How many furries know what Bitcoin is?

[Miles Marsalis]

I never touted it as such. Again, I only corrected you on your claim that there isn't enough gold to account for all the dollars. That's not my support for gold, as I've explained why it already failed as money. It was just my correcting a bad assumption on your part that ignores that the value of gold per ounce can increase to accommodate the entire dollar economy.

You did, in the beginning, and one has ask why you'd go out of your way to dispute my criticism of the gold standard if you thought the gold standard was unworkable to begin with.

More importantly, your proposal for returning to gold standard has a few flaws, starting with you would need to artificially increase the price of gold in the first place to make it even work since at gold's price per troy ounce currently wouldn't cover the economic activity of the US, much more the world.

It would not be artificial. It would rise in the market naturally as more of it encompasses economic activity. Same as the value of Bitcoin has been naturally rising to encompass more and more economic activity to the detriment of the dollar.

By definition, if the price of per troy gold ounce is currently around $1,500, the total amount of gold mined in existence is 142,000 metric tons, and that equals currently about 7.2 trillion dollars in gold, which is well short of being able to cover all the circulating money and deposits in US since our GDP is 20.9 trillion (which provides a nice starting point for how you'd need to cover), then you either need to massively devalue dollar (which will cause the very crisis you claim to want to prevent) or fix the price of gold higher (which what you're effectively proposing, even if you don't realize it).

To spell out the consequences of this, this would be devastating for the world economy because the higher price of gold would disrupt and possibly destroy the technology industry since gold is a key component in computer circuitry. Component prices would be impossible to meet. To make this personal to you, this would definitely end the Bitcoin industry since it relies entirely on computing technology.

I hope we've settled that I haven't proposed artificially rising the price of gold, that I merely corrected you that the price of gold will rise to encompass the value of the economy on its own, but that I don't support we use gold for this, since, as I explained, gold already failed as money due to its divisibility and portability problem, which necessitated the highly problematic backing. And hopefully we can leave this gold thing behind. It's irrelevant.

I mean, if the government decides to go back to the gold standard, it will be the cause of the price of gold rising immediately. That isn't gold "rising to encompass the value of the economy on its own".

Furthermore, I've repeatedly, as have others here, pointed out issues of the lack of portability and divisbility to you, yet you've ignored those flaws in your nonsensical defense of the gold standard only realize this now.

I thought I addressed this error of yours by explaining paper backing. In the same way that atoms are unusable, even dust specs of gold were unusable. But paper backing solved that issue because backing allows you to write any quantity of something in paper. Just as you can have a paper that is worth roughly $1, where it is backed by 1/2000th of a gram of gold, so too you can have a paper that is backed by a fraction of an atom. Either way the amount being backed is impractical to use, but it still grants you an amount of volume of gold and thus some value.

I didn't make an error and think you don't realize that by having monetary notes based on "subatomic" amounts of gold that are irretrievable and irredeemable, you've inadvertently reinvented ... a fiat currency.

Which you loathe, allegedly.

Unlikely. Every single commodity we use ended up expanding in supply because we ended up with more ways of extracting it. Gold is no different (space, sea, etc). Incidentally, that's another reason gold isn't as good as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is even more limited and will have to go up in value as the economy grows.

Your knowledge of geology is on par with your understanding of economics.

Gold is a finite resource and production has actually plateaued out in recent years.

"Mine production has flat-lined, and is likely on a downward trajectory, but not dramatically so," adds Ross Norman of MetalsDaily.com.

The volume of gold reserves can be calculated more accurately than resources, although this is still not an easy task.
The below-ground stock of gold reserves is currently estimated to be around 50,000 tonnes, according to the US Geological Survey.
To put that in perspective, around 190,000 tonnes of gold has been mined in total, although estimates do vary.
Based on these rough figures, there is about 20% still to be mined. But this is a moving target.

So it is not a good idea to use our slowly dwindling supply to back our monetary systems.

Inflation doesn't do anything other than make labor poorer over time. If the value of what you're earning goes up 3% a year and it's cut by 3%, you're not worse off. More likely there won't be cuts, the value of your income will just go up with deflation, same as you get a 3% raise with inflationary dollars. And that income should go up, since with experience you should be becoming more productive and valuable.

Generally, the Fed targets an annual rate of inflation for the US since a slowly increasing price level keeps businesses profitable and prevents consumers from waiting for lower prices before making purchases. Some inflation in an economy is not a terrible thing.

That never worked, as every recession still ended up with huge unemployment. Worse, this forgets, or just ignores, the issue that during a recession wasteful activity needs to be stopped and resources reallocated. Instead what this policy does is basically create artificial economic activity, done for wasteful reasons, just to keep people employed. Environmentalists should be extremely against this.

Keynesian doesn't necessarily prevent recessions, but it does allow the Fed to help shorten the length of recessions and ensure they don't become protracted depressions. Note than when we were on the gold standard prior to World War II, major depressions were the norm and devastating. After Keynesian economics were embraced and adopted, we've had relatively mild recessions that we've recovered from fairly quickly.

With Keynesian policy, we truncate the amount of time people are unemployed and ease their burden while they are, which is preferably to your approach of just letting depressions play out and allowing people to languish in poverty for years on end. Economic crises require some government intervention, partially because it is untenable to let people suffer like that.

There's no reason for falling income. Incomes are going up with deflation. No reason for an economic contraction either. If a worker is less productive than the pay he's getting, just cut his pay.

I mean, most workers aren't going to like having their pay cut due to deflation caused by the returning to the gold standard and I going to point out that workers having their paychecks cut is forming falling income since you seemed to missed that. I also mentioned before, which you conveniently left out:

When price levels fall because of this policy, paychecks will be cut and workers will be in a bind. Falling income also means that other workers will simply have to be fired, reducing total output and enhancing the economic contraction. (This is a good time to remind you that by maintaining a slow and steady rate of inflation, a central bank can keep unemployment down and ensure nominal wage growth even during a recession. Real wages might take a slight hit, but there is generally less labor unrest.)

 

[Miles Marsalis]

Hoarding cash is called savings. Savings is never a downside. You want people to be wealthier? Then why do you propose a policy that makes them have less savings? So you want people well off or constantly working for lower and lower wages?

Stating the obvious, if people are excessively hoarding cash during an economic crisis, in this case a deflationary crisis since that is what we're talking about, then there will be a shortage of money circulating in the economy, which will worsen the crisis and prolong it.

That is a far cry from people accruing savings in the banking system within a stable economy.

So this little disingenuous gem ...

People having hoards of cash is disastrous. People not having enough of a cash hoard to afford a $400 emergency expense is a good thing then?
I don't get the cognitive dissonance that this crazy economic school teaches...

... is a canard.

We've had five depressions (that I can think of) on the fiat currency already, so it hasn't helped.

When were these supposed depressions? List them out, because we haven't had a depression since the Great Depression and we only adopted Keynesian policy after World War II (despite your claims).

I do. That's why I never proposed we go back on the gold standard and advocate Bitcoin as a better alternative.

Well ...

This is dumb and you with your econ degree should know better. You know that the value of everything is relative. If we went to the gold standard, the value of gold will simply rise to meet demand. I heard the claim that "Bitcoin can't replace the dollar because there are only 21 million bitcoins for everyone" too, but Bitcoin is very divisible, and so is gold.

And ...

Seriously, why are you not able to wrap your head around this? "Assuming a price of $50,000 per kilogram, corresponding to around $1550 per troy ounce," what will happen is that as dollars are bought up to back the new US dollar gold reserve currency, that $1550 per troy ounce will climb to $2000, $20,000, $200,000, and up, to whatever value an ounce of gold would have to be to cover the entire worth of all the dollars. If there were only 50 ounces of gold in the entire world, and all of the US dollars in circulation were worth $200 trillion, that would just mean that each ounce of gold would end up being worth $4 trillion. The price of gold isn't fixed, value is relative to something else. True, it wouldn't be possible to just take the current worthless paper and claim it's backed by gold. The treasury would have to release new paper that corresponds to a fixed amount of gold, likely a tiny fraction of an ounce. But as the treasury keeps buying up gold to issue more and more of these new gold backed dollars, the value of that gold will simply go up, to the point that it can encompass the value of the entire us dollar base, with the value of gold backed dollars going up as well. Which is fine, since we can just use dollars that represent ever smaller fractions of ounces of gold. Hell, you can run the entire world's economy on just a single ounce of gold if you just subdivide it enough.
In short, yes, it would be logistically difficult, but the problem of "there's not enough gold" is non-existent in a world where all values are relative. And, thankfully, that's not even necessary anymore. People are voluntarily switching from unbacked inflationary fiat to hard money asset currency. One that WILL cause a massive devaluation of the dollar, but that at least doesn't have any secondary uses like industrial ones that can mess with its valuation.

