I said there is no evidence that I knew of that Trump has purchased Bitcoin. You have never provided any evidence, but kept saying I was saying something wrong, which is just... strange. Its almost like you don't want to have a discussion about Bitcoin but rather want to vent your anger on something.

I have never said nor implied Trump is trying to manipulate the price of Bitcoin.

Then why reply? Sure seems like a sign the issue is topical if there's a reply.

And I agree threads shouldn't go off topic for very long (say arguing about what is and is not off-topic on a thread for instance [recursion alert... stack overflow imminent]). But sometimes an aside is necessary for the conversation.



¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Really? Can you give us a link showing us the evidence that Trump has purchased Bitcoin? I could be wrong, but afaik, I don't think he has.


You asserted this, not me.


Never asserted any such thing...


There is no evidence that Trump has bought Bitcoin. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Okay, I got a little un-lazy here for a second so I could do a I-told-you-so post here:

Trump to buy Bakkt, a crypto exchange

Article on future US president competing with Bitcoin & crypto

Trump will compete directly with Bitcoin




Always a sign I won the argument when I reduce the responder to spitting out a mindless hysterical rant laced with expletives .


No, I predict Trump's behavior the same way anybody would predict anybody's behavior: by looking at their past behavior.


There's no evidence he did, but why on earth would he buy Bitcoin when he can make far more money simply making up his own coin for free and then using the power of the US presidency to pump his own coin at the expense of Bitcoin? Trump would never be able to buy very much of Bitcoin whereas he would own almost all of his own coin.

American First! And, unfortunately, Bitcoin is an evil woke "globalist" thing, whereas Trump's coin is "MADE IN THE USA"! I don't pretend to know what Trump is going to do, but this seems like the easiest possible way he could make himself the richest man in the world, e.g. by minting his own coin and tweaking the laws/regulations to make sure his replaces Bitcoin in terms of market share (he could do this merely by making a few statements, then leaning on the SEC/etc. to threaten new regs for Bitcoin [and not for Trump's coin]).

We're getting off the subject of El Salvador here, but there are a lot of parallels here in that in both cases it's the Bitcoin price level depending on the whims of political leaders supporting it's price.

It's just a crazy state of the world, that's all. Bitcoin started off as a means of thwarting government control over transactions, and now it's a football in US politics that will live and die by whatever political winds are blowing here.

You are probably right, technically speaking. But I assumed my statement about many (most?) people's sentiments about Bitcoin being a hedge against government control was not a controversial one. I don't think I would need to look at too many posts here, or Bitcoin ads from brokers, or stories in the media, or just average investors to see this sentiment repeated. I would go so far to say that "anti-government" is the biggest component of Bitcoin's brand.

But you are right, I didn't get specific. Too lazy I guess. The point is withdrawn.



Uh, if these forums are any indication of the broader sentiment--and the money that flowed into Trump from the crypto universe would support that--it would appear that "BITCOIN=TRUMP" now to any average American.

I agree you cannot and should not trust Trump--and I very specifically warned people about this before the election--but human beings tend to be... short-sighted and greedy. All anybody seemed to care about is Trump pumping the price of Bitcoin past $100k. Nothing else mattered.

Now Trump could turn off Bitcoin's price like a light switch because so much is riding on his personal whims. And Trump's extremely well-documented history is to be 100% self-dealing: in other words, he only does things that benefits himself personally. This is unlike any other US president in history: other presidents have done some self-dealing things here and there (although very little by world standards), but Trump is the first one to completely prioritize his own personal finance over absolutely everything.

But "the Trump pump is real!!!" they said, and nothing else mattered .

Frankly, if I were holding a lot of Bitcoin right now, I'd dump the whole lot. It might still go up some, but the downside danger here is pretty extreme. Trump changing his mind could send the price down 90% or more.



That is very sensible. So your assertion is not that Bitcoin is perfect, but that every other digital currency on the planet is "shit". Okay, I think I understand your position better now.


Insofar as they are taking compelled taxpayer funds and using them to do something for Bitcoin or some other product, that is... promoting the product.

Clearly if the leadership of El Salvador thought as you think, they would not be doing what they are doing. Quite the opposite since them letting another currency into the picture is such a bearish factor for Bitcoin.

I agree, but every day here in these forums there's at least a hundred posts that insist that "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by any government" LOL.


Yes, maxis gonna maxi . Bitcoin is only imaginable asset than any human being should invest in right now. You're not saying that because your entire net worth is based on your Bitcoin holdings of course .


