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Comment by throwvirtever | Hacker News Reader

But his point that Bitcoin is also essentially controlled by a central authority, i.e. the Bitcoin community, has merit.

(Even if the control isn't formal, owning a large percentage of a finite "thing" still counts as control, if the "thing" is the unit of exchange for people's work, property, etc. A BTC economy would depend on what the large holders decide to do with their portion).

With Bitcoin, the community that controls the money supply is not at all democratic; it is the early adopters with large holdings that carry all the weight.

From the perspective of a non-early adopter, the Bitcoin world would be even worse then the central bank and government world. Banks can be regulated and governments can be thrown out. Bitcoin would create a tyranny of "hodlers" protected by intractable mathematics.

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except that people can always vote with their wallet against bitcoin, while his currency was unfairly advantaged by becoming tender for paying tax.

I dont think currency should be democratic, it should be impersonal and outside the whims of any group of people. Gold is like that. Cryptocuyrrencies may reach that stage after they solve all their bugs and their source code becomes fossilized.

Gold is not like that. When my country, France, floated the idea to maybe sell our reserves now that it's useless to pay for things people may need, the pressure from Russia and other very large holders was so heavy we dropped it: not worth the amount of enemy we would have made crashing its price.

People who advocate for gold... wait for it ... have gold ! It's the same as bitcoin.

The best currency is worthless and fleeting and represent work effort today and must be quickly converted back to work. Invest in schools to pay for a productive future that can afford your retirement, instead of clutching your precious metal.

Good point, gold is like a PoS system nowadays. Still, the ease with which bitcoin can be exchanged makes it a better alternative

> I dont think currency should be democratic, it should be impersonal and outside the whims of any group of people. Gold is like that.

If gold (or some other precious metal) is such a fantastic currency for a modern economy to use, why are no modern economies pegging their currencies to gold? Why didn't Nixon keep the dollar convertible to gold?

I don't know. And looking at the current state of fiat currencies, they don't know either.

Voting with your wallet has worked in several isolated instances where there is a clear divide and an ability to coordinate large groups of people. Meanwhile it has failed in areas with obfuscation and unclear understanding of complex processes (most of the companies/organizations in the world). Technical understanding of Bitcoin and crypto in general is so limited it certainly falls into the latter category.

Nothing which responds to interactions with humans operates outside the whims of any group of people.

> technical understanding of Bitcoin and crypto in general is so limited

Agreed, this is something to fix. The current crypto bubble is driven by clueless hype

> Nothing which responds to interactions with humans operates outside the whims of any group of people.

Science does and so do mathematics.

> it should be impersonal and outside the whims of any group of people. Gold is like that.

Gold is not like that at all. In the days of gold backed currencies, owners of gold mines had tremendous power to manipulate the market at their own whims.

> With Bitcoin, the community that controls the money supply is not at all democratic; it is the early adopters with large holdings that carry all the weight.

The mechanism according to which Bitcoin upgrades has nothing to do with decisions of whales or democracy. Read about how soft/hard forks and UASF specifically works.

I wasn't referring to upgrades, I was referring to control of the existing, finite supply of Bitcoin.

In a Bitcoin-centered economy, a relatively small community of "whales" would have de-facto control of the supply, because the supply available for circulation would depend on what they decide to do with their holdings.

True. Although their control of money supply would be limited, and they would lose some part of that control every time they decide to "increase" the money supply.

But Bitcoin has inflation though. The supply doesn't become limited until the inflation curve runs out in years to come. The early adopters will find the same financial pressures as with fiat currency.

This is why bitcoin is not the answer. Bitcoin is v0.1. It kickstarted everything but isn’t shaped up to the the gold standard. For that we need a more distributed and chain using the fundamentally same consensus strategy. Chia looks way more poised to address this problem and become the foundation for a real economy.

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