 

[Rassah]

But they are, this is the problem.

No it's not. The more people join in to mine, the more security is provided to the network. That's a good thing.

People all want to make a buck quick.

You can't make a quick buck mining Bitcoin. Current return on investment is over a year, and mining margins are very tight.

This electricity is not ethereal and comes from somewhere. Its not being transferred from other aspects so much.

A lot of it is being transferred from sources that otherwise just discard it. Bitcoin mining competition forces miners to use waste electricity that no one else would, which power companies would otherwise get $0 for, and are willing to sell it to Bitcoin miners for as little as $0.03 or less.

HOWEVER, as more people are getting in for less and less remaining, its down stream effect is more energy consumption.

It has nothing to do with "less and less remaining" though. Again, people aren't getting into mining because there's less Bitcoin left, but because the cost of mining right now is lower than the price of the bitcoin you mine right now.

Yes it does. AS the perceived value per coin is increasing, and there is scarcity looming more people are trying to get in. Fomo on the hype.

No, it does not. Scarcity of Bitcoin left to mine has nothing to do with it. It's actually the opposite. Since over time less and less Bitcoin is mined, there's less and less of it to go around for everyone who is mining, meaning mining profits are lower and lower. If Bitcoin price goes up, that would make mining whatever decreasing amount is left more profitable, but it's not going up because there's less and less of it left to mine. It's going up because there's a limited supply in total and more and more people are adopting it as money.
Remember, at some point all Bitcoin will be mined, but Bitcoin mining won't stop. It will still be profitable.

You are grossly simplifying your outlook and I do not know why.

Maybe I understand it very well, having actually worked in the field for over a decade, and you're explaining it badly?

So my terminology is slightly off because BC decided to re-define common computing terms.

They weren't redefined, the technology just changed. Nodes are things that store and relay information. It used to be that nodes stored and share a copy of the blockchain, worked as wallets, and did the mining. Now nodes only store and relay blockchain information. Miners do not. They just compute blocks, and submit their results to a single node they work for.

It has since 2017.

Moore's law is irrelevant for mining and price. If ASICs doubled in processing power, making it half as expensive to mine with, miners would just buy double the ASICs to bring the power cost back up to the equilibrium where adding more is no longer profitable again.

When the bulk of all energy on earth is still produced in terrible methods and non-renewables its a problem. Fossil Fuel is still accounting for 84% of global energy production.

Then the problem isn't the use of energy. The problem is the source of energy. In which case you should be cheering on Bitcoin mining, since it uses mostly renewable energy sources, and has a huge incentive to continue to develop renewable and "free" sources of energy like solar and wind. All while also displacing a much more wasteful service like fiat.

Not every country is France running a lot of nuclear. Not every country is Iceland with 99% renewables for electrical. Not every country is like china with large hydro infrastructure

Yeah, but the cool thing is that bitcoin mining doesn't have to happen in every country either. It's on the internet, so you can have all your mines out in the middle of nowhere in Iceland, and it will still provide mining service to the entire world.

a GPU is by definition an ASIC.

I didn't know that. I thought ASICs were hardware coded to do one task. They're not programmable. GPUs are obviously programmable, since they can do both SHA256 and graphics calculations. But if GPUs fit under the definition of ASIC, then I guess I stand corrected.

The problem is its wasteful as hell single purpose computing.

It's not wasteful though. If it was more wasteful than multipurpose computing, it would have cost more to manufacture and use, and miners would be using multipurpose instead. But it's less wasteful, because they don't last more than about 3 to 4 years of intensive mining anyway, so there's no reason to expend more resources to make them multicomputing when they'll only be used for one purpose and then thrown out. And the savings in energy for it being single purpose are MASSIVE compared to extra wasted electricity used if it was multicomputing. What we have now is the most efficient and least wasteful method of mining.

Its also BoA, Cambridge, the Crypto Climate Accord, Qatar University, rystad energy, and countless others : state actors like china & the usa, independent researchers and multi national organization including the Paris climate accords who have growing concerns.

Check THEIR sources. Most of them come right back to using Digiconomist as their source for their claims, making all of them complete bunk. If you're given an article about how wasteful Bitcoin is, I search it for Digiconomist or Alex DeVries (the author). If you don't find that, go through the list of sources they use, then search that source. You're very likely to find it. At which point you can dismiss the entire article and its claims, since the author has proven that they're unable to do actual investigative research and fell for the Digiconomist scam.
As for state actors, of course they're concerned about something that interferes with their system that allows them to enrich themselves and wage unlimited wars.

I will agree with the Digiconomist fellow as well = 'Its waste, by design"

Do you agree with him that Bitcoin will use all of the world's electricity by 2020? Because that's what his "research" predicted. He's a 20-something yo kid, with no experience in electric power grid, or Bitcoin, or Bitcoin mining.

https://defi.crescofin.ch/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-damage-are-garbage/

I'm a big proponent of reduce, and reuse - recycle or toss is a method of absolute last resort.

As an economist, I understand that that's a terrible way to increase efficiency. Imagine we're back when our only source of energy was cutting down wood to use for a fire, and we decided to conserve energy. So, we decided that you're not allowed to burn a fire for more than 5 hours a day to stay warm or to cook. We'd save on trees, but there would be no incentive to use wood more efficiently, or to look for more efficient sources of heat. You're still limited to 5 hours of burning whatever no matter what you do. Instead what happened is we wanted to burn more and more to get ever bigger fires for more uses for that energy. So we ended up looking for more efficient sources to burn, like coal, and oil. And then we had to find even more efficient methods of gathering energy, like electricity. And now we're using electricity in ever greater numbers, so we're forced to come up with more and more efficient means of generating and transmitting it. Basically, in a real world market, increasing the use of a thing leads to us being forced to find more efficient ways to use that thing, while forcing conservation of a thing just freezes innovation and gets us stuck with using it at the wasteful level we always have.

Its bold of you to assume peoples habits outside the narrow scope in which this whole topic is about the inefficiencies of mining and maintaining the BC network.

I'm not assuming. I know most people have smartphones, refrigerators, etc, and I know most people discard electronics at a yearly pace. That's public information. But for some reason no one who complains about Bitcoin mining seems to complain about the much bigger problem in their hands.

You just moved this into whataboutism and started to levy semi personal attacks on limited information and no base.

My information wasn't limited. You and others prefer government fiat, that's why you attack Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. By supporting fiat you support all those other things fiat enables (war, waste, consumerism), whether you realize it or not. It's not a personal attack, it's a statement of fact.

FWIW - my current phone is from 2012 or 2013 and weighs roughly 4oz - ...

Good for you, but you obviously know you're an extreme exception, not the norm, and you now know my take on conserving vs pushing innovation. I'm pretty sure a lot of the things I own use less energy than the things you use. Like that monitor for example.

 

[Rassah]

You did, in the beginning,

I didn't. You misunderstood.

and one has ask why you'd go out of your way to dispute my criticism of the gold standard if you thought the gold standard was unworkable to begin with.

Because you made a silly argument that was directly transferable to Bitcoin:

> There are $40 trillion dollars in the world and only 142,000 tons of gold worth $7.2 trillion. There's not enough gold to fit the USD into!
> There are $40 trillion dollars in the world and only 21 million bitcoins worth $1.3 trillion. There's not enough Bitcoin to fit the USD into!

It's the argument economically ignorant people have been making about Bitcoin having too few coins to go around for a decade. I was just surprised you would make the same ignorant argument about gold.

More importantly, your proposal for returning to gold standard has a few flaws, starting with you would need to artificially increase the price of gold in the first place

If gold rises in the market as you start issuing gold backed currency, that's not an artificial rise, is it. Again, the parallels to Bitcoin are direct. Bitcoin went from total market cap of $10 million to a market cap of $800,000 million as it encompassed more of the global economy. That wasn't artificial.

By definition, if the price of per troy gold ounce is currently around $1,500, the total amount of gold mined in existence is 142,000 metric tons, and that equals currently about 7.2 trillion dollars in gold, which is well short of being able to cover all the circulating money and deposits in US

Yes, just like because we only have 21 million total Bitcoins and at $64k that only adds up to $1.3 trillion, that is well short of being able to cover all the circulating money and deposits in US, so I guess that means Bitcoin can never take over the USD, and that's no point discussing it as a money alternative. /s
How do you not see how wrong this line of thinking is???

then you either need to massively devalue dollar (which will cause the very crisis you claim to want to prevent)

Wait, what? I never said I wanted to prevent devaluing the dollar. On the contrary, I'm saying you should buy Bitcoin and don't "cash out" because Bitcoin will absolutely devalue the dollar and cause a crisis for any fool still left holding the bags of dollars.

