Quote from: viljy on Today at 06:09:57 AM

Quote from: Smartprofit on May 24, 2025, 06:02:30 PM

Quote from: viljy on May 22, 2025, 09:33:49 AM

Well, gold has never been speculative, it has been deliberately made such an asset for several decades in a row by speculators in London. They told everyone that it was the same product as, for example, coal, even worse! Because it has no uses other than jewelry... But gold has never been a commodity. Gold is money in its perfect form. Now everything is back to normal.

But with bitcoin, not everything is as good as with gold. Because Bitcoin is subject to control. First of all, the price of bitcoin can be controlled by large holders. The network itself is completely controlled by the miners. That is, it is enough to control the miners to control the network. Most of the mining facilities are located in the United States, where the government will have no difficulty controlling anything, including the miners too.

Therefore, the largest countries consider bitcoin only as a situational tool that is convenient for calculations at the moment, but not as a currency of the future or an investment. However, I think that bitcoin, nevertheless, will be widely used by individuals when capital is fleeing from treasuries and other assets, because there are very few alternatives.

By declaring a trade war against China, the American government has completely changed all the rules of the game in the geopolitical space.

As a result, the world will most likely never be the same again. China has a lot of American treasury bonds. At the same time, they cannot sell them at once (since it is simply impossible to find buyers for such a volume of bonds). At the same time, the Communist Party of China no longer considers American treasury bonds as a reliable asset. They would be happy to get rid of this asset completely (but they cannot).

In these conditions, Bitcoin seems to be a very good alternative to American stocks and American treasury bonds. I do not quite agree with the thesis that Bitcoin is controlled by Americans (Bitcoin is a fairly decentralized asset, its miners and owners are located in different parts of the globe).

At the same time, Bitcoin has a significant advantage over gold - gold is very difficult to transport across borders, gold is not well suited for cross-border transactions, gold is easier to counterfeit than Bitcoin.

The United States is in first place in terms of hash power. Miners in the United States control 35% of the hash power of the bitcoin network. You must agree, this is a lot if we consider decentralization by country. Kazakhstan is in second place, which controls 18% of the hash power. Russia is in third place. For example, if the economic situation in Kazakhstan regarding miners changes (electricity prices, taxes on miners, etc.) and they can migrate to the United States, where more than 50% of the hash capacity will be concentrated.

If military conflicts escalate, ocean communication cables may be damaged and the unified Internet will split into segments, in any case, poor connectivity makes mining difficult with weak hash capacities. That is, in fact, the bitcoin network is quite fragile in extreme conditions.

As for the difficulty of transporting gold, this problem has been successfully solved for centuries by sufficient security. For example, it would not be difficult for the United States to send an aircraft carrier with a squadron to guard a convoy of gold, if necessary, so the inconvenience of transportation is not such a serious problem.

Yes, it is possible that American mining pools control 35 percent of the computing power of the Bitcoin network...

But we must not forget that a mining pool, as a rule, consists of individual miners who join the floor for commercial reasons. At the same time, these miners can freely move from one pool to another, and even create their own pools.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule - for example, the American mining pool "Mara" - they do not allow "foreign" miners to join them. And it is this circumstance that makes us suspect that this American pool works directly for the American government.

At the same time, I do not rule out that Bitcoin is more decentralized than it seems. It is quite possible that the Chinese Communist Party has found some secret way to secretly mine Bitcoin. North Korea and rich Arab states are probably mining Bitcoin as well.

As for gold, sending a whole convoy of American aircraft carriers every time for one transaction is, in my opinion, not very rational. Moreover, warships can be sunk very easily with the help of sea drones and missiles. There have already been examples of successful attacks on American aircraft carriers (and repairing such a large warship is very expensive).