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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I find bitcoin to be the greatest innovation in finance in the 21st century, a watershed moment in economic development. For the first time any person can own a financial asset completely decoupled from any government. That’s the value proposition for me. It’s not nihilism - it’s optimism in the individual to succeed over the corrupt state.

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You could already own land, houses, cattle, ownership shares in companies that produce useful goods other humans want, all things the government doesn't control. If the concern is the government could potentially seize control of those things, sure, but a sufficiently malicious government can seize control of you and no amount of magic numbers on a USB stick is going to stop them.

All of that is at the whim of governments and could be seized. If properly stored no one knows you even own bitcoin let alone would steal it. Land is probably the most dangerous asset of all from a fear-of-government perspective.

I predict his reply will be that your property rights to land, cattle, homes, and common equity are protected by governments.

If people find out you own a lot of Bitcoin you are relying on governments to protect you from theft, blackmail, kidnapping schemes, etc.

You were right!

Ding ding ding!

The biggest society wide actualized impacts of crypto have been:

1) Ransomware

2) Electricity usage

3) International reserve currency for bad actors such as North Korea, terrorist cells, and drug cartels.

I don’t see any of these three as a positive; certainly not the greatest financial innovation of all time. I also don’t see other use cases having the size of these three. (Ignoring speculative investment as a use case)

I see the major benefit of bitcoin being that no government can stop it or seize it from me if properly stored. USD was used for crime well before bitcoin. The benefit of reducing the power of government and empowering individuals is vastly worth whatever electricity it costs. After all, if people want to use electricity to stream pornography, I don’t care. They are paying for it - and so are bitcoin enthusiasts.

I'm happy that the state has the ability to seize illegal funds from people. Outside of minarchists and a few others, there aren't many people who think that completely lawless wealth is a good plan.

In the West we have reasonably decent government. In other countries, not so much. You are a law-abiding citizen today, and tomorrow you are a criminal whose assets should be seized. Just ask my family that fled communism!

Btc won’t protect you against a government that is willing to show up to your house and send you to Siberia or shoot you in the head. The “sweet spot” of a sufficiently corrupt country where seizing wealth is common but Btc would protect you is pretty small.

The downside is that is fuels a speculative mindset, not only among so-called investors in bitcoin but as a ripple effect throughout the economy. However great of an innovation bitcoin is in theory, in practice it could have unintended consequences you ought to consider.

Fully agree. I feel sorry for those who don't understand this.

Couldn't you do that with gold or even earlier, seashells?

You can't send gold over the Internet. The question isn't whether Bitcoin lets you do things that couldn't be done before, it's whether those things are valuable.

"For the first time any person can own a financial asset completely decoupled from any government."

Not advocating Bitcoin but it's a lot easier to have your gold or seashells stolen than Bitcoin.

I'm not sure that's actually true, given how common software security vulnerabilities are.

> a financial asset completely decoupled from any government

is gold not one of these?

I neglected to explain it in my original post but bitcoin has all of the good properties of gold and none of the bad - primarily in terms of how easy it is to settle (especially over long distances) and the guaranteed fixed supply and emission rate.

Gold has real industrial and consumer uses (and therefore reliable demand). I don't see why anyone buys Bitcoin for any reason other than that another speculator will pay him more for it later.

Why does it have to be more? As long as someone else pays him roughly the same amount for Bitcoin in the future, it’ll have worked as a store of value.

Do you really think the people buying gold are buying it so that they can sell it to industry, as opposed to buying it so that they could potentially sell it to someone else who does the same thing? If gold price were based on industrial uses alone it’d be worth a small fraction of what it’s worth now. Is gold a Ponzi scheme?

Except bitcoin derives its value from...USD. It’s there because you can buy and sell with...USD. You see where I am going?

Value is subjective.

For me, Bitcoin has value because it can't be inflated, and I can carry it on my head over any country's frontier without governments harassing me because of it.

Sure, Bitcoin is a means to an end, I can only "use" it by exchanging it for something else, but so is any other currency.

If US govt banned bitcoin and the exchange of it to USD, bitcoin will go to zero. And no one will be willing to defend it because it’s quite literally backed by nothing tangible or intangible.

> For me, Bitcoin has value because it can't be inflated

BTC will continue to be inflated for another 100 years. Inflation of BTC is currently higher than CPI in the US.

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