And, since we're talking about Bitcoin here, I don't care about any of the gold stuff. For the last time, I have never and will never advocate for the return to the gold standard. If you think I have, I hope I explained above why you completely misunderstood.

Furthermore, I've repeatedly, as have others here, pointed out issues of the lack of portability and divisbility to you

I'm the one who told you that gold failed because it isn't portable or divisible. Not you. Not others. I DID. And I said that Bitcoin fixes that issue. Don't preach back my own words at me or claim they're yours.

I didn't make an error and think you don't realize that by having monetary notes based on "subatomic" amounts of gold that are irretrievable and irredeemable, you've inadvertently reinvented ... a fiat currency.

They're not irredeemable. If you have two papers for half an atom, while you can't get half an atom, you can get a whole one. Collect enough of those irretrievable amounts and they'll add up to a retrievable one. Which makes them NOT fiat. They're still backed.

Incidentally, a Bitcoin is divisible to 0.00000001 units (smallest is called a satoshi), but even that small amount is divisible on the second layer Lightning Network. Much like atoms would be on paper. You can't redeem just the fractional amounts until they total at least one redeemable unit. Lucky there's little reason to redeem so little.

Your knowledge of geology is on par with your understanding of economics.

Impressive and deep? Thanks, but it's not actually that good. I just read a bunch of things about gold since they tend to pop up in financial articles. Stuff like experiments with extracting gold from sea water, plans to mine gold from asteroids, etc. So I don't consider gold a safe store of value. Too much risk of sudden increase in volume.

Gold is a finite resource and production has actually plateaued out in recent years

You need to learn a phrase that will help with your thinking. It's "For now." You've heard of often and it seems to be the biggest problem in your understanding of all things economy.

Generally, the Fed targets an annual rate of inflation for the US since a slowly increasing price level keeps businesses profitable

That's NOT a good thing. A business that burns 2% of energy and resources every year (depleting them) is still profitable when compared to a dollar that loses value at 3% a year (-2% – -3% = 1%). Remember the malinvestment and consumerism I mentioned? By making business that LOSE value seem profitable, we're contributing to a WHOLE LOT of waste. That's why I "loathe" fiat and support deflationary money like Bitcoin. With a money that grows in value, no one will invest in a business that doesn't at least grow too.

If you guys didn't understand why I kept saying USD is extremely polluting and harmful to the environment, hope that explains it.

and prevents consumers from waiting for lower prices before making purchases.

That's a myth. Doesn't happen. Economically ignorant assumption that both ignores consumer need to use something now (look at the electronics market), and ignores that there's always two sides to every transaction. Sellers aren't just going to lie and take that lack of sales because consumers are waiting. They will adjust their prices accordingly too.

Some inflation in an economy is not a terrible thing.

It is. War, waste, concentration of wealth, etc etc etc.
Why do people who say "a little bit of inflation is fine" never seem to care about someone at the top getting and using that inflationary cash to buy up assets and concentrate wealth unfairly, without actually producing anything of value???

Keynesian doesn't necessarily prevent recessions, but it does allow the Fed to help shorten the length of recessions and ensure they don't become protracted depressions.

2008 was a very prorated depression. And as I said, they don't actually fix recessions, they paper them over with money. Did the toxic real estate assets go away because the fed inflated? No. All that Keynesian recession fixing does is kick the can down the road. As it kicked 2000 to 2008, 2008 to now, etc. Just watch, I'll be proven right.

After Keynesian economics were embraced and adopted, we've had relatively mild recessions that we've recovered from fairly quickly.

I can't help but just laugh at this. And then cry, remembering how these mild recessions are just the can kicked down the road using a government credit card, where the debt will come due soon, people will realize that all the wealth they thought they had was just inflated with fake money, and the economy will crash so hard it will be in the history books for thousands of years... Like the fall of the Roman empire, but worse...

which is preferably to your approach of just letting depressions play out and allowing people to languish in poverty for years on end.

Yeah, but those people will have been hoarding a lot of cash, so they'll be okay

Economic crises require some government intervention,

You're saying "economic activity requires central planning." Never does and it always leads to disastrous results. If you don't know why central planning fails, look it up.

partially because it is untenable to let people suffer like that.

It's even more untenable to let people suffer from the fallout caused by government intervention. USSR? Venezuela? Brazil and Argentina? India? Practically all poor third world countries are like that because of government intervention in economics. Oftentimes with good intentions. To me it is untenable to let people suffer like that. That's why I support Bitcoin. It makes government intervention much more difficult. But to you, and to other Keynesians, that suffering is something you don't even consider or care about, since if you had, you wouldn't be proposing the policies that will cause first world to end up like third world... Fuck it's depressing knowing how much pain and suffering you guys will cause to so many people, thinking you're doing good...

 

[Miles Marsalis]

It really wasn't. It probably looked serious to a newbie. It went from $20k at the beginning of the year, through $40k to $60k, before retracting to $40k for a few months, before going back up to $60k today. That's not a serious drop, that's a serious rise with a temporary retraction. And that's with A WHOLE COUNTRY LIKE CHINA banning it!

I think losing a third of your investment in a short period like that is a serious concern, particular since the whole of your investment in Bitcoin took that hit. Also, your description illustrates that wild volatility of Bitcoin over just this year. I'd also remind that major markets like the EU, US, and India having pending regulations or bans forthcoming which will affect the Bitcoin market.

Large mega institutions aren't Binance. And they don't use Binance. Businesses and large institutions, including myself, use exchanges like Kraken, Gemini, Coinbase, Bitstamp, and others that have a long established history. That's why I didn't know it was the largest. Serious users don't use it. Binance has been known to be problematic. If it's "the largest" it may even be just based on trading volume done by bots. And those large institutions like investment banks, pension funds, government institutional funds, etc are not holding their bitcoins on exchsnges, let alone on Binance. So, like I said, tell them they know nothing about how financial infrastructure is built when I know some of them have been working in it for over a century.

Financial institutions looking to trade in Bitcoin used Binance because they were a big exchange that could offer better protections that the smaller ones, so if Binance is having security problems, that does not bode well for the smaller exchanges.

More interestingly, the four exchanges you mentioned have had serious legal concerns or service disruptions:

Kraken:

In April 2018, The New York Attorney General's Office began a fact finding investigation regarding the measures taken by cryptocurrency exchanges to protect their customers and fight market manipulation and money laundering. The New York State attorney general warned that the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange might be breaking the law. "Customers should be aware that the platforms that refused to participate in the OAG's Initiative (Binance, Gate.io, Huobi, and Kraken) may not disclose all order types offered to certain traders, some of which could preference those traders at the expense of others, and that the trading performance of other customers on those venues could be negatively affected as a result."[61] Powell claimed that the investigation was hostile and bad for business, and refused to comply with the inquiry. He claimed that market manipulation "doesn't matter to most crypto traders," and stated that "scams are rampant" among cryptocurrency exchanges.[62]

In May 2018, Powell said that Kraken was considering registering as an alternative trading system (ATS), which would bring the company directly under US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) oversight.[63]

The Attorney General's Office's final report, issued in September 2018, emphasized Kraken's non-participation in the inquiry and referred Kraken (as well as Binance and Gate.io) to the New York Department of Financial Services for potential violation of New York's virtual currency regulations.[64][61][65]

In late September 2021, it was announced that Kraken would pay $1.25 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for offering unregistered margin trading.[66][67]

Gemini:

The site's primary challenge has been remaining online at times of excessively high volumes, a relatively common occurrence for any website receiving an unusual amount of traffic.[26][27] On November 28, 2017, for example, both Gemini and Coinbase crashed for several hours. Gemini was showing a "504 gateway time-out" message, and the status page showed "Systems are currently experiencing degraded performance."[28] Subsequently, the Gemini Blog offered this comment. "This is not the first scaling challenge we’ve encountered, and it won’t be the last. We’re continuing to improve our performance and infrastructure monitoring so we can anticipate potential problems more quickly in the future."[29]

Coinbase:

On February 16, 2018, Coinbase admitted that some customers were overcharged in error for credit and debit purchases of cryptocurrencies. The problem was initiated when banks and card issuers changed the merchant category code (MCC) for cryptocurrency purchases earlier that month. This meant that cryptocurrency payments would now be processed as "cash advances", meaning that banks and credit card issuers could begin charging customers cash-advance fees for cryptocurrency purchases. Any customers who purchased cryptocurrency on their exchange between January 22 and February 11, 2018 could have been affected. At first, Visa blamed Coinbase, telling the Financial Times on February 16 that it had "not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting." However, the latest statement from Visa and Worldpay on the Coinbase blog clarifies: "This issue was not caused by Coinbase."[84]

In March 2018, Quartz reported that the number of monthly customer complaints against Coinbase jumped more than 100% in January of that year, to 889, citing official Consumer Financial Protection Bureau data, with more than 400 of those categorized as "money was not available when promised".[85]

In September 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly threatened to sue Coinbase if the company decided to launch its cryptocurrency lending product. [86]

Bitstamp

In February 2014, the company suspended withdrawals for several days in the face of a distributed denial-of-service.[7][8] Bitcoin Magazine reported that people behind the attack sent a ransom demand of 75 bitcoins to Kodrič, who refused due to a company policy against negotiating with “terrorists”.[citation needed]

In January 2015, Bitstamp suspended its service after a hack during which less than 19,000 bitcoins were stolen,[9] reopening nearly a week later.[10]

 

[Miles Marsalis]

No, I just ignore it as irrelevant. Did you know the internet is currently broken because Prodigy internet service failed? Oh? It isn't broken and Prodigy is irrelevant? Same deal with Bitcoin then.

