It's one year, unless something changed recently.

One year yes, and politics wants to change it..

Legally obtained bitcoin is what the person I responded to said, suggesting anti money laundering concerns which are the concerns I responded to

And the tax liability sister comments all disagree with each other

Notably, the parent commenter hasn’t replied at all yet

It's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.

But the volatility hasn’t gone away. Compared to previous periods of broader interest in it (rife with the awful FOMO habits of people) sure it’s not as bad, but it still fluctuates wildly and without warning. In the past 12mo it has gone as high as 120k and as low as 60k, currently around 76k. You cannot reasonably use a currency like that. Your wealth can’t be doubling or halving over months with 10pt swings over a single day being a common occurrence. How much mental energy and planning would have to go into timing any and all purchases and earning?

Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.

It would be, except when the primary value proposition is capturing the upside of that volatility. In the case of BTC a sustained lack of volatility is going to create significant downward pricing pressure. At some point that will trigger a run and as stakeholders have condensed the rut will get deeper and deeper as the upside of the volatility swings continually lower.

https://bitcoincalculator.tools/calculators/lightning

Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.

Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.

could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.

Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!

USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).

There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.

But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.

If russia or china has a real interest because relevant amount of people start using it, they would easyl be able to stop this.

Chinese firewall is real.

Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.

And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.

Ethereum, for all its other faults, has shown that burning lots of electricity is not necessary for cryptocurrencies.

Fossil fuels were always worth way more than people ever realized.

Like Joni says, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone."

what is dead may never die

Anything but a log scale would be misleading. When showing long term growth of something that has grown so drastically, it is imperative to use a log scale so that 10% gains look consistent over time. Especially in finance.

you can press the "linear" button if you'd like.

but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part

Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there)

It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.

Slightly more abstract: my argument is that assets with a very skewed probability distribution of future value will have a positive current value, even if in the vast majority of cases, they'll be worthless in the future.

Lottery tickets were only an example.

to be fair the majority of the statements that site mocks are not about bitcoin being dead but being a ponzi scheme, evil, hard to use by normal people, silly, a risky investment etc.

All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.

I hate this side.

The first quote i got was "Bitcoin is evil" and then the subtitle "bitcoin worth now 10000%"

Bitcoin is still evil and it has very much to do with the value of bitcoin.

This page is ignorant and shit :(

The problem with bitcoin is that the only real evidence of it's success is it's price has gone up.

It's very reminiscent of stocks that rocket 500% in a year, while almost nothing in the underlying company changed.

Many of these quotes are technical or social critiques of Bitcoin, not claims that it is "dead". Here's one for example: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2023-10-26-every-single-bitc.... It is dishonest to frame this as a disproven claim just because the price has gone up since the quote. The truth of this claim has nothing to do with the success or failure of Bitcoin.

A couple other examples: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2019-02-07-bitcoin-inefficie..., https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2024-11-20-nobel-prize-winni.... This bothers me, you can't respond to a genuine critique with "but look how much money I've made!"

Buy signal

They've hodled from the original ~$200,000 donation to $1.2 million, now down to $800,000.

If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls

Really hope so too. Would be devastating

That is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

taking on debt you don't really need.

How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.

It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones

You are neglecting interest paid. It doesn't matter who issues the credit - the Medici family or the US Federal Reserve.

Your understanding of monetary theory is somewhere between 110 and 5,000 years off. Furness had a pretty cogent explanation of a monetary system without central authority or functional currency about 100 years ago with the Yap. They even managed to have bouts of inflation without the concept of a bank or state.

credit does provide a kind of flexibility that is sometimes needed, though. However, predatory lending, and the endless stacking of recursive loans, and government money printers are a massive stability issue that we're running into globally, and have (as you say) run into multiple times, historically.

My thought on this would be a dynamicaly stable currency. estimate debt and transaction activity, and the more debt and more liquid activity there is, the more deflationary currency should be. the less debt there is, and the less of a percentage of the money is actually in-use, the more inflationary the currency should be. this, though, is fairly off-the-cuff.