I didn't mean to ascribe any of these sentiments directly to your actual person--if I gave that impression that was a mistake on my part. Clearly the broader community has gotten into bed with the US government now, but that's not an individual judgement.
 

Wait, WHAT??

You said that investing in anything else besides Bitcoin is stupid. It's "shit" as you keep calling it, over and over and over again. Why, believing what you say you believe, would you invest in any other instrument besides Bitcoin?

Are you trying to tell me that there's some kind of remote chance that Bitcoin might... not pay off as an investment? How... UNmaxi of you .

Next you'll be telling me that maybe, just maybe there's an actual valid reason why El Salvador might look at other digital currencies besides Bitcoin... We're through the looking glass now, so why not? 

Yes.. leaders of governments have been elected by the people and they have discretion regarding how to spend public (tax payer) money, [...]

[/quote]

LOL, so is that what you are going to say when popular sentiment around Bitcoin turns negative, and governments outlaw Bitcoin instead, and send the price down 95%?

You live and die by what governments do now. So much for Bitcoin being some kind of hedge against government control. Now the price is dictated by the US president, which is control you handed to them voluntarily in exchange for pumping your investment portfolio.

Y'all area cheap date .



Inventing "some kind of bitcoin plan" is not going to change its basic nature, which is slow and expensive by design.



Individual Bitcoin holders are organizing to support political candidates who promise to use taxpayer money to increase the price of Bitcoin. These are governments who are being bought off with campaign donations.



"Live by the sword, die by the sword" is the old saying. Bitcoiners begged the government to come help them make money, and now everything revolves around what the government does.


Right back at y'all. You are surely a Bitcoin maxi's maxi. Every other product on the planet that is not Bitcoin is "shit". Very impressive consistency, I guess .

El Salvador passed a law forcing the government there to promote Bitcoin using compelled taxpayer money. Today, Bitcoin's price completely revolves around what the US president says about it on any given day. So much for Bitcoin being some kind of hedge against governments .



I agree it has grown, but I think new products are only just starting to take hold. This market is still new, but the direction seems pretty clear to me. When a market leader like Bitcoin actually loses traction against competitors, it's time to wonder why. When you investigate and find those competitors have far superior products in every way--except for the present-day market cap--then the trend seems very likely to continue.

Imagine saying, in about 1986, that General Motors will always be the biggest company in the world because... they are the biggest company in the world. The biggest one always always stays the biggest, they said.

Well, that's not always the case. Perhaps this is why Bitcoiners are now trying to get governments to use force and compel citizens to stop using other products--because they are losing in the free market.

(That said, what most Bitcoiners missed about the 2024 US elections is that the major donors, under the guise of "Bitcoin", were actually brokers and non-Bitcoin makers who have a financial interest in hawking their own products over Bitcoin: the actually Bitcoin community just get conned, I think ).


You see, your only interest--which is the same as most current owners of Bitcoin--is that Bitcoin goes up in price so you are richer. That is very natural. Hence the only thing you are concerned about is more rich people buying more of the asset you hold. But this is a very narrow focus, I think.  Imagine shareholders of a public company telling the CEO, "just get the stock price up right now and ignore everything else". That will work great... until it doesn't.

In the long run, the winner of the digital currency wars will be the product(s) with the most individual users. There's no way that ends up being Bitcoin since it simply doesn't scale.

El Salvador passed a law in their country basically forcing Bitcoin down people's throats and yet they still aren't adopting it. What more do you want?

Bitcoin is not going to increase in the number of users, it will decrease. Maybe richer people will buy up more of it and make the price go up, and maybe more governments* will help prop up the price, but there will be fewer and fewer individuals in the future actually holding Bitcoin because there are far better products out there now. Bitcoin is too slow and too expensive to be used for mainstream transactions by ordinary people.

(*And the irony that Bitcoin needs government help to support it's price now is pretty intense  ).

But why is that unfair? Every citizen gets the same exact amount of voting power. If they truly don't know about, or don't care about any of the issues or candidates of previous elections, then why should they be forced to give up their right as a citizen to participate?

All that said, the aspect of this idea wherein voting tokens rollover to the next election is an implementation detail, and the idea still works if for each ballot every voter could simply vote their allotted points on a single ballot.


Each individual would be allotted (say) 1000 voting tokens per year. So it would take 1000 years to do that.

Buying votes is illegal now (if Harris had won, Musk probably would have been prosecuted for what he did in the election for instance), and it would be illegal in this system too, so an individual could not sell their voting tokens to anybody else for instance.

And another straightforward limitation would be to put a cap on the number of tokens a citizen could spend on a single ballot, e.g. 2000 (two years worth) of tokens.