Many exchanges seem to not have learned lessons from Mt. Gox and are repeating the same mistakes of not having adequate security and redundancy built into their systems.

Dollars get stolen on a daily basis too. Dollar is very broken and insecure then. That's the same argument you're making. Because some weird obscure exchanges and services get hacked, that makes Bitcoin itself insecure. Just like because some obscure businesses and third world banks storing dollars get robbed, that makes dollar itself insecure. It's a dumb argument. No offense, but there's no other way to call it.

The world financial system, which largely handles fiat currency, and the world economy, which is worth $93 trillion US dollars, dwarfs the Bitcoin economy, which is worth approximately $800 billion US dollars. The value of fiat currencies and their relative stability to Bitcoin means that criminal conduct committed within the system and the insecurity of certain institutions within the financial system is negligble compared to what the system has to offer. The financial crimes committed within the mainstream financial is tiny compared to the legitimate transactions that comprise the majority of the economy. The criminality that occurs in the Bitcoin economy is overwhelming larger by proportion and the Bitcoin economy itself is used to circumvent the regulations of the mainstream financial system. The fiat currency financial system also offers consumers protections against fraud and recourse to recover their funds, which most Bitcoin exchanges struggle to do.

You realize this problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH worse for fiat, right? Not only do you have the same but BIGGER issue with banks that can just print money to create fraud, but you also have entire government central banks who can just print a ton all of a sudden, or do things to destabilize the entire currency and cause it to hyperinflate. You have Binance to prove that Bitcoin are risky? I have the entirely of 2008 crash and all those toxic assets that are still on the books and the banks that are currently even more leveraged than they were then as a counter argument.

Part of the fallout from the Great Recession was the banks fell under greater regulatory scrutiny and had to meet stricter capital requirements. When this last recession hit, the banks were far less vulnerable and better capitalized than during Great Recession and were able to assist in the ongoing recovery without being liabilities, so I don't what books you're looking at. I'll also note the banks paid back the bailout money, which was $700 billion dollars in loans and paid back with 8.2% interest.

And as I keep saying, DON'T KEEP YOUR BITCOIN ON EXCHANGES. There's zero reason to. None of the big investors, corps, and institutions do. You think Tesla cares about exchanges with the billion of Bitcoin they hold? No, they don't.

Bitcoins being stolen from exchanges is only part of the problem, since market manipulation from both internal and external sources relative to the exchanges has been a recurring problem.

I will say the COVID relief package is doing good towards cutting child poverty, in half to be exact.

2008 was a depression which arguably lasted almost a decade. It was only called a recession for appearance reasons. Didn't want the populace to panic too much.

The Great Recession lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 and the Obama years had record economic expansion and end with historically low unemployment, for those of us who care about facts.

We're not, and you thinking that shows how much out of touch you are with the people at the bottom. People are getting more and more desperate.

My family struggled financially for a significant part of my adolescence and I still visit and volunteer for services in my old neighborhoods, so I still connect with the community and the common need. There are solutions to these problems, which are partly political so I'm not getting into them, but Bitcoin is not among the private sector interventions that are going to make difference in most people's lives.

 

[Rassah]

Stating the obvious, if people are excessively hoarding cash during an economic crisis, in this case a deflationary crisis since that is what we're talking about, then there will be a shortage of money circulating in the economy, which will worsen the crisis and prolong it.

No it wouldn't. You're just rehashing the deflationary spiral myth. If people have "excessive hoardings" aka a lot of saving, that means that in an economic crisis they won't be as affected by it. They have the money to survive while jobs and incomes might be tight. They still have means of paying for necessities. They still have money to circulate as you say. Having "excessive hoardings" is literally HOW you get through an economic crisis. Not having these excessive hoardings is why so many companies almost failed during 2008 and needed bailouts, and it's why, after learning their lessons, so many companies are hoarding cash now in preparation for the next crash.

I mean, seriously, on the face of it you're literally claiming "You shouldn't have savings, because without it it will be easier to deal with a recession." Do you not see how silly and illogical that is? This is why Austrians call Keynesian economics lunacy.

That is a far cry from people accruing savings in the banking system within a stable economy.

So this little disingenuous gem ...

... is a canard.

Oh really? How is having a lot of savings in the banking system different from "excessive hoarding?"

When were these supposed depressions? List them out, because we haven't had a depression since the Great Depression and we only adopted Keynesian policy after World War II (despite your claims).

Inflationary and expansionary policy caused the Great Depression (even if the policy wasn't officially Keynesian, the reason was to inflate money to help pay off WW1 debt, in the same way that Keynesian policies are used to inflate to pay off more debts since). OPEC one in 73, S&L crisis, Dot Com bubble, 2008 crisis. Despite them not being called "depressions," I think that's more for posterity. They were all pretty f'in bad. Interestingly, while looking up the years, I've found a number of sources that list all the recessions in the 1900's, and it seems that US has been in a recession for over 20% of the time, with minor recessions happening pretty frequently. So much for that Keynesian attempts I guess.

A Complete Look At The History Of Recessions In America

www.businessinsider.com

Great Recession in USA from 1900 - 2013 timeline.

www.timetoast.com

Finally, please learn the difference between "If we do X" and "We should do X"
Economics deals in a lot of hypotheticals. If you can't tell the difference between a hypothetical and a proposal, we won't get very far.

 

[Rassah]

I think losing a third of your investment in a short period like that is a serious concern, particular since the whole of your investment in Bitcoin took that hit.

Cool. Then don't invest. Those who invested and understood that it will have a period of fluctuations with a long term return of 200% won't care. I actually had a client, who's a Bitcoin newbie, who bought a few $100k at $50k price. It went down to $40k, then $30k. Think it was a serious concern for him? Nope. Unlike you, he actually did his research, so he just bought a few $100k more. I'll remind you that it's $64k now, that I've told you it will go up before, I've told you that it will go back up when it was $6k, I've told you it will go up when it crashed from $20k four years ago, and I'm pretty sure I told you that it will go up and be a good investment when it was under $1000, back when this was the old forum. Funny how those with a lot of money, like my client, actually research into things they invest in, and those who don't just talk about it.

I'd also remind that major markets like the EU, US, and India having pending regulations or bans forthcoming which will affect the Bitcoin market.

And? India already banned it. China just banned it. If US and EU ban it, that will just leave the rest of the world to use it and thuse in US and EU will flock it for safe storage, knowing the only reason US is banning it is because it's a serious threat to the USD. But, US can't ban it. Not only because they're not that stupid, but because, you seem to have forgotten, there are a number of HUGE financial institutions, like banks, brokerages, investment funds, trusts, and pensions, that already hold billions of it on their books. These institutions individually hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth. If US tried to ban it, those investments would be at a major risk. If those investments aren't held by some politicians directly already, these institutions will certainly have a very stern discussion with those politicians. Banning Bitcoin is too late for US at this point.
For EU, interestingly a lot of countries there are actually more friendly to Bitcoin than even US is. In some countries using Bitcoin doesn't incur capital gains, and some countries like UK even regulate it as currency already, unlike US which will regulates it as an asset.

Financial institutions looking to trade in Bitcoin used Binance because they were a big exchange that could offer better protections that the smaller ones

Eh, they didn't. Biggest doesn't mean strongest for security, as you demonstrated. Most likely "biggest" in their case means most volume, with bots tossing the same coin back and forth. Binance doesn't have a good reputation. They're not based in US or a safe country either. I know what exchanges big businesses use. I listed them. Those do have a good reputation and they're not "small." For big purchases, they use multiple ones as Tesla has, but I somehow doubt Tesla used Binance too.

