Refer to my prior blog about the capital controls and “proof of source of funds” confiscations that are coming to kick people off of their BTC.
Any other attacks other than the $5 wrench attack that I need to worry about?
That eventually we will not be able to exchange BTC for anything of we value in the tangible world, because eventually the people of the world are going to be extremely angry that Bitcoin has wrecked the world.
When I wrote that we are headed into stagflation because of the rising interest rates and collapse of the sovereign debt bubble, I was not including the inflation that will come from Bitcoin consuming most of the electricity of the world and driving the electrical prices sky high. In the 1970s it was sky high oil prices, but that was only for a few years. Bitcoin is only consuming 0.3% of the world’s electricity right now, but it’s apparently increasing at 10X every 4 years. The rate of increase may slow down a bit as the consumption becomes very significant, but 80+% of the world’s electricity is probably attainable within the next 8 years or so.
If governments effectively react by banning Bitcoin mining such that Bitcoin’s percentage consumption of the world’s electricity doesn’t increase as fast, then in my conceptualization of the S/F model, BTC will also not appreciate in value as fast. I think it’s not just the S/F ratio but the energy consumption that coincides with that ratio. But realize that if governments attempt to do this, they will enrich those who have access to electricity for Bitcoin mining. Thus I think governments can’t effectively ban Bitcoin mining, just as Venezuela couldn’t effectively ban it. Smaller surreptitious mining rigs in homes would replace large mining farms to circumvent government detection.
So this means that governments should turn very totalitarian against people of large net worth. They will need to show “proof of source of funds” and if this derives from Bitcoin the wealth will likely be at least blocked from spending/investment in the real economy which the governments control or (if possible) confiscated.
Of course the corrupt politicians and the nature of political society means the uber wealthy, global elite (not you and I, I mean Rockefeller, Soros, etc) will be able to (behind the curtain) attain exemptions from these capital controls. They have the necessary economies-of-scale. We don’t.
What do you think the Patriot Act, 9/11, and all these AML regulations are for? It is to prepare for what these globalists have planned by creating Bitcoin.
My thought is we need to get off of Bitcoin before those capital controls are in place. And the other problem is that if our gains came from Bitcoin, our funds will be forever tainted even if we got them out of Bitcoin. Because as I said, the “proof of source of funds” is becoming a thing now that will be required more and more. The exchanges require it. Banks now require it. They will not hassle you now if the amounts are small (e.g. < $3000 or $10,000) but those will be very tiny amounts after Bitcoin’s inflation wrecks the world. And they might lower the thresholds in the future.
My thought is to convert Bitcoin into useful assets that don’t need permission before the capital controls begin, if possible in such a way that the payment for those assets will not be traced in the future and clawed back by the coming totalitarianism. This may not be possible to accomplish in significant size. For example purchasing a vehicle for cash is probably doable and it will probably not be questioned in the future.
The other issue is an ethical one. Is it ethical to invest in an asset with a78%guaranteed annual compounded return while it siphons off the world’s electricity? Is that a productive endeavor? What good does it accomplish?
That is the point of quoting the scriptures in my prior comment reply. It seems that idoling Bitcoin’s ill-gotten gains is an evil doers trap.
Fungible money is an information system which enables the transfer of utility overcoming the double coincidence of
wants. Asymptotic perpetual store-of-value (e.g. Bitcoin but not gold) is an anathema, because it means past production is valued infinitely more than future production. So AFAICS Bitcoin is disinformation. Could we argue that electricity is too cheap, that electricity needs to be a greater friction in society, and we need Bitcoin to provide more competition for electricity (so people can’t afford to idle their time on Facebook)? Well that is going to happen, because Bitcoin is unstoppable at least until the world government forms. But there will be causalities:
Essentially the above video confirms that man can’t escape the fundamental (Second Law of Thermodynamics) trend towards maximum entropy (aka disorder). The more we think we control nature, the more we are subject to the disorder of nature. Thus any paradigm which increases the centralization of metrics or control (e.g. Bitcoin) is to be destroyed by nature, such as by destroying the human species if necessary. Bitcoin is top-down control. Analogous to what is explained in the above video, Bitcoin attempts to give the past absolute control over the future, which is why it must become infinitely expensive (which obviously it can’t so the world will fight back).
