> but ran companies that were just casinos and actually could have simpler operations without the crypto parts

But during the big buzz, the crypto parts were what got those companies any exposure at all.

> but ran companies that were just casinos and actually could have simpler operations without the crypto parts

Creating a product for the sake of using a technology is a flawed order of operations. However, the glitz and glamour of a new money for a new internet is enticing with a lot of promise. I'm a crypto bro, but my crypto confidence has waned recently. My confidence in the USD has also waned.

Improving or standardizing the approach is all well and good, but if it's not natively integrated into MEW / MM / Coinbase Wallet / Phantom it's sort of irrelevant. Argent was the best attempt but they failed so bad commercially that they pivoted to a google drive recovery mechanism and changed their name.

> "Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.

This seems orthogonal to the ability to seize assets.

There are plenty of legends of old wallets "waking up" due to the person getting out of prison, as it seems the only plausible way someone can sit on 30 BTC for 10-15 years, through all the news and price movements, without touching it once. One would only expect to hear about the successful seizures law enforcement makes.

Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.

Agree. Bitcoin is more of a social concept / weighted democracy than an algorithm. If the participants decide that a new / incompatible hashing algo is needed (e.g. post quantum), it will be forked and everyone will use that.

The odd part is, the governance model is not defined. At the end of the day, some person or group has to decide what the new "real" Bitcoin is and the average holder just has to go along with it.

I think for most bitcoin users, the main usability concern wrt forks is being on the most secure chain; i.e. hashpower. If you're willing to trade being on the most secure, most historic chain for specific technical features then you're probably on an altchain already. In practice every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker, meanwhile the users are never organized enough to do anything but follow that decision.

It's nice when I do it. Not so nice when everyone else does it. If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket? Any investment has to beat deflation. Why hire people? In fact maybe I should fire everyone to hold on to more capital and spend as little as possible...

The point of money is not to reward delayed gratification. The point of money is to efficiently tabulate human preferences, and deflation directly counteracts this by introducing potentially unbounded latency at every step. That's why it destroys economies, as it has throughout history.

> Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.

The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.

> For most of human history the money was stable

Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.

I think deflation-based economy could produce some interesting capital-allocation environemnt. Investment offering a 2% real return becomes unattractive if cash itself earns 2% real purchasing-power yearly. You could argue this raises the hurdle rate for investment and eliminates low-quality projects. And the counterargument is exactly the same: it raises the hurdle rate for investment and therefore some potentially good projects would never receive funding. And thats probably where the intellectually interesting argument really lives, rather than in inflation good deflation bad

The right thing would be to have 0 change in the value of money as long as the right amount of money exists.

The right maount of money is the amount of money we as normal humans need to work with (buying and selling stuff).

Inflation and deflation are results of too much money or too little money in comparision to the production capability of a society.

If i save today for my retirement and money gets less valuable when i'm retired, i have to give more 'saved' capacity back to get the real capacity (people taking care of me) and if i have more value, the others have to do more for me.

Controlling this is 'work' from experts and is not solved by bitcoin btw.

Why does everyone assume that we're the ones keeping money under the mattress, not the ones who would have been paid by money otherwise not spent? All transactions have two sides, no?

> Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.

"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.

> For most of human history the money was stable.

[citation needed]

The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.

If you have a brilliant technical solution that requires throwing out all conventional economics, you don't have a brilliant technical solution. Bitcoin is rotten to its core and every excuse you make for it proves the point.

>For most of human history the money was stable.

Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.

That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)

Historically, as far as I am aware, there was never a situation when deflation coincided with good things happening.

A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.

Hahahaha, oh my. You think the world was some idyll halcyon pre bretton woods? My man Enmentrna is going to come back and declare a jubilee for your great revelation. When has any historic monetary system been “stable” for an appreciable amount of time. Debasement is a very literal ancient word and problem.

Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.

> For most of human history the money was stable.

Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.

However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.

But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).

Well, countries have experienced moderate inflation and moderate deflation, ask the ones who lived through both which one they preferred.

> taking on debt you don't really need.

How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.

Yes, they could change that, too.

However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.

AFAIK it can be changed later.

Only if there has been an outgoing transaction from that account. If the address has only received deposits then only the hash is available.

How does that work?

Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?

The idea of taxing people for not working an hour sounds incredibly dystopian.

I disagree with you in the other thread, so I want to balance that by saying that I strongly agree with you here.

It's identical really. It's just instituting the nationalisation over time of all businesses.

They could accept either I suppose

Well, it is socialist in that the government basically gets to own more of everything you own every year.

and on the other hand we have trillionaires who spend their wealth on fascist party propaganda and censorship

Because our current social safety nets all work by assuming the next generation pays for the care of the current elderly. Those elderly do need 'stuff' they need doctors and nurses and nursing homes. Thus taxes will have to go up, and if it has to, it may as well be progressive.

Do we have an estimate on the number of people capitalism has killed? Serious question.

Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally.

Man I always love the straw men you guys stand up to fight this. More taxes = socialism, and not nordic socialism, no, actually, communism. Therefore mass death / genocide. Ok. Sure jan.

Communism is not socialism. What Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung did was wrong because they did basically the exact opposite of a socialist policy, centralizing power out of workers hands and taking all surplus value into the central government instead of distributing it.

They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority.

Taxes on unrealized gains are good? Are you nuts? No sane country has them, and it is one of the stupidest ideas that NL came up with. Way to squeeze middle class even more.

consensus is easy. its that people want to not pay taxes and still use public infrastructure anyway. thats the real theft.

> Taxes are theft?

Taxing unrealized gains is theft and stupidity.

What do you mean by forced liquidity event?

I mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.

One year yes, and politics wants to change it..