More interestingly, the four exchanges you mentioned have had serious legal concerns or service disruptions:

Kraken:

Interestingly you don't even know what all that text actually means. You just found some overzealous NY regulator being concerned about them not listing some obscure stuff properly and went with it.

Oh, FYI, a lot of financial services dealing with Bitcoin block customers from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and New York. Because all these areas have draconian regulatory issues to deal with. In NY's case it's the stupid Bitcoin regulations they passed.

Gemini:

Not enough capacity to handle unprecedented flood of new customers. Fixed now. So what.

Coinbase:

VISA fucked up, blamed it on Coinbase

However, the latest statement from Visa and Worldpay on the Coinbase blog clarifies: "This issue was not caused by Coinbase."

Also Coinbase it's touted as the easiest to use, so it has the most newbies. And so it's not surprising they would have the most complaints. They're also kind of the Comcast of Bitcoin exchanges when it comes to dealing with tech support. But if that's your argument, I'm sure I can find similar about Chase/Citi/BoA/etc XD

Bitstamp

Wow, 2014 and 2015 is like 50 years in Bitcoin years. Bitstamp was just a tiny startup back then.

 

[Miles Marsalis]

I didn't. You misunderstood.

I quoted you in one of my recent posts.

Because you made a silly argument that was directly transferable to Bitcoin:

> There are $40 trillion dollars in the world and only 142,000 tons of gold worth $7.2 trillion. There's not enough gold to fit the USD into!
> There are $40 trillion dollars in the world and only 21 million bitcoins worth $1.3 trillion. There's not enough Bitcoin to fit the USD into!

It's the argument economically ignorant people have been making about Bitcoin having too few coins to go around for a decade. I was just surprised you would make the same ignorant argument about gold.

My criticism was specificallly directed at the gold standard, not Bitcoin. You can quote me if you think was conflating the two systems, but I think you're thinking of someone else.

If gold rises in the market as you start issuing gold backed currency, that's not an artificial rise, is it. Again, the parallels to Bitcoin are direct. Bitcoin went from total market cap of $10 million to a market cap of $800,000 million as it encompassed more of the global economy. That wasn't artificial.

If the government passes legislation to issues a gold-backed currency the way you proposed, it is artificial because that rise wouldn't have happened absent that change in monetary policy.

There isn't really a parallel to Bitcoin unless the government were to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, which it won't.

Yes, just like because we only have 21 million total Bitcoins and at $64k that only adds up to $1.3 trillion, that is well short of being able to cover all the circulating money and deposits in US, so I guess that means Bitcoin can never take over the USD, and that's no point discussing it as a money alternative. /s
How do you not see how wrong this line of thinking is???

You keep linking, falsely, my criticism of the gold criticism to an identical criticism Bitcoin you are trying to say I'm making.

I'm the one who told you that gold failed because it isn't portable or divisible. Not you. Not others. I DID. And I said that Bitcoin fixes that issue. Don't preach back my own words at me or claim they're yours.

I've done that previously in this thread and another thread where you first were promoting the Austrian school. You replied to my argument, recently, acknowledging gold's lack divisibility when I brought it up, within the last two pages, I believe.

Wait, what? I never said I wanted to prevent devaluing the dollar. On the contrary, I'm saying you should buy Bitcoin and don't "cash out" because Bitcoin will absolutely devalue the dollar and cause a crisis for any fool still left holding the bags of dollars.

And, since we're talking about Bitcoin here, I don't care about any of the gold stuff. For the last time, I have never and will never advocate for the return to the gold standard. If you think I have, I hope I explained above why you completely misunderstood.

My dude, you were arguing that the Austrian school wasn't wrong about the gold standard (and I'll point out that if you agree something is wrong with the gold standard, then the ABCT is fundamentally flawed since it relies on the gold standard as a solution for the problems it elides). You proceeded to argue that you could make the gold standard work if you just issued currency based on "subatomic" amounts of gold, vehemently. You did this despite the arguments regarding the effect on industries dependent on gold, the damage to the economy this would cause, and the issues of people actually being able to redeem their wealth in actual gold, which I did raise.

Impressive and deep? Thanks, but it's not actually that good. I just read a bunch of things about gold since they tend to pop up in financial articles. Stuff like experiments with extracting gold from sea water, plans to mine gold from asteroids, etc. So I don't consider gold a safe store of value. Too much risk of sudden increase in volume.

You're a funny man, but I'll highlight that you are backtracking on the feasibility of the gold standard, which is a good thing. I'll also add that the cost of extracting gold from from sea water and certainly mining gold from asteroids put those strategies economically out of reach, which I'm assuming you read from the article I provided with.

I won't bring up the gold standard after this then, because maybe you realize the gold standard is a fundamentally bad idea and that is progress, but let's not mess about here.

You need to learn a phrase that will help with your thinking. It's "For now." You've heard of often and it seems to be the biggest problem in your understanding of all things economy.

I mean, as someone who's worked in finance, you should appreciate that a track record of proven success is worth more than a promise of future success. The Bitcoin market has a lot more growth to attain and obstacles to overcome before it becomes a long-term and feasible investment or payment system.

That's NOT a good thing. A business that burns 2% of energy and resources every year (depleting them) is still profitable when compared to a dollar that loses value at 3% a year (-2% – -3% = 1%). Remember the malinvestment and consumerism I mentioned? By making business that LOSE value seem profitable, we're contributing to a WHOLE LOT of waste. That's why I "loathe" fiat and support deflationary money like Bitcoin. With a money that grows in value, no one will invest in a business that doesn't at least grow too.

If you guys didn't understand why I kept saying USD is extremely polluting and harmful to the environment, hope that explains it.

You are acting like that is the only thing keeping businesses afloat, rather than innovation and profitability.

2008 was a very prorated depression. And as I said, they don't actually fix recessions, they paper them over with money. Did the toxic real estate assets go away because the fed inflated? No. All that Keynesian recession fixing does is kick the can down the road. As it kicked 2000 to 2008, 2008 to now, etc. Just watch, I'll be proven right.

The system has worked since World War II and we've have no depressions yet.

Yeah, but those people will have been hoarding a lot of cash, so they'll be okay

That is making the risky assumption the economy turns around. After all, anyone hoarding Bolivars right now might not come out on the top. Furthermore, hoarding may be a solution for the individual, but not the economy. The best way to get the economy back on track is ensure people are buying good and services to circulate money throughout the system.

You're saying "economic activity requires central planning." Never does and it always leads to disastrous results. If you don't know why central planning fails, look it up.

Government intervention does necessarily equate to central planning and in fact the independence the Fed has prevents the kind of central planning you're talking about. It's politically independent and can make decisions within its charter without interference

It's even more untenable to let people suffer from the fallout caused by government intervention. USSR? Venezuela? Brazil and Argentina? India? Practically all poor third world countries are like that because of government intervention in economics. Oftentimes with good intentions. To me it is untenable to let people suffer like that. That's why I support Bitcoin. It makes government intervention much more difficult. But to you, and to other Keynesians, that suffering is something you don't even consider or care about, since if you had, you wouldn't be proposing the policies that will cause first world to end up like third world... Fuck it's depressing knowing how much pain and suffering you guys will cause to so many people, thinking you're doing good...

I think those are wildly divergent examples and in some of those cases, economic crises occurred under governments that did ... nothing. This is also ironic, becuase Milton Friedman once said:

"The Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm."
.

 

[Rassah]

Many exchanges seem to not have learned lessons from Mt. Gox and are repeating the same mistakes of not having adequate security and redundancy built into their systems.

Your examples didn't provide any such examples. Nothing with regards to security anyway. Except for Bitstamp which got hacked early on, paid back that Bitcoin, and the time when that happened was during MtGox existence, so obviously it wouldn't have learned anything from an exchange that didn't fail yet.

The world financial system, which largely handles fiat currency, and the world economy, which is worth $93 trillion US dollars, dwarfs the Bitcoin economy, which is worth approximately $800 billion US dollars. The value of fiat currencies and their relative stability to Bitcoin means that criminal conduct committed within the system and the insecurity of certain institutions within the financial system is negligble compared to what the system has to offer. The financial crimes committed within the mainstream financial is tiny compared to the legitimate transactions that comprise the majority of the economy. The criminality that occurs in the Bitcoin economy is overwhelming larger by proportion and the Bitcoin economy itself is used to circumvent the regulations of the mainstream financial system. The fiat currency financial system also offers consumers protections against fraud and recourse to recover their funds, which most Bitcoin exchanges struggle to do.

