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Comment by shiado | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that the exact society destabilizing grand visions of the future billionaires advocate for are some of the main drivers behind people embracing Bitcoin. If you push a "you own nothing" WEF approved dystopian tech oligarch reality don't be surprised when people adopt an asset that cannot be confiscated by the government.

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> If you push a "you own nothing" WEF approved dystopian tech oligarch reality don't be surprised when people adopt an asset that cannot be confiscated by the government.

Completely agree. It's like something straight out of cyberpunk. Governments everywhere are just printing money like it's nothing and we're supposed to just accept this. Cryptocurrency doesn't systematically rob people via inflation.

I find it really cute that people think that a fully transparent public ledger, where every transaction is written for all to see, is the way to escape government control.

Remind me again what currency was used on the Silk Road for purchasing illicit goods and services. And how many of those vendors were prosecuted by the US gov?

It is silly if by "escape government control" one means avoiding taxes, buying illegal substances, etc.

But if by "escape government control" one means a currency that the government cannot interfere with to censor/stop transactions, or a currency that cannot be debased on the government's whim, the public ledger is exactly why bitcoin can do what it does.

Monero will hopefully make it hard enough that governments can't discover the information without significant effort. They'll probably still be able to target specific individuals but perhaps we can stop dragnet surveillance of everyone.

You take what affordances are offered when there's no hope in the future.

Exactly this. Bitcoin is the result of the gross power imbalances present in society. It's ironic that those on the heavier end of the scale, like Gates, are attacking Bitcoin with the cudgel of environmental policy. Rather than fix the power imbalances that are the root cause of his supposed gripe, Gates is advocating for the status quo enjoyed by him and his contemporaries.

Sure, but Bitcoin's wealth and access is also very concentrated. If you replace USD with BTC, you still have a power imbalance, just a slightly different one.

The real power imbalance is the Central Bank's power to confiscate wealth by inflating it away aka money printing, and not to forget the confiscation of physical gold by the US in 1933 (thanks FDR). There is a reason why countries decoupled from the gold standard to fund WW1. They got near infinite access to the nation's wealth. The loser of WW1 ie Germany eventually suffered hyperinflation, as have countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela recently. Should Governments have the power over your money to the extent of making it go down to zero? That's what happened in all of these cases.

So no, BTC != USD

The GP's point is that even if we switch to Bitcoin completely, there will still be a hierarchy of financial players, with regular people at the bottom, just like in the current system.

There are ~150MM people working in US, so let's say that only these 150MM need to perform financial transactions (get paid, pay others, etc.). How many of these 150MM will be direct participants in Bitcoin? If not all of them are miners, there will be some necessary centralization.

Why should anyone trust the 10,000+ Bitcoin miners? Do I as a regular user have more freedom when dealing with these 10,000 miners vs the 4,000+ US banks?

The problem isn't with US banks but central banks, and it isn't with concentration of wealth but confiscation of wealth through money printing

We very well might have Coinbase, BlockFi etc. act as crypto banks, and BTC whales as the new rich. That's reward for their work and belief. What do you think is the threat vector from BTC miners? The protocol nullifies such threats.

What would be bad is if a central authority could confiscate your work output at its leisure. That's the real battle here

Coinbase is not decoupled from government

It certainly isn't. Hence, we will continue to have taxes and regulation.

However, the BTC mantra is "not your keys not your coin". So if you leave it on Coinbase, you are welcoming attack by nation states to confiscate your cryptocurrency. This isn't an imagined threat. The confiscation of gold by FDR was a very real event that forced citizens to sell gold to the Government at a fixed price (of USD that the state printed at a whim) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

And what stops the bitcoin miners from collectively deciding that their current bitcoin reward is too puny and changing the code to give them 1M bitcoin per block?

Competition between cryptos?

If BTC miners band together to cause inflation, then people migrate to ETH or <insert other crypto>. BTC loses value, and them miners have 1. not gained value even with the extra 1M BTC per block, and 2. lost value because their mining rigs generate less value per energy unit.

Miners access to change the code is the same as you and I. Bitcoin is open source and code changes are reviewed by layers and layers of developers and approvers. Take a look here: https://bitcoin.org/en/development#code-review

Not to mention, they literally have $ millions in vested interest in the success of BTC by virtue of setup and mining costs. Such a move, even hypothetically, unless it is justified somehow, will cause loss of faith in the value of BTC and the fall in the value of BTC will make them lose value in mining as they earn these in BTC as well.

> The primary goals of the [Gates] foundation are to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the globe, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

What are you saying? That we should take the mission statement of the Gates foundation at face value and as something that represents the motivations behind everything he does and says?

I'm saying that the Gates Foundation is _fixing the power imbalances that are the root cause of his supposed gripe_.

No you are not, and the Gates foundation has absolutely not done anything to address the actions of central banks or the the United States' weaponization of the current financial system. Giving out malaria nets in Africa has nothing to do with any of this.

Your government can force you to do or give them anything, don't think math will stop them from trying. If they fail, they'll just lock you up.

> An asset that cannot be confiscated by the government

It might be intractable to confiscate bitcoin by attacking the math, but why wouldn't governments just put people in jail until they pay up? With adequate control over the internet, governments would be fairly able to track who's transacting.

Moreover for the vast majority of people on earth would still have basically zero money relative to the emerging bitcoin oligarchs. It would be a grossly unequal society, where there would need to be some non-math-based approach to getting money from the wealthy to redistribute to the less fortunate.

>Moreover for the vast majority of people on earth would still have basically zero money relative to the emerging bitcoin oligarchs. It would be a grossly unequal society, where there would need to be some non-math-based approach to getting money from the wealthy to redistribute to the less fortunate.

Those oligarchs won't be able to print more bitcoin or exclude (sanctions) their political enemies from conducting trade. Seems fairer than the current system.

>Those oligarchs won't be able to print more bitcoin or exclude (sanctions) their political enemies from conducting trade. Seems fairer than the current system.

Sure they would. If bitcoin continues to exist much longer, you'll likely see the larger governments define a set of rules for domestic miners, perhaps including requirements to only process transactions from registered accounts or signed by specific keys, or otherwise authenticated. Any international agreement on such a system reaching significant hash power would fork the ledger into legitimate and illegitimate versions, and generate obvious consequences

What you're suggesting is a fork, which would not be Bitcoin at that point.

the "real" bitcoin among forks is culturally determined, and institutions with power right now have the most control over that

I imagine the US government would do something similar to what they did in the past and it would push Bitcoin underground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

What would be the reason for imprisoning someone who holds Bitcoin? Don't we live in a free society?

And even if they imprison you they won't be able to access your money:

https://amp.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3120852/germa...

Presumably GP is talking about coercive imprisonment (e.g. contempt of court). If the court has ordered you to give something up, and you don't, they can imprison you to coerce you to obey.

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