[gobip]

Yes, thank you for your comment. Altcoins are terrible, NFTs are terrible, it was all a trend and I'm glad it's gone now. Bitcoin is different, always has been, always will be. Bitcoin is the digital gold. In my opinion it's not a currency and will not function like a currency but rather like gold. You don't buy your latte with gold, but you own gold stocks. Same thing with Bitcoin.

It's the safest, oldest, most tested blockchain out there. You can't beat that.

[mindslight]

I personally see Bitcoin itself falling apart because it lacks the critical ecash property of untraceability, meaning it is the original non-fungible token. Regardless of how many honest verifiers are following the protocol, it's always possible to build a parallel system that judges which transactions/flows are legitimate or not according to completely different criteria - eg AML. This is happening slowly from both the bottom and the top - from the cryptocurrency industry with "blockchain analysis" and from the incumbent financial system with slowly creeping KYC rules. Right now you can still squint, use a mixer, and perhaps a less regulated exchange - just as ten years ago many people blissfully thought the whole thing was "anonymous". But the writing is on the wall. As soon as the more regulated exchanges start routinely rejecting transactions based on the source wallets' provenance, anything that's touched those wallets will become less desirable. Everyone will be drawn to the attractor of heeding the augmented rulesets to make sure they're not receiving tainted coins, and the currency will essentially fork.

[Baeocystin]

Even Etherium? I was impressed they seemed to manage the transition to proof of stake and not blow up the whole thing.

(not a stakeholder myself, so this is only an outside view opinion)

[rspeele]

One problem I see with the store of value idea, in the long run, is that I don't know if BTC's double spend prevention will survive its design.

The point of mining is to prevent double spend attacks. It does this in a rather brute-force way: the network as a whole always maintains a higher hashrate than any attacker. The network always out-spends the attacker to maintain security. As described in my prior comment the funding for this massive hashrate comes from newly generated BTC.

But Bitcoin is designed to wean itself off of emitting new coins as a mining reward. This is done by halving the block reward arbitrarily every 4 years. This is necessary to fulfill the promise that there will only ever be 21M coins, which has been a huge selling point to anti-inflation investors.

Ultimately the mining is supposed to be funded entirely by fees. But there is no market mechanism to ensure that fees "make up for" the lost emissions of new coins. The only reason to pay a high transaction fee is if there is high transaction volume, causing blocks to fill up, so you are competing for space with other people trying to make transactions. If transaction volume is fairly low, fees remain low. You can see fees only become a meaningful part of the reward at times of unusually high volume[0].

So, it seems plausible to me that if Bitcoin mining was funded entirely on transaction fees, the total mining reward would not be high enough to sustain enough hashrate to be impervious to 51% by a powerful attacker. That's especially true if most users are holding onto BTC as a store of value not attempting to transact in it. As far as I know, there is no successful cryptocurrency that functions using fees alone. Bitcoin is in a very slow march towards being the first to do that.

Basically the network is currently funded with a "tax" on holders of BTC -- newly generated coins dilute the value of held coins. This to me makes a lot of sense for a store-of-value. But the coin is trying to transition to funding security with a "tax" on users of BTC. Nobody really knows whether this will work. In fact nobody knows how much is the "correct" amount for the network to spend on mining at all. All we know is that with the current level of spending we haven't had a 51% attack yet. Are we spending 2x more than needed? 10x? 100x? It's impossible to say but the design of BTC seems like a slowwwww experiment to find the level at which it fails.

[0]https://charts.bitbo.io/fees-percent-of-reward/

[rspeele]

An obvious argument against this: so far we haven't seen a problem at all with halvings. The network's hashrate continues to rise.

BUT - that is only due to the increase in purchasing power of BTC. At the last halving in May 2020, BTC was trading at 8-9K, so at its current value of 28K "half" the BTC is still worth MORE. In real terms the block reward has gone up, not down. And so has the hashrate.

A BTC maximalist might say that the price increases because of the halving and this will continue for all future halvings, making the real-world value of the block reward approximately consistent over the next few decades. I doubt it, because each halving should have less and less impact on the price. There are millions of BTC already mined and actively trading so is the price really going to double when we go from making 900 new ones per day to 450 new ones per day? And down the road, from 450 new ones to 225? And so on? Eventually the newly mined BTC are such a drop in the bucket compared to the already-mined ones being traded, that a reduction in emission cannot have much impact on price. I don't believe the theory that the halving was responsible for the last pump either. I think it's more the market conditions during the pandemic that encouraged speculation.

But just for fun let's pretend that this does happen. The price doubles (give or take) after each halving to maintain the real world value of the block reward. In that case it could theoretically work all the way up until the very last halving takes the reward to 0. Because the fees people are willing to pay are still going to be on the level of "a piece of candy" for a transaction. Whatever that translates to in BTC. Scaling up the real-world value of BTC works for magnifying the block reward which is denominated in a fixed amount of BTC, but not for magnifying the fees which are just a bidding war and not fixed value.

And really, it would fail a bit before then because long before the final halving, you already have ultra-low rewards denominated in Satoshi. You couldn't scale Bitcoin's real world value enough to make those one or two digit SAT rewards mean anything, without also making it totally unusable for ordinary transactions!

[ouiouibaguette]

Exchanges and whales manipulate Bitcoin's price regularly through spoofing and wash trading to build up illusions of optimism/"bullishness" and then sell off suddenly to profit off the rubes who bought into the hype.

Also - how much actual real-world money backs a USDT? When Tether comes undone and people realize there is only a suitcase of IOUs, there is going to be a run for the exits and BTC will sell at a huge discount.

Real world commodities don't have that problem.