Are we still talking about security, or criminality? Because if security, Bitcoin has never been hacked, and it is infinitely easier to secure than fiat is. You can even back it up. Can't do that with dollars. Yes, people will be robbed. But that's not a Bitcoin or dollar thing, that's a people thing. The sarcastic example you're replying to here is me making fun of your argument saying that "dollars are broken because banks and old ladies get robbed." Obviously dollars aren't broken despite that. That's just a theft that happens because people use poor security. It will continue to happen in dollars, Bitcoin, and everything else, just because some people will always be careless. But, as I said, Bitcoin is much easier to secure than dollars. Cold storage backups with multi key signature is just impossible to do with dollars or any other fiat, but it's trivially easy with Bitcoin, and gives you ABOVE banking level security.

And if you're talking about criminality, I think less than 0.3% of Bitcoin is used for criminal stuff? I don't know exactly but that's because I don't care. It's the same deal. Criminality isn't a function of a currency, it's the function of people. As more people dump fiat for Bitcoin, I'm sure more criminal activity will happen in Bitcoin too. With luck, all criminal activity will happen with Bitcoin because the USD will have completely failed.

Part of the fallout from the Great Recession was the banks fell under greater regulatory scrutiny and had to meet stricter capital requirements.

Yeah, that was hilarious. Harvard business class on that went into detail about how these stricter capital requirements posed unbearable costs on smaller banks, and forced them to merge with the big banks. We live in a world where our too big to fail are even bigger now, but people think we're safer.

When this last recession hit, the banks were far less vulnerable and better capitalized than during Great Recession

Yeah, that wasn't because of the regulations, it was because investors didn't want to lose their money again. That always happens: something unexpected fucks up, investors lose money, investors and businesses learn from their mistakes so that never happens again, regulators pass useless regulations, regulators strut around pretending they fixed something. From Great Depression through Savings & Loans through Dot Com through 2008, it's all the same. None of those mistakes that were made will be made again, not because of regulations, but because investors know not to do them again.

Bitcoins being stolen from exchanges is only part of the problem, since market manipulation from both internal and external sources relative to the exchanges has been a recurring problem.

Lost that argument so moving the goal posts? No, as the expert here, I can confidently tell you that market manipulation isn't a problem either.

I will say the COVID relief package is doing good towards cutting child poverty, in half to be exact.

I wish my tenant's kids knew that...

https://www.upworthy.com/when-joe-b...ld-cut-child-poverty-in-half-he-wasn-t-joking

The Great Recession lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 and the Obama years had record economic expansion and end with historically low unemployment, for those of us who care about facts.

Uh, no. Don't confuse government propaganda with facts. Does it not strike you as strange that we had "historically low unemployment" but the number of new jobs created between 2009 and 2017 didn't even keep up with population growth? I think we have discussed that before. And as someone involved in economics research and business at the time, yeah, the economic recovery was mostly on paper then too. It was a very very slow and sluggish recovery at best. Some places haven't

My family struggled financially for a significant part of my adolescence and I still visit and volunteer for services in my old neighborhoods, so I still connect with the community and the common need.

So why are you so disconnected to think that people are getting better? Maybe you live in a more affluent part of the country and are isolated from larger cities?

but Bitcoin is not among the private sector interventions that are going to make difference in most people's lives.

And yet, it made a difference in EVERY person's life who bought even a little bit into it over the years. My parents, my grandmother, my coworkers, my friends. Five years ago I started sending a Bitcoin allowance to my friend's daughter back in Kiev. Their monthly income is $300/m (pretty average for the world). I was only sending her $10 a month. That's just $10 a month for 5 years. The daughter is just turning 16 next year. Her savings that she decided to keep instead of spend? $30,000. Not much to us, but for her that's 8 years of income, or the chance to go to a really good University.
Just $10/m... Frickin amazing. Imagine if someone you know was saving $10/m for five years...

 

[Miles Marsalis]

No it wouldn't. You're just rehashing the deflationary spiral myth. If people have "excessive hoardings" aka a lot of saving, that means that in an economic crisis they won't be as affected by it. They have the money to survive while jobs and incomes might be tight. They still have means of paying for necessities. They still have money to circulate as you say. Having "excessive hoardings" is literally HOW you get through an economic crisis. Not having these excessive hoardings is why so many companies almost failed during 2008 and needed bailouts, and it's why, after learning their lessons, so many companies are hoarding cash now in preparation for the next crash.

I mean, seriously, on the face of it you're literally claiming "You shouldn't have savings, because without it it will be easier to deal with a recession." Do you not see how silly and illogical that is? This is why Austrians call Keynesian economics lunacy.

I think the key thing you missing is it is deflationary crisis and that if most people are hoarding money instead of spending enough of the jolt the economy back in action, everyone loses because the small and large businesses that power the economy are going to languish. That will slow the economy further and several basic good and services people need will become unavailable, compounding the economic crisis. Jobs will become increasingly unavailable as this lack of spending continues because the businesses that relied on this consumer spending are folding.

Yeah, savings are important to have in preparation for a crisis, but consumer spending is important for the economy, particularly in times of crisis, as you know.

Inflationary and expansionary policy caused the Great Depression (even if the policy wasn't officially Keynesian, the reason was to inflate money to help pay off WW1 debt, in the same way that Keynesian policies are used to inflate to pay off more debts since). OPEC one in 73, S&L crisis, Dot Com bubble, 2008 crisis. Despite them not being called "depressions," I think that's more for posterity. They were all pretty f'in bad. Interestingly, while looking up the years, I've found a number of sources that list all the recessions in the 1900's, and it seems that US has been in a recession for over 20% of the time, with minor recessions happening pretty frequently. So much for that Keynesian attempts I guess.

A Complete Look At The History Of Recessions In America

www.businessinsider.com

Great Recession in USA from 1900 - 2013 timeline.

www.timetoast.com

Finally, please learn the difference between "If we do X" and "We should do X"
Economics deals in a lot of hypotheticals. If you can't tell the difference between a hypothetical and a proposal, we won't get very far.

For the nth time, Keynesian policies didn't lead to the Great Depression because we were on the gold standard going into it, which was part of the reason the Great Depression happened in the first place, as Milton Friedman argued. You can't have Keynesian policies and be on the gold standard simultaneously. Admit you were wrong again about Keynesian policies being responsible for the Great Depression and move on.

You also you are counting the depressions that happened before the adoption Keynesian policy to arrive at that 20% figure you copied from Business Insider, which is a little dishonest since 1945 would be a better starting point.

If you need a visual aid, note the considerable pickup in GDP growth after 1945.

 

[Miles Marsalis]

Uh, no. Don't confuse government propaganda with facts. Does it not strike you as strange that we had "historically low unemployment" but the number of new jobs created between 2009 and 2017 didn't even keep up with population growth? I think we have discussed that before. And as someone involved in economics research and business at the time, yeah, the economic recovery was mostly on paper then too. It was a very very slow and sluggish recovery at best. Some places haven't

I mean ...

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was different in kind from all the recessions since the Great Depression, as it also involved a banking crisis and the de-leveraging (debt reduction) of highly indebted households. Research indicates recovery from financial crises can be protracted, with lengthy periods of high unemployment and substandard economic growth.[62] Economist Carmen Reinhart stated in August 2011: "Debt de-leveraging [reduction] takes about seven years ... And in the decade following severe financial crises, you tend to grow by 1 to 1.5 percentage points less than in the decade before, because the decade before was fueled by a boom in private borrowing, and not all of that growth was real. The unemployment figures in advanced economies after falls are also very dark. Unemployment remains anchored about five percentage points above what it was in the decade before."[63]

Several key economic variables (e.g., Job level, real GDP per capita, household net worth, and the federal budget deficit) hit their low point (trough) in 2009 or 2010, after which they began to turn upward, recovering to pre-recession (2007) levels between late 2012 and May 2014, which marked the recovery of all jobs lost during the recession.[64][65][66][67] Real median household income fell to a trough of $53,331 in 2012, but recovered to an all-time high of $59,039 by 2016.[68]

The Great Recession had a particularly severe effect on state and local tax receipts, causing many states and localities to reduce spending and employment to balance budgets as mandated by their constitutions or statutes. This government contraction subtracted from real GDP growth, creating an economic drag, rather than government adding to real GDP as is typical.[69] Obama noted this in June 2012, saying, "The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government -- oftentimes, cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in."[70]

Your examples didn't provide any such examples. Nothing with regards to security anyway. Except for Bitstamp which got hacked early on, paid back that Bitcoin, and the time when that happened was during MtGox existence, so obviously it wouldn't have learned anything from an exchange that didn't fail yet.

There was list I provide for you before, but this list has monetary damages tabulated nicely.

