What is the real underlying reason Gary Gensler is delaying the spot ETF? And when is it likely to be approved?

It is obviously not volatility or consumer protection. So what is it?

The canadian truckers are unable to get a hold of the 21 bitcoin that have been donated to them recently because the wallets associated with the fundraising have been tracked and banned from all regulated financial institutions (including banks and exchanges). Two questions for discussion:
1. Is bitcoin really censorship resistent if the government can track and ban addresses? Bitfinex hackers being tracked and caught is another example (though most people would argue that this is an example of "positive" censorship resistence, unlike the canadian truckers example).
2. Can bitcoin be both censorship resistent and transparent at the same time?

Bitcoin futures expiring 31 Dec 21 are currently 2.6% higher than spot price. This premium is around 15.5% annualized. Is this a good opportunity for a cash and carry trade by doing:
1) Long 1 BTC spot
2) Short 1 BTC futures contract expiring 31 Dec 21

I've heard that before we well. Can I just ask what is meant by "Bitcoin is the highest quality asset"? Why is it the highest quality? And why do people use words like "pristine asset" to describe it?

There seems to be a belief by some people that:
1) The money that is currently put into negative-yielding Treasury bonds needs a new "home" and
2) That new "home" is likely to be bitcoin

Can someone explain this in more detail. Why are Treasury bonds being compared to bitcoin? I understand the rationale behind point 1, but don't really see why a large portion of it will move into bitcoin. I can see it moving away from Treasury bonds, but I also see it moving to stocks, real estate, gold, silver, other commodities, art, pokemon cards etc. 

I agree with everything sana54210 said. The only thing I would add is, the other thing that changed is the volume of futures vs spot. It's not just a matter of the whether there is a futures market that allows suppression the relative weight of futures to spot. Back in 2017, yes there was a futures market but it was tiny, in fact the futures volume was less than spot volume back then. Now, the futures volume is 10 times as big as the spot volume, making suppression easier. The trend is only continuing to widen.

The thing I always seem to hear from people is "Look at the past, Bitcoin has always crashed hard but it always came back stronger than ever."

This ignores the fact that in 2009-2017 there was no futures market. Post 2017, there was a futures market. And as at 2021, it is now 10x as big as spot (for every $1 traded on spot exchanges, $10 is traded in futures) and the trend sends to be increasing. We are seeing a bigger and bigger paper market. And this makes price suppression a real threat. We know the banks don't like bitcoin. All the bitcoin maxis are like "there's nothing the banks can do to stop bitcoin". I reckon they can. They can use the futures market.

Why are the bankers suppressing silver when they could let it surge and join us to the moon?

Unsure, hence the question. I do know the banksters are ruthless and they've done it before with silver which has been suppressed for many decades (and still is). But silvers paper market is many multiples the nonpaper market (more than 100x). If bitcoins futures market gets bigger relative to spot market, then perhaps it could suffer the same fate. Hoping it doesn't get to that stage though.

Prior to 2017, there was no futures market for Bitcoin and all trades were 100% spot.

Now, futures volume for Bitcoin is up to 10x the spot volume.

The silver market is also notorious for having a large futures/paper market compared to physical and is likely one of the reasons why silver prices are able to be suppressed.

Is Bitcoin going to suffer the same fate as silver, with future prices being suppressed? Will Bitcoin-futures-backed-ETFs be the nail in the coffin?

Thoughts? Keen to hear any arguments against this view.

Truth is, I don't know the answers to these questions. In fact, I don't even have a definitive view as to whether PoS or PoW is the best solution. Most people seem to hold the view that PoW works, but quite a lot of people seem to think PoS won't work. I'm just not convinced about ruling out the possibility of PoS.

ranochigo and a few others on this thread have made some good points. And I agree with them. The more I think about it, the more problems (and merits) I see for both. I just haven't seen a convincing case why PoW is the very much superior to PoS.

Based on the calculations in the article, the cost required for a PoS attack is 4x the cost of PoW attack. While there may be some miscellaneous costs that the article ignores, it seems unlikely to change the conclusion given the magnitude of the difference in cost (4x).

Putting cost aside, you're right that we also have to consider whether a PoW attacker can acquire the necessary ASICs. If we assume the attacker is a wealthy person who currently has no ASICs, then yes it is very difficult to acquire 51% of the mining power. Just like how you mentioned exchange centralization (as a potential threat to PoS security), so too is miner centralization. It only takes a few mining pools to have enough mining power to attack the network.

@ranochigo

Once the PoW attacker has set up their mining rigs, he/she is a few keystrokes away from the 51% attack. The hard part is setting up the rigs.
Sure there's a bunch of electricity that needs to be expended. But the cost of rigs + electricity is less than 51% of capital under PoS.

The question then is why are attackers not incentivised to attack PoW? Some possible reasons:
1) Requires ongoing electricity to maintain.
2) Overall cost is too big
3) Even if attack is successful, the attacker stands to lose everything (including said cost in point 2) and underlying coins going to 0.
4) They can't be bothered setting up the mining rigs.

Well let's comment on each one:
1) and 2) Yes but overall cost is less than under PoS. I linked an article which proves this and you didn't seem to disagree with the said figures
3) This argument also applies to PoS
4) This is true but if someone was to attempt a task as big as trying to hack the biggest network of all time, surely setting up the mining rigs is not an impossible task.

