It's a technology, and open source. You could say it is literally the opposite of a scam.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?
Most legal fictions can effectively be regarded a scam, if enough people don't buy into it(and by those who don't buy into it).
MtGox & Bitfinex & the Satoshi mystery should have been enough to end cryptocurrency's future as a security instrument. They weren't. There's more than 1 fool born every minute, I suppose.
Seeing the Satoshi mystery as a discrediting factor points to a genetic fallacy, doesn't it? Does it really matter who made it, as long as it is open?
I am aware of the pre-mined Satoshi coins, but it's perfectly possible that the key to those got lost forever by now if they weren't explicitly designed as a pump & dump/kill switch for Satoshi's benefit.
Not really, IMO. Knowing the actors in a scenario often illuminates more than the declared intentions & motivations. I can't help but refer to MS's embracing Linux, for example.
Being used for scams is not the same as being a scam. Dollars are being used for scams all the time.
In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"? Seems to me for the most part it is simply being traded. Do you mean Ransomware? What fraction of BTC transactions happen because of that?
"When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself."
It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
I find it difficult when people say "BTC will be worth xxxxxxxx$ soon". That kind of statement may be scammy, or at least speculative. But that is different from the tech.
"When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming"
There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
"This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum."
Of course I care about what can be done with the tech, but not about the scams. There are many other uses. However, I don't have to convince you, it doesn't matter to me.
> There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
They are.
> Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me a start up, and I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin.
Apart from the very, very, very small use case of sending money to failed states, and even that use case is hinging on a lot of ifs.
> And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
Yes, but that's not their primary use.
> There are many other uses.
If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now.
" I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin."
Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
"Yes, but that's not their primary use."
Neither is bitcoin's. So is gold also a scam, in your opinion?
I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever? How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
"If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now."
> Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?
> Neither is bitcoin's.
The absolute vast majority use cases for bitcoin are scams and hoarding.
> I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever?
It's not. It's very, very simple.
> How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
You assume that having many lines of code is equal to something not being a scam.
There exactly two kinds ow people who peddle bitcoin and crypto: scammers who know what they are doing (and yes, writing millions of lines of code), and gullible idiots.
> So gold is also a scam?
Outside of technical uses? Yes, mostly, as in the usual scenario of "you need to hoard gold because soon everything will fall, and you'll need gold". So are diamonds. There are very many scams. But blockchains, and bitcoin among them, take the current crown.
"I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin."
You can not just store bitcoin. Your assumptions are ridiculously wrong.
While you can not pay everywhere easily with Bitcoin yet, you also have to think of it in terms of insurance. When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled, more and more people will seek refuge in Bitcoin. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin can provide a way out. Extreme cases like having to flee the country - are you going to carry gold bars across the border?
A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
> you also have to think of it in terms of insurance.
Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year.
> When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled
There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely.
> A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
Ah. "For some reason or another". Could you tell me those "some reasons"?
Let me help you.
--- start quote ---
[In the US] the majority of the unbanked and underbanked are American-born while a growing number are immigrants where the two groups have low income as a commonality and lack the minimum balance to open checking and savings accounts
--- end quote ---
Wells Fargo requires you to have 25 dollars to open a checking account. People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year.
Same goes for other unbanked populations across the world, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
> With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality.
You can transfer BTC. What else can you do with a bank account?
"Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year."
It's still early days. Fluctuation is better than devaluation to zero.
"There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely."
At least a billion people in China, for starters. And you vastly underestimate the number of people who are being cancelled. You only hear about the famous cases. The number of people whose funds have been frozen by PayPal is legion. Also the people who are not cancelled yet may still be unhappy about constantly having to worry and having watch their steps to avoid being cancelled. It's not a good feeling. Sometimes stories even make it to Hacker News, maybe you missed them.
"People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year."
Even those people will have banking needs, and the transaction costs are being tackled with things like Lightning. Fiat banking is not free, either.
"There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality."
