Monkeytrots: " Bitcoin mining is already a NEGATIVE ROI - and the Chinese completely control 'the mining'.
WITHOUT MINING - the 'blockchain' (ie. the distributed ledger) ceases to function - and the 'crypto' is defacto worthless, unusable, untradeable, unconvertable, unredeemable - not to anything - not to another crypto, not into any country's currency."
I'd like you to make the logical/factual CASE for ANY of those assertions. Maybe you can. Maybe you can't. I dare you to try, in the interest of everyones' edification and thinking.
I am not the world's expert on "bitcoin". But I remember when I could have picked up the "fad" for $8 each; and I was swayed by approximiately your current arguments to DO NOTHING.
Getting to the end of the "mining" phase in BitCoin doesn't appear -- in reality nor in theory -- to be any real problem. It is comparable to having only a limited amount of gold in the world, or oil, market scarcity just keeps driving scarcity, AND VALUATION, higher.
It is pretty well established, in general, who -- in general -- are The Whales in Bitcoin. And it isn't the Chinese, not by a long shot. It is the original people who got in at $8 each or less. And, increasingly, other speculators coming in with actual green-paper-trash (which is heading to zero at breakneck speed, AND 100% ASSURANCE, if you havne't noticed). Those ladder used toilet-paper-holders, especially those on government-delimited pensions, who are the fools -- I among them.
And bitcoin IS divisible. Infinitely divisible, I believe? So that is no problem.
Now, the function of bitcoin has always been, to my mind, its weak link. But it does have a function: it permits near instant transmission of huge wealth transfers around the world with cost benefits, speed beneifts, and freedom from Sanctions and Tracking which makes "SWIFT" look like the corrupt, dead-dog it is.
In other words: There IS a use-case of great value for something like BitCoin...put aside your programming and preconceptions and recognize that. There is a technology. There is a use case. And there IS a positive valuation for ANY technology which can do something better than the competition. That last point is just LOGIC; even as there is still lots of speculation of what the valuation should be (as there is with NVIDIA stock, or any other stock).
What is more questionable is whether something like Bitcoin is actually "money". I would say it currently is not really money. It passes Gresham's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law). But it fails in general adoption for ordinary transactions.
Look. I am not a bitcoin defender. Nor adopter. but I still think something like my U$B could substantially collapse the utility of BitCoin, and potentially save The_Biggest_Debtor_Nation_In_The_History_Of_The_World. almost overnight.
But at somepoint it behooves us to read our Twelve Steps again and stop lying and conniving ourselves. Paper dollars are trash and I have far LESS intrinsic basis than the much maligned Bitcoin. Yeah Bitcoin is SCARY to us chickens. And we weren't so clever as we thought. But the headman IS coming with his ax real soon now, and we might want to reassess how much we are willing to lose by sticking with our FEARS and ossified clucking.
P.S. The term "Conservative", like "Liberal, is badly polluted. Liberal now means "hates liberty". Conservatives ought to opt out for Less Government and maybe Libertarian and more common sense. Just sayin'.
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