Even with all the calamity in the marketplace, Bitcoin has held up extremely well. It's more stable than most other things even when you look at a 90 day chart. When you look at what's happened over that time, it's amazing to see things so flat. There was the FTX drop but not the volatility you'd expect afterwards. More clear signs that we have to be in the accumulation phase. Now is the time to be filling your bags with BTC and setting those bags on ice for 2 years. If the paper Bitcoin problem gets solved, we could be in for real fireworks this next time around.
I fear paper Bitcoins will remain. A new sucker born every minute
Yep.. truth of the matter is that paper bitcoin will be hard to eliminate complete.. even though it is likely people will get burnt, and burnt and burnt when they do not adequately protect themselves during circumstances in which paper bitcoin are "at issue."
Look: you, me an OgNasty can go out for dinner and fun on the town, and then the bill ends up being 1.2 Bitcoin.. but we decide NOT to pay it all in full at the moment.. so maybe OgNasty covers for you and me, Gachapin.. and therefore we each owe him 0.4 BTC.. and we decide to do payments over the next 4 years...
or maybe 2 years? who knows?. we can figure out something... but in the process of agreeing to our paying back the guy with the BIG bucks (aka OgNasty), then we have created 0.8 BTC.. but hey, if we settle our bill in 4 years and pay back Ognasty for all the fun that we had out on the town, then we are back to normal after we pay him back.. and who's going to stop us from entering into such an arrangement if we all agreed to it?
Of course, we are free to make any contracts and are free to trust each other or not.
However when customers buy 1 Bitcoin and they agree with the seller (exchange) that he'd hold it for them, that doesn't mean that they agree (or even know) that the same 1 Bitcoin is sold to several other people as well.
In comparison: Banks do fractional reserve too. But there is public reliable info that they do it, and that they even have a legal permission to do it (1 : 10 or else)... fwiw
So you knowingly agree to such terms when creating a contract with them.
With exchanges though, I estimate that
none of them publicly admit to do fractional reserve although many of them certainly do. So they never disclose it to their contracting partner, which turns it into some kind of legal or at least moral fraud (depending on local laws)