Or people who see the issues in our current system and try to create something better. People like you will probably be unable to understand the mindset of pioneers.
Clearly people are playing along with Bitcoin, so I don't see your point? I also don't fully understand what you are saying. You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
> You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
Yes, did you not realize that?!
Are you really rallying this hard against people discarding its economic value without understanding something as basic as deflation?
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Deflation is more deadly to a currency than inflation. By far.
You reduce interest rates to 0% and then what? You can try negative interest rates, but with the kind of deflation BTC has seen you would need negative triple digit interest rates which is a complete absurdity.
You'd probably see the government outlaw physical cash to boot, forcing you to use a bank and forcing the bank to constantly siphon your money if you don't spend it quickly enough.
I know about the usual "deflation scares" by economists and governments. I think they are a bit overblown, though. They seem to assume people spend money just for fun. But people also spend money because they need things. If you are hungry, you have to go out and buy food. It doesn't matter that your 1$ may be worth 10$ tomorrow, if you need an Apple now or you will starve. So I think people would still be spending, and things would even out after a while. I don't believe we need those centralized banks manipulating prices to keep some inflation rate so that people keep spending.
I also don't think Bitcoin will just keep doubling every year forever.
But all that is besides the point.
As for "people discarding the economic value of Bitcoin", clearly right now it has value, so those people are wrong. Whether it will still have value next year is another question. But right now, you can sell 1 Bitcoin for 56000$, so it provably has value.
You are completely out of your depth, you have no idea what you're talking about, and it is not worth any effort to explain to you how a currency increasing in value by 10,000% in 5 years would cripple the economy.
Understanding why that would be disastrous to the point of irrevocably destroying a nation and leaving millions in abject poverty should be table stakes when you have the bravado to shrug off the fear mongering economists who study this stuff for a living.
Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Maybe you are the one who is clueless?
Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
Also new currencies have been created a lot of times in the past, technically their value would also have been increasing by 10000% over night.
Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x". There are economists advocating socialism and economists advocating capitalism, for example. There are even economists advocating Bitcoin.
> Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
Ever heard of The Great Depression???? Go read up on it and tell me if deflation made things better or worse.
> Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Bitcoin is not the official currency of a country! The closest cases we have to that are failing economies where BTC is used as a life raft and its taken * 10 million percent * inflation to finally make BTC an attractive alternative!
>You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
The only way it wouldn't have is if it was highly regulated... sounds like a great match for BTC right?
Like you realize we ran this experiment before right? Do you know what the gold standard was? And why we moved away from it? Hint: Go look up deflation and it's role in the Great Depression again.
Leaving the gold standard gave the government tools like interest rates that didn't have to compete with a commodity. Let alone a commodity increasing in value 10,000% in 5 years
> Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x".
This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks.
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Your comment as a whole just tells me this is not even worth the effort I've put in to get to this point. I'm not even trying to be rude, you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here.
I know about the Great Depression. Economists are discussing the causes to this day. And why it ended is also up to debate. Yes, they left the gold standard and all that, but there also was WW II and war economics. Politicians love Keynes theories because they can employ them to rationalize government spending and money printing.
It seems quite ridiculous to claim the Great Depression was caused by Deflation. It might as well have been the other way round.
I have a Billion Reichsmark at home. Was the collapse of Nazi Germany caused by Inflation? I rather doubt it. An egg cost 100000 Reichsmark in the end because there were few eggs to go around. In the Great Depression, presumably labor was cheap because there were more workers than demand for work.
As for the gold standard, most economists agree that we don't know how the experiment will end yet. What if the central banks keep interest rates low forever - nobody knows how that game will end. And they can not easily raise rates again now without bankrupting a lot of people.
In any case it seems humans have existed for thousands of years without central banks setting interest rates.
"This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks."
What an idiotic comparison.
"you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here."
Yeah you know nothing about reasoning. But you are entitled to your beliefs and cherry picked "facts", of course. Let's hope you won't get responsibility for any nations money supply any time soon.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?