Based on this, my conclusion was if you think PoW is infeasible to attack, then you should also think PoS is infeasible to attack. Unless you think the major deterrent is the setting up of mining rigs.

Thoughts?

These tools are not out of their control though. They can still sanction countries and print money all they want because just like how Bitcoin can't be banned and will always be around, so will fiat. And governments know this. Because fiat can act as a last resort mechanism. And Bitcoin can't. So fiat is not going away and governments are not afraid of Bitcoin threatening their tools. Government don't want to buy in because they don't see how it's better than gold for reserves. They don't need to transport their reserves very often and they don't need a censorship resistent currency because they're the ones doing the censoring.

I don't think this is necessarily the case.

I guess it depends on which government.
- China government: yes you're probably right.
- US government: I don't completely agree. I don't think its control/decentralised nature of bitcoin that they're concerned about. I think they just don't really see the benefit of getting involved (see below).

Agreed that it makes more sense for Bitcoin to complement fiat rather than substitute it, because fiat system has a last-resort mechanism (money-printing) for catastrophic situations and a Bitcoin standard doesn't. Having the option for a last-resort system is better than not having the option because it can act like insurance when needed (even though it can also lead to some mis-allocation and benefits some at the expense of others).

So if we think that there are merits to a fiat system and it makes sense for fiat system to sit alongside Bitcoin, then the next question is does it make sense for governments to hold Bitcoin as reserves? Are there sufficient advantages to holding Bitcoin that make it better than gold from the government's perspective? Personally I don't think so. A few reasons:
- Government gold reserves are just sitting there. There's no need to transport or transfer much. So Bitcoin's advantage of being easy to transfer/transport is irrelevant.
- Government holding a single private key which gives access to their entire reserves is a bit laughable.

Keen to hear any opposing perspectives though.

Governments have copped a lot of flack ever since the start of the pandemic, with gasps and finger-pointing as they printed trillions of stimulus.

Is the idea of money-printing by centralized authority bad? When does it make sense to have a centralized leadership and when doesn't it? And more importantly, if the world was on a bitcoin standard when the pandemic started, what could have been done better? These are some of the questions I want to discuss.

The argument against money-printing is that it can lead to monetary mismanagement and currency debasement, both of which are bad for the general public. However, if we are faced with an emergency (such as global pandemic), what's the alternative? Let the markets sort it out? Let the general public decide how fiscal spending should be allocated? Allow the general public to decide and vote on outcomes via a Decentralised Autonomous Government? Give power back to the individuals and hope they can decide what's best in the midst of all the chaos? I just don't see how that's any better to be honest.

Sometimes there are merits to centralized control. For example, what would happen if Tesla was a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation and didn't have a central authority? Would the general public be able to create self-driving electric cars with their token votes? That just seems ridiculous.

Unpopular opinion, but I think the same applies to government. Yes, there are some shady people there (with their own incentives), but again what's the alternative? Under a bitcoin standard, you can argue that incentives are more aligned to general public. Ok so what does that mean? Well, we allow markets to crash and let markets do their thing and things will naturally sort themselves out. We have more wild swings in the cycle. Is this better than the current system which artificially smooths things out? It's hard to say. It's sort of like home insurance. Most of the time you pay premiums and nothing happens to your house, but when your house collapses, then with insurance you're got a safety net. But over time, the insurance premiums will eat away at your savings.

Yeah that's my point - I believe billionaires have been buying bitcoin for years. A high percentage of the elite already own bitcoin. And a lot of the middle class and accumularing too. When majority of the lower class eventually start to accumulate, the people who bought early such as the elite are going to see outsized returns compared to the lower class. This increases wealth inequality.

Note: I refer to the groups in aggregate ("elite", "middle class", "lower class") so illustrate my point. Obviously someone from lower class can purchase in 2009 and bought before someone from upper class. But my point is when we look at the groups in aggregate, the "elite" already know the current finanncial system well and are more likely to know and understand bitcoin before the lower class (again I'm talking about in aggreagate).

Note2: Title of thread is incorrect. Should read "Does Bitcoin increase wealth inequality"

Due to Bitcoin's supply issuance schedule, it's fair to say that those who buy bitcoin early achieve (exponentially) outsized gains.

Based on what we've seen so far, adoption looks something like: cryptographers -> early adopters -> suits/elite -> the masses

Given that the exponential nature of adoption and returns, doesn't Bitcoin further increase income equality? So that the elite are even richer than the everyone else?

To be a bit more specific, what I'm envisaging is the new world to include three groups of people, the elite (aka "the 1%" of the old world), the early adopters (aka "the 1%" of the new world) and the masses (the remaining 98% of people).

Before bitcoin maybe top 2% of people owned 80% of the wealth. But after bitcoin, perhaps top 2% would own 95% of the wealth (approx only to illustrate point).   

Thoughts?

Most of the responses in this thread seem to boil down to "that's how it was from the start, so that's how it should be". I'm keen to understand why it was like this from the start. Did Satoshi (and other developers) not consider the impacts of lost coins and population growth? Did they feel that we should incentivise saving more than investment? Did they feel that this current approach doesn't incentivise saving more than investment? Has there been any meaningful discussion about the implications of the various options apart from "this is just the way it is"?