List of Crypto Exchange Hacks: Updated For 2023 | HedgewithCrypto

In this full list of cryptocurrency exchange hacks, we evaluated each hacked crypto exchange to find commonalities and lessons learned.

www.hedgewithcrypto.com

And here is the original list, with articles detailing vulnerabilities.

A Comprehensive List of Cryptocurrency Exchange Hacks

Hacks and data breaches happen on an almost daily basis. Cryptocurrency exchange hacks are particularly damaging because they typically affect thousands of users and involve the loss of funds. Here we provide an updated list of all major cryptocurrency exchange hacks.

selfkey.org

Are we still talking about security, or criminality? Because if security, Bitcoin has never been hacked, and it is infinitely easier to secure than fiat is. You can even back it up. Can't do that with dollars. Yes, people will be robbed. But that's not a Bitcoin or dollar thing, that's a people thing. The sarcastic example you're replying to here is me making fun of your argument saying that "dollars are broken because banks and old ladies get robbed." Obviously dollars aren't broken despite that. That's just a theft that happens because people use poor security. It will continue to happen in dollars, Bitcoin, and everything else, just because some people will always be careless. But, as I said, Bitcoin is much easier to secure than dollars. Cold storage backups with multi key signature is just impossible to do with dollars or any other fiat, but it's trivially easy with Bitcoin, and gives you ABOVE banking level security.

And if you're talking about criminality, I think less than 0.3% of Bitcoin is used for criminal stuff? I don't know exactly but that's because I don't care. It's the same deal. Criminality isn't a function of a currency, it's the function of people. As more people dump fiat for Bitcoin, I'm sure more criminal activity will happen in Bitcoin too. With luck, all criminal activity will happen with Bitcoin because the USD will have completely failed.

Spelling this out for you, but the money laundering and tax evasion that occurs in Bitcoin exchanges will attract government regulation and already has, in the form of China's crackdown and India's impending restrictions. Most people will not use a cryptocurrency payment system that is illegal in their country or that they feel is exposed to potential regulatory risk. Futhermore, the international usage of Bitcoin incentivizes governments to come with international agreements to regulate and monitor Bitcoin to prevent transnational criminal activity and prevent capital flight.

Arguably, besides taxation issues, criminal financial activity is one of the biggest concerns governments have about cryptocurrencies and is a major reason for regulation.

Yeah, that was hilarious. Harvard business class on that went into detail about how these stricter capital requirements posed unbearable costs on smaller banks, and forced them to merge with the big banks. We live in a world where our too big to fail are even bigger now, but people think we're safer.

I thought you went to Smith in Maryland for business school, but more importantly I agree that the focus of Dodd Frank could have been tailored more specifically to Wall Street as opposed to the community banks, but you didn't see the systemic collapse of Great Recession during this last recession either.

Yeah, that wasn't because of the regulations, it was because investors didn't want to lose their money again. That always happens: something unexpected fucks up, investors lose money, investors and businesses learn from their mistakes so that never happens again, regulators pass useless regulations, regulators strut around pretending they fixed something. From Great Depression through Savings & Loans through Dot Com through 2008, it's all the same. None of those mistakes that were made will be made again, not because of regulations, but because investors know not to do them again.

I don't know where you have been, after the initial market when the pandemic hit here, it has been record profits if you've been investing in the stock market. Furthermore:

Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy.” He says, in hindsight, to have prepared the economy for an event like the pandemic is an unrealistic expectation. “[A pandemic] wasn’t completely unanticipated,” he says. ”It’s not completely obvious what preparation for that kind of event would have looked like … That’s not a way that you can perpetually run the world economy.”

As much as the pandemic has devastated the world economy, Tooze says the Federal Reserve and global central banks prevented the worst possible effects. “It’s a huge act of stabilization they performed … How do you calm an ocean when it’s storming? That’s what they were trying to do,” he says.

Tooze says there are reasons to be hopeful that the world financial system is stronger than it was before the pandemic. “As gloomy as we tend to be, there are some good news stories here,” he says. ”One thing we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 was a big bank collapse… [and they] were forced to stabilize their balance sheets … We learned lessons.”

I wish my tenant's kids knew that...

I mean, you probably have enough money to help them out or you ease up on the rent possibly, if you deigned to do so.

 

[perkele]

21 pages in, did you all solve Bitcoin yet?

 

[KesTheWolf]

Bitcoin is an attempt to provide an economic system without a centralized bank, like the Federal Bank. Everyone has a copy of transactions made and gain money by making transactions. Who gets to make the transaction is determined pseudo-randomly via complex math calculations. Basically, the more processing power you throw at the calculations, the greater chance you have of making more transactions, and earning money.

The unfortunate side effect of this is, that people will create server farms to generate as much processing power as possible doing calculations as fast and often as possible, which requires a huge amount of energy to maintain. This is not good for the environment and is why you see people everywhere up in arms about how bad bitcoin is for the environment.

You can use computer GPUs in video cards to do bitcoin calculations, but the processing power in a video card is vastly inferior to a server farm... so you are not going to make nearly as many transactions, and not make nearly as much money.

 

[Rassah]

Seems DeviantArt added support for Bitcoin. So, predictably, Twitter furs are up in arms about it:
"Welp! Guess IMMA DELETE MY OLD ASS DEVIANT ART ACCOUNT"

Which is funny and ironic since Twitter added support for Bitcoin and sending bitcoin tips through Twitter accounts last month (getting rolled out slowly though). And then Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, also recently tweeted this:
Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.

So I wonder when furs who hate Bitcoin will start leaving Twitter?

And then there's also this:

Walmart plans to eventually install 8,000 Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S. and has installed 200 in a pilot program.

If you're a broke fur who is mad he missed Bitcoin and now hates it because you wrongly think it's bad for the environment, now you can't shop in the cheapest place, and can't get your popufur social credit kicks from Twitter anymore. There's fewer and fewer places to escape to to avoid it every year XD

And oh look, a frickin pension fund, which people depend on for retirement, decided to diversity $25mil into Bitcoin (it's only 1% of their portfolio, but still). It's not too risky for a pension fund, but it is for some others.

Houston Firefighters Pension Fund Makes Bitcoin, Ether Purchase

The fund has invested $25 million in crypto in what appears to be a first for a U.S. public pension plan.

www.coindesk.com

 

[Fallowfox]

21 pages in, did you all solve Bitcoin yet?

Mostly just seems like a thread for people to be toxic and nasty to each other- but then again, maybe if it weren't this topic, it would just be some other excuse to shout abuse at strangers on the interwebs? Who knows.

For some relevant and more light-hearted posting to this thread, a hamster called 'Mr Gox', who trades crypto-currencies by playing on the wheel in his cage, is currently out-performing a majority of human investors:

Mr Goxx, the crypto-trading hamster beating human investors

Can a hamster trading cryptocurrency beat human investors in the stock market? Mr Goxx can.

www.bbc.co.uk

I'm mostly just re-posting this news-article because of this comment by Mr Gox's anonymous owners:

'as with almost any topic discussed on the internet these day, it feels as though discussions can become heated and uncivil quite quickly'

 

[Rassah]

And more.
"Mastercard is preparing to announce that any of the thousands of banks and millions of merchants on its payments network can soon integrate #crypto into their products, CNBC has learned.

That includes #bitcoin wallets, credit and debit cards that earn rewards in crypto and enable digital assets to be spent, and loyalty programs where airline or hotel points can be converted into bitcoin."

Mastercard says any bank or merchant on its vast network can soon offer crypto services

The announcement could lead to a significant expansion in the ways regular Americans earn and spend bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Miles Marsalis]

Seems DeviantArt added support for Bitcoin. So, predictably, Twitter furs are up in arms about it:
"Welp! Guess IMMA DELETE MY OLD ASS DEVIANT ART ACCOUNT"

Which is funny and ironic since Twitter added support for Bitcoin and sending bitcoin tips through Twitter accounts last month (getting rolled out slowly though). And then Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, also recently tweeted this:
Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.

So I wonder when furs who hate Bitcoin will start leaving Twitter?

And then there's also this:

Walmart plans to eventually install 8,000 Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S. and has installed 200 in a pilot program.

If you're a broke fur who is mad he missed Bitcoin and now hates it because you wrongly think it's bad for the environment, now you can't shop in the cheapest place, and can't get your popufur social credit kicks from Twitter anymore. There's fewer and fewer places to escape to to avoid it every year XD

And oh look, a frickin pension fund, which people depend on for retirement, decided to diversity $25mil into Bitcoin (it's only 1% of their portfolio, but still). It's not too risky for a pension fund, but it is for some others.

Houston Firefighters Pension Fund Makes Bitcoin, Ether Purchase

The fund has invested $25 million in crypto in what appears to be a first for a U.S. public pension plan.

www.coindesk.com

It's kind of a dick move to assume that that Twitter user you probably don't know is broke, but okay.

