Let me be more explicit: You say that like the people running banks aren’t the exact sort of people who think that laws are merely suggestions and that fines are the cost of doing business. Finance bros are exactly the same as crypto bros, except instead of shitcoins they talk about Byzantine financial instruments that only have a 90% chance of collapsing the country’s economy but has a 10% chance of making them $10000000000.
For most of human history, salt met this definition. Ever wonder why it’s called a salary?
Tungsten is also one of the rarest minerals on Earth despite being relatively cheap.
Yes, as everyone knows, if you are mugged in the street, you can just say “no”. The robber legally cannot take your money without your consent.
Yes, but the overwhelming majority of the value of gold is because it is shiny. Up until very recently, it had almost no other practical use other than being shiny. Plenty of other objects meet the definition of “rare” and “cannot make more at will” and “doesn’t degrade over time”. Gold is just the prettiest.
The notion that “crypto is easily stolen” is completely false. It’s definitely harder to steal than, say, cash in a wallet. That it is “accepted almost nowhere” is also false. Look hard enough, and you can find someone who will sell you almost anything for crypto.
The choice of a uint32_t for time saves 4 bytes per transaction. That doesn’t sound like much, but with 1.2 billion transactions recorded, it adds up to almost 10 GB of space saved.
They could, ultimately, just replace it with a uint64_t some time in the 22nd century without much fuss. In the late 2000s when Bitcoin was created, storage space was at a significant cost, but now it is quite cheap and in the 2100s it will undoubtedly be even cheaper.
Well, gold might be a little bit different. It derives its value not because of a government mandate but because monkey brain like shiny
Trump is not yet in charge of the Federal Reserve. That may change depending on what his goons in Congress and the Supreme Court do, but for the time being, even if Trump says “I ORDER the Fed to buy $1 trillion in TrumpBonds”, Powell can say “I’m good” and there’s not much he can yet do about it.
Crypto is also accepted as a means of exchange. There are plenty of merchants willing to accept it as payment, but they are just not geographically concentrated in one location like banknote-accepters are. With a banknote, you have a very high concentration of merchants who will accept that as a means of payment in one geographic area (i.e. the country or region whose central bank issued that banknote), while it is not accepted anywhere else. With most cryptocurrencies, they will be acceptable worldwide, but the concentration of people willing to take it in any given geographic area is low.
It is important to note that you can’t take properties of the smaller coins (the ones which you are probably thinking of are derisively referred to as “shitcoins” and most are deserving of that epithet) and apply them to every cryptocurrency. Just like you can’t use properties of the Zimbabwean dollar to smear all fiat currencies in general.
Bitcoin transactions on its Lightning Network are typically instantaneous, and fees are lower than most credit cards (usually on the order of 0.1%). An on-chain Bitcoin transaction currently has a fee of about 1 USD, which would make it competitive to credit cards for transactions greater than 40 USD. Bitcoin fees, despite being notorious for being the highest among all cryptos, are actually very competitive with most traditional payment methods. This transaction from the most recent block at the time of writing paid about 117 USD to move over 411 BTC worth 48.5 million USD. That means they paid about 0.00024% in fees and this is the highest-fee transaction in this block (meaning they paid the highest fee rate of any transaction in this block). The going rate for this block was actually much lower; whoever sent this transaction overpaid by about 50 times.
This is called debt monetisation and has been forbidden by law in the US since 1981.
In the US if someone takes your debit card and enters the correct PIN, the transactions are permanent, and the bank has no obligation to give your money back (and if they choose to do so it would be out of their own pocket).
“Debit” in the United States refers to chip-and-PIN transactions only (though tap-and-PIN is also now a thing). The US debit card networks process only in-person transactions because their fees are limited by law and the risk of fraud is lower for chip-and-PIN compared to the “trust me bro” of online card transactions.
All other transactions processed through the Visa or Mastercard network are treated as credit card transactions for the purposes of processing the transaction on the network, even if the underlying card is a debit card.
It’s true in the United States. In the US, a debit card transaction is an EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) and once you enter your PIN, there are no take-backs and if you want a refund and the merchant refuses, you have to resort to the legal system for recourse. Credit cards, on the other hand, have consumer protection rules and dispute procedures.
The merchant pays the fee. With cryptocurrencies, the consumer pays the fee. Some sites offer a discount for paying with cryptocurrency as a result. For example, most precious metals dealers who accept Bitcoin offer a 3% discount for using it.
I think we can. Have you not heard of this phrase before?
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Satoshi Nakamoto put it in the zeroth block of the Bitcoin blockchain.
This is really getting into the weeds of what you define “value” to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).
This already exists. 1 bitcoin = 1,000 mBTC = 100,000,000 satoshi. The exchange rate as of writing is about 846 satoshis = 1 USD or 982 satoshis = 1 EUR. The current usage is thusly:
To be franc (or to be billion francs), France has enough money, guns, and United Nations Security Council seats to give Haiti the middle finger
Your idea of “distressingly often”, which you bring up a lot, I believe to be severely flawed. With respect to individuals who control their own wallets, it is in reality exceedingly rare for hackers to be able to breach a wallet’s security measures and steal coins. Most wallets implement encryption of some sort, either through the device’s keystore or using a password. Most crypto thefts take the form of people being tricked into giving away their key phrase or sending their crypto to a scammer. This is really the same type of scam as someone taking your debit card and then tricking you into giving them your PIN. According to most bank policies, you are liable for unauthorised chip-and-PIN debit transactions. “Zero liability” only applies to credit transactions proceed through the Visa or Mastercard networks. If you give someone your PIN for any reason, you are deemed to have authorised all transactions that they make with that PIN.
But you do raise a good point that the crypto industry is very under-regulated and there needs to be some form of deposit insurance for crypto exchanges. More regulation is definitely not a bad thing (despite what crypto bros will say), especially in the post-FTX era.