this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Regulatory capture is exactly why we should not trust a single, centralized entity to print the global reserve currency.
Bitcoin, with its fixed supply and decentralized production solves this. It is immune to regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture involves:
Bitcoin is decentralized and immune to influence. No matter how rich and powerful you are, you cannot print Bitcoin that is not meant to be printed and you cannot spend BTC which you do not hold the private key to. Period. Rich, powerful people are used to having outsized influence in our legal and political systems, but they are subject to the same laws of physics and math as the rest of us.
Other advantages include:
Oh right, I remember now, your whole thing is to shill cryptocurrency bullshit.
The economy will be able to grow just fine and normally: by producing an ever-increasing value of goods and services. We have good historical precedent for this: countries and empires that existed before the invention of paper currency. Or the US when it was on the gold standard. In a fixed supply currency economy, when the economy grows, the money becomes more valuable. A dollar is essentially a "share" of the entire US economy. If a company you have a share in becomes more valuable, what happens to your share of it? It becomes more valuable too. In a fixed currency economy, when the economy grows, the benefit is shared with all economic participants according to how much currency they have.
In an inflationary supply economy, when the economy grows, if supply inflation outpaces growth (which it is does) then the currency becomes less valuable. Meanwhile, value transfers to the people to printed the additional currency supply and whomever they decided to give it to. This is what happens every time we do bank bailouts. The 99% end up paying for the investment mistakes of the 1% and the flaws of fractional reserve banking.
Imagine how the world might look different if governments couldn't print money at a whim. If they wanted to fund wars, they would have to raise taxes. That would not be popular. Might we end up with a more peaceful planet if that were the case?
If you expect your currency to generally appreciate in value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Might our goods be built to last? Be more repairable? More sustainable?. Perhaps, one can only speculate. Having money that loses its value over time forces people to spend it as quickly as possible. The faster your money depreciates, the more wreckless you will be with spending because even getting your 15th blender is worth more than your 100 Turkish Lira will be in a month. A currency which loses value by design fuels needless consumption/production. On a planet with finite resources, this is a questionable incentive to have in our economic system.
@makeasnek @PeepinGoodArgs This is cope. Even El Salvador couldn't use Bitcoin as currency, had to layer Lightning on top of it to make their situation work for them.
Bitcoin is turning 16 this year, there is no more mystery to the damn coin!
Lightning is an international open-source protocol, not something El Salvador made. It's a layer on top of Bitcoin which makes transactions settle instantly for pennies in fees while using the underlying Bitcoin blockchain for security. Similar to how venmo is a layer on top of the existing banking system. El Salvador has no say in how Bitcoin is administered.
@makeasnek The administration or lack of it is not what makes Bitcoin useless as a monetary currency. Bitcoin is useful for many other things but that's not one of them.
Really decentralized when two groups hold 54.3% of all mining activity and historical precedent shows that miners always side with the whales, which are people made rich in the old financial system and who now hold even more influence in the space.
Indeed, given that hard non crypto cash and the compute power it buys is the ultimate decider on the protocol, updates, and which fork is the correct one, Bitcoin would seem to be a system which removes any semblance of power over the monetary system from elected leaders and explicitly gives it to the rich.
Also, why is having a set unchanging hard limit on total supply that important?
The braindead answer is something to do with inflation, but outside of hyperinflation the total money supply has little if any impact on inflation. BTC actually demonstrates this quite nicely, given that it saw over three hundred percent inflation between November of 21 and 22, despite there being a slight decrease in the total money supply. While those months were chosen for dramatics, Bitcoin’s swings from rapid inflation to deflation and back are wild when compared to even poorly managed third world currencies.
Because otherwise somebody else is printing that currency and transferring value from your currency to whatever they want to do with it. And if we give an authority the ability to print currency, they may be a great custodian of that trust until they aren't. Historically, for the most part, government haven't been, they've just been the best solution so far to the problem of who to trust with the currency supply because they were the most stable institutions humanity had ever built.
Bitcoin's value relative to the dollar is unstable, yes, but it's more stable than many other currencies out there. And it's stable relative to its own supply. 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC. No fiat currency can make that promise. Stability improves with scale, the more people use it, the more stable it becomes, same as any other currency.
The only thing that guarantees Bitcoin's worth is thoughts and prayers.
The US government has aircraft carriers.
People don't use USD because the US will bomb them if they don't. They use USD because they trust the fiscal policies of its issuer and many places accept USD (network effect). Not every country likes using USD because we use it as a tool of imperial control over others, so sometimes they choose other currencies. Not often though, because they don't trust the issuers of those other currencies.
Bitcoin has fiscal policy that is backed by math and physics instead of the whims of a national government and its network effect grows more each year. Only time will tell if that can result in Bitcoin becoming a global reserve currency.
A powerful entity backs the USD is the point. Military might provides a certain level of stability. It's not about forcing the use of the dollar; you don't have to.
Bitcoin is hot air and a poor use of electricity.