I really don't. Every voter would have the same budget of votes. So yes, a voter might spend all of his votes on a "buddy", but that's their right as a citizen. All of what you are talking about here occurs in today's elections where people are forced to vote on every decision--it's called campaigning. It's not different if the candidate goes to neighborhoods to gather votes in the current system.

And perhaps you missed this nuance in my description, but I am talking about every voter getting the same amount of voting power--so it is in no way connected to how much money a voter has or doesn't have.

(By the way, is there some reason you have to be so extremely nasty and personal in every reply? This is the "Serious Discussion" forum after all...).

No, can you explain? What is wrong some citizens voting on one race, and other citizens voting on another one that they care about more?

Every citizen would still have the same exact voting power, so there would be no change in the power dynamic. This would just allow people to express their vote only on what they know about or care about.

Obviously people could use this system to vote exactly as they do now, equally spreading votes across all races for instance. But there would be no more "wasted votes" in this paradigm like there is now.

Yes, voters could be strategic about their votes, perhaps saving them for a certain election or candidate--but that's the whole point. If they did that, they would have no votes on anything else. In other words, the winner of the election is the candidate (or decision) that enough people deeply cared about that they sacrificed many other things they care about less.

It's also important to understand the downsides of today's elections, wherein our complex society gives voters an impossible number of options that no individual who had a daily job would ever keep track of. In today's society, probably 50% of people's votes are almost entirely uninformed--and probably 90% if you count party-line voting where people know nothing about the specific candidate. This gives enormous power to parties, and also makes money much more decisive.

For instance, take an election for the local water commissioner. Hardly any citizen would know this person's name, or know what they did. But a small constituency would know, and would know what is at stake for this position, e.g. the industrial use of the local water supply, pollution controls, etc.

In the current system, large monied interests could easy buy this election, because they could flood the airwaves with soundbite advertisements that skipped over any of the technical details of the decision (e.g. they could tar the opposing candidate with smears, or just insist that their candidate was for "better water" without any explanation).

In the tokenized election scenario, most citizens would not vote on this subject at all since they would have absolutely no idea what to vote on. However, a small number of citizens (and not industrial concerns or not outside money) would probably know a lot about the issues of this specific decision, and would vote on it accordingly. Yes, some citizens could be in line with the industrial concern, but there would likely be others who would be alive to the risks and vote against them. But the election in this case would be decided by a relatively small number of citizens which correctly mirrors the knowledge levels for once.

In this new system, the mantra is, "only vote on what you know, and don't waste your vote on something you don't".

Yep, they do.

Suffice it to say that your experience is... unusual. Most credit card transactions take less than a few seconds for instance.



I have no problem with an L2--heck, I built the fastest one in the world--but an L2 is not Bitcoin. Your interaction is entirely with the L2, and whether the backing investment is Bitcoin, USD, or some mix of stocks or whatever, the actual technology you are using has nothing directly to do with Bitcoin.

Indeed, when people ask me whether Bitcoin will survive against competition in the long run, I use L2s as an example of why it will not survive because it's basically just a different currency pretending it's got something to do with Bitcoin.




Nobody forgot the contributions of IBM Mainframes either, and in fact they are still in use today. Early adopters of those systems did really well because they were on the forefront of the computer revolution and then the internet revolution. Bitcoin will always be remembered in El Salvador as the catalyst to get them a more advanced financial system.

My original point was that El Salvador's latest move embracing Tether, when they have previously been so focused on Bitcoin, is a sign that they are looking for other solutions that Bitcoin cannot address, even though Bitcoin is literally written into the law there. And insofar as El Salvador is looking past Bitcoin and instead to a competitor, this is a negative development for Bitcoin.

I think this is a very defensible point, and given that the only response has been... personal attacks, I would say that the point has held up quite well.

As I said (three times now), I am not talking about changing the systems themselves, but rather how democracy works. This is a side-forum here where serious academic subjects like this are discussed, so I thought it would be appropriate.

If you aren't interested in this subject, that's fine. Maybe others are...

@JayJuanGee -- You are really losing it, dude. You need to calm down.

All I am saying is that El Salvador looking at non-Bitcoin currencies, and thus breaking Bitcoin's monopoly there, is an indication that Bitcoin doesn't do everything El Salvador needs, which is a clear, concrete indicator that non-Bitcoin currencies have a place in the world, and thus they are not "shit" as you keep calling them.

And insofar as Bitcoin has competitors that are not "shit", that means... Bitcoin has competitors--and serious ones.

