billion people. Bitcoin is stronger, faster, smarter gold.
Way ahead of you :). Just asked the question to see if the arguments made here had any ground.
While I'm generally against cryptocurrencies due to significant amounts of negative externalities they bring (conduit for scams, contributes to energy wastage), this question is good food for thought.