@Roy Sebag via GoldMoney.com wrote:
Money as a Self-Evidently Superior Embodiment of Metabolic Energy Induces Measurement and Motivation of Sustainable Human Cooperation
In order for a cooperative society to demand money, money must be an equitable measure of human agency, by which I mean toil, which is unchanging through time. When money is an objective and immutable constant, then it incentivizes a meritocracy of action which can be sustainably perpetuated into the future. Operating under such a money, those who work harder and produce a greater surplus of whatever skill or good they invest their metabolic energy into producing are rewarded with more money relative to others. This dynamic, in turn, motivates everyone else to wake up the next morning, ingest various localized information via their common senses relative to their personal wants and needs, and work more or less hard depending on their personal circumstances and desire for self-actualization. This circuitous relationship between Money as a measure and a reward for both toil and merit is what allows a complex, interdependent cooperative society to survive—that is to say achieve and maintain a state of collective prosperity and thus remain resilient through time.
Here, I use the term “prosperity” to denote a state of surplus metabolic energy. Owing to the inherent laws of nature, any cooperative society must first be sufficiently fed, sheltered, and kept warm in order to avoid social and political upheaval and, thus, create an environment for productive cooperative action. Therefore, this existential demand in a non-clannish society must always be maintained.[8] For just one example of the ramifications of a breakdown of this most foundational dynamic in any non-clannish society, look no further than Venezuela these days. It is important to stress that I am purposely avoiding the usage of abstract notions of “wealth,” “capital,” and other nominal mathematical measures. Such measures, employing the language of mathematics, may be helpful for communicating natural phenomena, but they do not explain the more fundamental dynamics at play.
The Natural Order ensures that none of these nominal calculations matter within the objective present as it relates to the existential demand to maintain a surplus of metabolic energy. The Natural Order enforces that every day, acts of human cooperation must continually transpire within the objective present because the past is entirely powerless, as are all cooperative acts which have taken place within it. As far as non-clannish human cooperation goes, it is only the future that matters. This is due, in part, to the self-evident reality that the laws of nature dictate that all of the most existentially-mandated goods and services suffer from diminishing marginal utility through time—things grow up and then they die back down, food and energy resources cannot last in their most immediately useful state without the need for a continued investment of energy in order to preserve them.
[…]
Let us first focus on Money as an equitable measure of toil. The best measure is one that embodies the most energy and that can continue from the past through the present and into the future as an embodiment or representation of that energy effortlessly and unchangingly in the most efficient way through time. Such a measure, which must be self-evident to the primary cooperators within a given cooperative society (those engaged in producing the existentially-mandated surplus of metabolic energy) will be demanded as money through time by all members of the cooperative society (from the farmer to the software engineer and all individual cooperative nodes in-between).
It is from this understanding that the principle of “proof of work” arises—the notion that someone can instantly recognize and measure an equitable quantum of human action or metabolic energy expenditure from the past. This can be in the form of an investment of time, energy, thought, labor, or skill in the production of a service or a thing. As history has shown, abstractions–ranging from ideas to services–fail this first test because they wither with the advent of ever-changing paradigms and beliefs. The notion of “utility,” for example, can be correctly relegated to this intellectual tradition within economics. Aside from the core, primary, collective requirements of food, shelter, and energy for any cooperative society to exist, all other notions of utility are subjective. Therefore, the things that tend to last as objective measures or “proof of work” tend to be things in the corporeal world, which primary cooperators can perceive viscerally through their human sense perceptions. Once again, the elements and the natural order remind us of the primacy of such objective measures within human cooperative societies.
[…]
The issue for me is that the Bitcoin community cannot, on the one hand, base its entire future on the Proof-of-Work argument while maligning Gold, which is the natural ideal which any proof-of-work currency strives to embody. As I shall show in the remaining sections of this paper, pursuing this flawed intellectual path introduces a necessary comparison which, unfortunately for Bitcoin, renders it inferior to not just Gold, but most corporeal units of metabolic energy made manifest in naturally scarce elements that survive through time.
