Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Stop your BTC cheerleading and mass delusion and face the reality
by
Alix Istek
on 23/12/2014, 06:00:07 UTC
Nevertheless, I think you have the time scales wrong.  It will probably take decades, if not centuries, to achieve the full conversion from the current fiat system to something else like bitcoin.  It took more than a century to switch fully from gold to fiat (started out in the 19th century, where fiat was fully covered by gold and silver, and ended with the official release of any reference to gold with Nixon).

Agree with much of your other points, but using linear historical comparisons for timeframes can be misleading, due to various vaguely exponential technological acceleration effects.

Quote
Even the bitcoin protocol wouldn't allow one to switch fully to bitcoin without an ecological disaster in the first 20 years or so, because the mining incentive would use up too much ressources (mainly energy and hardware).

Yes, but ecological disaster is perhaps not the best way to look at it, for even if the ecological disaster were averted, its still a giant economic malinvestment.  It creates a bunch of hardware and computation that doesn't actually lead to technological/economic growth.

The other problem with the whole "bitcoin as reserve currency" idea is the incompatibility between the bitcoiner ideal of a currency and world free of taxation, and the practical necessity for governments to fund themselves.

For example, consider a world where bitcoin became the reserve currency, and then - hypothetically - a giant asteroid was found on a collision course that would destroy the world in the next 5 years, unless we could spend 10 $trillion on some massive spaceship intercept missile program.

Now, in a world where governments can arbitrarily commandeer 50%, or 80% of the GDP, the disaster can be avoided.  But in the ideal bitcoiner world, you have a problem.  In reality governments aren't going to just give up and die.

So given all that, the more realistic scenarios would involve massive tax increases in other areas to compensate - such as much higher property taxes, or whatever.  The end result is you still have something similar to the present wealth tax - just in a different form.