I think is excessive for people to leave a social media platform just because it has a cryptocurrency payment option when they could make a statement by just not using the payment option. I'm suspecting that the cryptocurrency payment option isn't going to outpace regular payment system on DeviantArt (and believe Twitter, though I'm not on Twitter and only know the platform through quarterly reports).

We'll how the Bitcoin ATMs pan out, though I'm questioning that story somewhat in light of LiteCoin scandal.

As for the pension, 1% is not exactly a large vote of confidence in the cryptocurrency, though I'm glad the fund is exhibiting some restraint in investing in cryptocurrency.

 

[Rassah]

It's kind of a dick move to assume that that Twitter user you probably don't know is broke, but okay.

Oh, no, I assume most furs are broke cause it's a stereotype, and then that gets reinforced by claims furs make about Bitcoin. If you make dumb ignorant claims about an investment you don't understand, you're probably not the type of person to invest in the first place. Probably just someone with a j.o.b. (just over broke) who at most may have a retirement fund through work, mostly living paycheck to paycheck, increasing spending every time you get an increase in income. It's almost always a good guess XD

We'll how the Bitcoin ATMs pan out, though I'm questioning that story somewhat in light of LiteCoin scandal.

Litecoin scandal? Who cares about Litecoin?

As for the pension, 1% is not exactly a large vote of confidence in the cryptocurrency, though I'm glad the fund is exhibiting some restraint in investing in cryptocurrency.

True, it's not much. I'm privy to a few more in other countries that invested as much as $200 million in it though. But, it's all just a start. Ten years ago when I got into it and started telling people about it, the entire market cap was just $5mil.

 

[Miles Marsalis]

Oh, no, I assume most furs are broke cause it's a stereotype, and then that gets reinforced by claims furs make about Bitcoin. If you make dumb ignorant claims about an investment you don't understand, you're probably not the type of person to invest in the first place. Probably just someone with a j.o.b. (just over broke) who at most may have a retirement fund through work, mostly living paycheck to paycheck, increasing spending every time you get an increase in income. It's almost always a good guess XD

I mean, there are people associated with the fandom, myself included, who don't fit that category and maybe even aren't adamantly opposed to cryptocurrencies, but simply don't see it as the long-term gamechanger you do.

Given the considerable and demonstrable holes in your knowledge about economics, you should be slow to show such disrespect.

Litecoin scandal? Who cares about Litecoin?

It was a scandal where Litecoin claimed Walmart was rolling out Litecoin ATMs, which turned out to be false.

True, it's not much. I'm privy to a few more in other countries that invested as much as $200 million in it though. But, it's all just a start. Ten years ago when I got into it and started telling people about it, the entire market cap was just $5mil.

I would love to know what pension funds these were.

 

[MechaMegs]

Glad to see that conversation is still carrying about the volatile currency that can be tanked by a tweet from Elon Musk, much like other coins like Shibe coin tanking after he made a remark on them.

Hecking wild that this is allowed to be peddled to people, but if you believe that this will somehow overtake governments and the currency in place today I tell you what I got some swamp land in Florida to sell you.

 

[Rassah]

I mean, there are people associated with the fandom, myself included, who don't fit that category

What will happen to you if you suddenly lost your job tomorrow and couldn't get one for 6 months? Will you lose your house? Default on bills? Get into major financial trouble or even go homeless? If yes, you're "just over broke" (job). I'm assuming you're still entirely dependent on your job, so you're still in that category for me.

and maybe even aren't adamantly opposed to cryptocurrencies, but simply don't see it as the long-term gamechanger you do.

Few people have the foresight that I do. That's why they're where they're at and I'm where I'm at. And before you start with "lucky" thing, again, I've been telling you about this thing for years and still am, and you still don't have any.

Given the considerable and demonstrable holes in your knowledge about economics,

I still demonstrably know and understand it considerably better than you do, and probably better than anyone else in this forum. That's why you don't get Bitcoin and think it has problems, and why I get it and understand those problems. It's also, again, why you're where you're at and I'm where I'm at.

It was a scandal where Litecoin claimed Walmart was rolling out Litecoin ATMs, which turned out to be false.

Oh. First, I seem to remember OneCoin ponzi making that claim, and second, again, who cares about Litecoin? Tell me how the internet is flawed and not going to go anywhere because AOL has sucky service.

I would love to know what pension funds these were.

Houston Firefighters Pension Fund is one. For the others, you'd have to ask Greyscale to release that information. I'm under NDA or Chatham House Rules for a lot of the information, unfortunately.

Speaking of Greyscale, if you're concerned about Bitcoin's energy use, and are confused about why I'm actually excited about it, this guy does a great job of explaining exactly what I was trying to

The whole video interview is great, but this highlights how Bitcoin will change the entire global energy infrastructure for the better too, not just the money and power.

 

[Miles Marsalis]

What will happen to you if you suddenly lost your job tomorrow and couldn't get one for 6 months? Will you lose your house? Default on bills? Get into major financial trouble or even go homeless? If yes, you're "just over broke" (job). I'm assuming you're still entirely dependent on your job, so you're still in that category for me.

I mean, I'm a management consultant and I've been working since graduating university for a decade, while working for my current firm for more than half that. If I lost my job, I have enough to make rent and other expenses for a year, maybe six months if a few emergencies crop up. That would eat through a lot my savings and I wouldn't be waiting six months to get another job, though, whatever the next would be. I was definitely dependent on my job as a research librarian, my first gig out of college ... I was just graduated and was also caregiver for my grandmother.

That aside, most people are dependent on their jobs if they don't have significant savings, that sentiment is kind of silly.

Few people have the foresight that I do. That's why they're where they're at and I'm where I'm at. And before you start with "lucky" thing, again, I've been telling you about this thing for years and still am, and you still don't have any.

I've known of you, I think, because you profiled were WIRED awhile back, if I'm remembering correctly, though maybe it was another person because guys living off Bitcoin was a thing in WIRED for the longest time.

But I met you about year ago here, a year and half, max. So you haven't been telling me this for years.

Oh. First, I seem to remember OneCoin ponzi making that claim, and second, again, who cares about Litecoin? Tell me how the internet is flawed and not going to go anywhere because AOL has sucky service.

You could've look this up yourself, but here.

Houston Firefighters Pension Fund is one. For the others, you'd have to ask Greyscale to release that information. I'm under NDA or Chatham House Rules for a lot of the information, unfortunately.

Speaking of Greyscale, if you're concerned about Bitcoin's energy use, and are confused about why I'm actually excited about it, this guy does a great job of explaining exactly what I was trying to
The whole video interview is great, but this highlights how Bitcoin will change the entire global energy infrastructure for the better too, not just the money and power.

That is literally the pension in the article and one at that, but I'll watch the video and see what's up.

 

[Rassah]

If I lost my job, I have enough to make rent and other expenses for a year, maybe six months if a few emergencies crop up.

That aside, most people are dependent on their jobs if they don't have significant savings, that sentiment is kind of silly.

Good thing I didn't say "one year" instead of "six months." You're doing better than most.
Yes, most people are broke, or "just over broke," living paycheck to paycheck and being entirely dependent on their jobs whether that job pays them $10 an hour or $100 an hour. So it was perfectly fine of me to assume that that particular Twitter user was broke. 97% chance I'm right. 99% chance I'm right when it's people making stupid claims about Bitcoin like he did. In our current environment is safe to assume you're broke until proven otherwise, than to assume you're well off.

But I met you about year ago here, a year and half, max. So you haven't been telling me this for years.

I was pretty sure you were around since the old forum, back when FAF died, went to Phoenix Forum, and then was resurrected. I remember talking to Fallow, you, and many others here for many years. If you joined in only 2018 about four years ago, then sorry, my mistake. Sucks you didn't listen because you decided to side with the financially ignorant idiots who have been arguing with me against it for many years prior.

You could've look this up yourself, but here.

Paywall, and you seem to be missing or ignoring my point: Who cares about Litecoin?
Who cares about any of the other shitty "me too" altcoins that any economist familiar with fundamentals of money knows are worthless and will disappear eventually? Walmart IS actually adding Bitcoin ATMs though. Already added 200 of them. Walmart also takes Bitcoin directly in El Salvador, which means it now has a system it can roll out around the world if it wanted to. And thanks to Square, VISA, and Mastercard development, soon Walmart will be able to take Bitcoin by just continuing to accept credit cards.
While you guys keep claiming it's worthless, risky, problematic, etc, the world continues to steamroll on over all those complaints.

 

[Fallowfox]

You shall be insulted until you invest in the cryptocurrencies I tell you to.

*flips table*