Bitcoin is a paradox. On the one hand, its creation involves a proof-of-work predicated on the exertion of metabolic energy (the massive energy expenditure made in the form of the electricity used by the computers that “mine” it).
On the other hand, this exertion is an effective opportunity cost for a cooperative society’s surplus of metabolic energy, which, due to the infinite demands of Bitcoin, is unsustainable through time.
What we need instead of Bitcoin is a digital gold, that can actually be used by anyone in humanity but which does not appreciate in value forever as Bitcoin will (until a world government and 666 tracking can stop Bitcoin). For example, if we were to create our own society or community (analogous to the Amish) and use our own money and reject all capital controls within our community, would we choose to use Bitcoin? And give everyone in our who holds Bitcoin a 78% per annum gain relative to those who do not yet have money and who are working hard? No! That is evil and inequitable.
So my thought is we need an altcoin which will not abuse the world. Not have inexorable increases in valuation. And which will facilitate transactions. It would not be sui generis, just as gold has not been sui generis. If we had such an altcoin available, then we could buy or mine it, being careful to record our “proof of source of funds” (and to cryptographically prove the funds didn’t originate from Bitcoin, which decentralized physical gold can’t prove!) and hopefully the world will be less angry at such a more fair altcoin which is more helpful to humanity.
Note Monero and Grin both have perpetual debasement (although it’s not a percentage so it declines as a percentage thus making them worse than gold in this respect) so would qualify except they don’t scale transaction volume. Grin (MimbleWimble) has pruning, but this is not transaction volume scaling. Monero has an adaptive block size but AFAIK this is centrally controlled by setting the minimum transaction fee.
By my estimations we could see $100 transaction fees when bitcoin reaches $80K (based upon segwit only). Not sure what else I might be leaving out.
I am leaning towards transaction fees not being the problem for BTC hodlers. But those high transaction fees do mean Bitcoin is really useless as a medium-of-exchange for all of humanity. And also refer to the insoluble, egregious flaw in Lightning Networks which I linked for you in my first comment reply. Again what good does Bitcoin generate for humanity? Okay it helps to precipitate the crash of the sovereign debt bubble, but seems to me it will increase socialism and totalitarianism. Bitcoin seems to be usurious (taking a guaranteed gain which is not based on investment and risk, at the expense of humanity).
Sounds to me like the 1 MB block size is a Schelling point because of the network effect. Segwit 2X's failure seems to confirm this.
Agreed.
Andreas Antonopoulos seems to think that block size increases will happen anyway at some point into the future
For an altcoin such as perhaps Bitcoin Core, BCH, or BSV, but never for Bitcoin.
Note that block size increases do not solve the problem, because there is no size that will be enough and not too much. And changing the size periodically is centralization. Again there is no Schelling point around block size increases.
I hope someone will send to Andreas a link to my blog.
My head was too deeply immersed in my own software projects until 2015
Ditto myself until I joined bitcointalk.org in March 2013. Also 2011 and 2012, my health turned acutely worse. Risto Pietilä (the guy who bought a castle in Estonia with BTC) and I were doing silver business back in 2009 and in 2012 he suggested we both sell $100k of silver and buy BTC. I agreed with his decision and advised he proceed. He bought 10,000 BTC for $10. I didn’t sell because my life was a mess at that juncture. Yet now I am thankful I did not. Observe what happened to Risto since that time.
Bitcoin is really a wrecking ball.
Really wish I'd just gone all in back in 2010, but of course that would have included mining and nobody really gave bitcoin any chance at all or realized why it was important except for the really obscure nerds.
Actually I had read Szabo’s bitgold blog circa 2010, because I was trying to work on something that would decentralize gold-backed money. But I dismissed it because I was a goldbug. Risto pinging me about Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012, but my life was in health and personal chaos.
Had I been healthy and focused, I would have probably gotten into Bitcoin in 2011 or 2012. For example, I was not even aware of the rise in the price to $32.
But back to my main point. See us being jealous? How jealous do you think the people of the world are going to be? Bitcoin appears to be the epitome of evil.
RE: Secrets of Bitcoin’s Dystopian Valuation Model