Some people love Bitcoin so so much that the very idea of there being another non-Bitcoin currency in the world makes them go ballistic. People here on the forums call those people, "Bitcoin maximalists" or, "Bitcoin maxis" for short. I get loving Bitcoin, but... this seems a bit narrow in thinking to me.

Apparently it's narrow thinking to the government leadership in El Salvador, too.

Do you have any links to these threads? I looked and found nothing at all like this specific topic, only the technical mechanics of voting itself, which is not what I am talking about.

To be clear, what I am talking about doesn't necessarily need to be done with a digital currency system at all, it could just be a central government-run database, too.

Huh? Like saying Toyota doesn't need Nissan to be successful. That makes no sense.


Do you have evidence of these assertions, or are you just trying to say that what I am saying makes you angry somehow?



Of course Bitcoin has increased in price, and it might increase further. There are many factors that drive an instrument's price. IBM mainframes are still sold today and they still sell for a lot of money, for instance.


Can you please give us a link that demonstrates how the Bitcoin network has significantly changed for its users in, say, the last 12 months?


Fascinating. Can you give us a specific example of a "fiat institution"? Like one with an address and a website, and not just a vague "them"?

There are all kinds of ways to transact onchain bitcoin and through second or third layers, so sure some of the details are still being worked out, including that bitcoin is not about buying coffee.
[/quote]

L2s are not Bitcoin. L2s are what you Bitcoin maxis would call a "shitcoin" because it's not... Bitcoin, and you call anything that isn't Bitcoin a "shitcoin".



Absolutely. But 99.99% of the world's daily transactions are not $1000 or even $100.


Interesting idea. What centralized, non-Bitcoin system would you use to make these transactions?


I never said they were. I only said that their moving to other products--and breaking Bitcoin's monopoly--is a bad long-term sign for Bitcoin. That doesn't mean anything will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, or that Bitcoin's price will crash in the next year, or even anything, since there are a lot of factors in any product's success in the market. But El Salvador bring in other non-Bitcoin currencies is not a positive development for Bitcoin. There might be other factors that overcome this one, but that factor itself is negative.

You really don't need to be so hysterical...

Yes, it's good business. Better business than them trying to foist Bitcoin transactions on their citizens, which are extremely expensive and extremely slow.




L2 BTC (esp, lighting) is about all people use at the street and vendor level (e.g., Walmart) use because it works so well.  Of course people who don't want the exposure to Bitcoin's voletility can and do use Tether.  Personal choice which nobody has a problem with...and a good illustration of why some people get rich (e.g., Bitcoiners) and others not so much (e.g., Shitcoiners).

[/quote]

So you don't have a "problem" with other people's choices, but you still call them "shit". Fascinating.



The thing you are buying is some currency that isn't Bitcoin. It has none of the purported benefits of Bitcoin. It's no different than buying a Bitcoin ETF, which is no different than buying any other stock on the NYSE. This is as far from the original concept of Bitcoin as one can get.


I'm not here to defend Tether--I really don't know much about them. All I know is that El Salvador has learned they cannot solve their needs with Bitcoin and is looking at alternatives--and such a thing is a bad sign for Bitcoin.


You really need to pick a lane here. On one hand you "have no problem" with somebody using something besides Bitcoin (so you are not a "Bitcoin maxi"), but on the other hand you deride everything that is not Bitcoin as a "shitcoin" (so you ARE a "Bitcoin maxi"). I hope you can see why it's hard to have a conversation this way .



Um... Tether is not Bitcoin. It is a completely different network, and like most non-Bitcoin currencies it is defacto centralized.



Yes, Bitcoin is not getting "weaker" anymore than a 1987 IBM mainframe is any "weaker" than it was the day it was purchased.

And Bitcoin hasn't changed for years, and there are no plans to do so, nor does anybody want it to change. What are you talking about?



What are "fiat institutions"? Why would any financial institution especially care about what mechanism they use to transfer value?


Yes, people need to "get used to" transactions taking up to 30 minutes to transact, and cost up to $30.

In my opinion, nobody is going to "get used to" that. Bitcoin is absolutely inappropriate for 99.99% of the world's transactions.



El Salvador has admitted that Bitcoin can't handle it's needs, so it is starting to use alternatives. This is a bad sign for the future of Bitcoin. There is no sugar-coating this.


It's not anybody's dream, it's just fact. I don't see why it's even up to debate.


Going cashless doesn't necessarily mean being non-private (although using Bitcoin makes you trackable, but that's another subject).

And physical cash is controlled and tracked in all kinds of ways, and has been for decades, so I'm really not seeing what the point is here...