When are they going to stop using fixed dollar amounts in laws as if they didn’t know in a decade $200 will be worth way less than it is now? Kind of a slap in the face.
Holders of bitcoin are the only people who don't have a say. Buyers, miners and developers decide what is and is not viable (in roughly that order). Holders have a say only as much as they are still buyers.
By creating the fork on demand. The only part of Bitcoin that is technically hard to recreate from scratch is the huge hashing power of its mining network.
If buyers were happy with bitcoin-but-a-different-brand then there isn't much existing bitcoin holders can do to hold their market together. There is an unlimited supply of numbers out there, the constraint is numbers that are backed by whatever silly number of hashes per second the Bitcoin network is up to. The holders don't have any particular influence over that constraint.
> People complaining that bitcoin is just for crime are just slandering it.
This one really gets my goat. There are so many ridiculous laws. It’s illegal to consume alcohol in Saudi Arabia. It’s illegal in Russia to use profanity in theaters, and in Thailand it’s illegal not to play a salute to the king before every film. Besides geographical differences in current times, the differences throughout history are more striking.
Thank God for the existence of other countries or else I would be forced to say those laws in Russia and Saudi Arabia are justified, and any technology that that lets people subvert them is immoral.
The idea that one can live in a country where fundamental political values are wrong is alien to most people. Every form of imposition that the government applies is justified with ideological notions like the social contract. So one can only explain the value of censorship resistance by pointing out how it enables people to escape tyrannical laws in those other countries, which unlike our own perfect countries, are repressive.
>For example, all present-day populations show about two percent of Neanderthal ancestry which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East.
I thought subsaharans lacked Neanderthal admixture?
That’s a ridiculous statement if you consider the fed a part of the government. I.e. the fire department and police both have “government enforced monopolies”. The government itself is a “government enforced monopoly”
“The alternative would be a repeal of laws establishing police, allowing consumers & businesses to choose between law enforcement providers.”
Look I’m not saying you can’t criticize the existence of the fed, but calling them a “government enforced monopoly” is inane. They are a _part_ of the government.
If using a given telephone company were mandated by the government, it would be by definition a government enforced monopoly. Similarly, legal tender laws force businesses to accept USD to settle all debts. From this point, Gresham's law also plays a role.
There is a long history of private policing in the United States.
The Federal Reserve Bank is not owned by the government. It is considered a public private partnership.
It will and is. Every time the US attempts to control what can be purchased with dollars, it advances the process of turning the USD into a kind of Chuck E. Cheese token.
It should also deflate as the economy grows. Wrt the problems of deflation, it may or may not cause some, but it doesn't really matter because people who don't want to participate in Bitcoin don't have to. They can still choose to use inflationary stores of value.
Deflationary "problems" are largely strawmen. We've never had such deflationary money systems to know how it plays out long term.
In the end, people still need to eat and drink, and they're going to pay to meet those needs no matter how much it costs them.
Most of the complaints about deflation are from the Keynesian economists, who for them, it is a major problem. How are they going to pay back all that interest they keep accumulating if people aren't continuously spending?