No, no. The issuer of your money is really, really happy when you don't use the money. Because that means they can issue more money, without causing inflation to spike.

..and, you think that covers both individual and collective good?

..balance in all things. Neither being completely stingy, individually, nor being excessively spendy will benefit us, individually or collectively. ..but there are times for either.

I wonder if there's a way to quantify that and put a variable on the conditions, and have an inflationary/deflationary currencynthat is dynamically stable depending on conditions.

..i mean, individually, most people will eventually spend, if they have much saved and it benefits them to do so. but occasionally, we do need a kick in the pants. whenever the economynis in gridlock, that's the time for inflation. ..but when people are spending excessively, it's a time for deflation, which discourages taking on debt, and pushes the economy towards real wealth. rewarding long-term thinkers is valuable, and has a very broad effect on society.

The Japanese economy is not, in any sense, destroyed. It doesn't get the infinite exponential growth unhinged economists want, but life on the ground is stable, wealth inequality is low, cost of living is low, average quality of life is very high. It is the perfect counterexample to the doctrine of chasing line go up.

The problems with using physical gold as currency are very well known. When population would increase, or when someone would hoard it, it would cause deflation. Likewise, when a new deposit of gold was found, it would cause inflation.

This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.

Wasn't the great crisis in first half of 20th century caused by deflation?

Yep, exactly why Bitcoin people dont understand their own system.

First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth.

So then you need an investment; you're going to have to return a multiple of the deflation rate since the risk of your supermarket shutting down is probably higher than the currency changing course.

First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth.

So how are you going to build the supermarket?

Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world.

If it needs to give you more money than just saving the investment (which it should, you need to be rewarded for the risk or you would just save the money), obviously the profit margin has to be higher than it currently is, which would increase prices.

But a deflationary system rewards inherited wealth. It's a pyramid scheme where the person at the top splits their big piles up into smaller piles, selling them to newer people, who then sell their smaller piles to newer people...

So you'd be working for 0.000000000000000001 coins per day at the amazon warehouse, while Bezos has 500000 coins because he was born with them. There would never be a way for you to get 500000 coins, because there are only 20m coins in existence.

My family needs food though. Perhaps a supermarket is a poor example. I think people might purchase fewer luxury goods in a deflationary world which TBH I'm not sure is a bad thing.

To put it another way, the model you're presenting reads well in an economics textbook and I'm sure is exactly how we justify our MMT social policy but it doesn't fully account for actual human behavior. I'll buy necessities (house/food/water/electric/communication) even in a deflationary economy.

When was the last time you went to the grocery store and thought "I better buy this milk today because my money will have less spending power tomorrow"?

But if sitting on a pile of cash provides returns, eventually all money will accumulate into the hands of a few ultra wealthy individuals. (Hmm...)

Surely most of the people putting their money under the mattress would still need to use a little of that money to buy food.

I mean, cardio is Rule #1 of the zombie apocalypse in Zombieland.

This can be said about many conflicts between the individual and society, though. In many ways we are prevented from just taking what we want and “keep us in shape” because if everyone did the same it would be a problem.

This would be more convincing if it wasn't from a site trying to sell me gold. Do people really believe that the mechanization of clothing production in the industrial era has made no difference to "real" prices?

(Rome definitely had inflation crises!)

If you have a brilliant technical solution that requires throwing out all conventional economics, you don't have a brilliant technical solution. Bitcoin is rotten to its core and every excuse you make for it proves the point.

For most of human history the money was stable.

Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.

I think deflation-based economy could produce some interesting capital-allocation environemnt. Investment offering a 2% real return becomes unattractive if cash itself earns 2% real purchasing-power yearly. You could argue this raises the hurdle rate for investment and eliminates low-quality projects. And the counterargument is exactly the same: it raises the hurdle rate for investment and therefore some potentially good projects would never receive funding. And thats probably where the intellectually interesting argument really lives, rather than in inflation good deflation bad

The normal term would be “velocity” of money, btw. Its a key consideration in addition to total supply whenever you need to evaluate inflation or manias.

Why does everyone assume that we're the ones keeping money under the mattress, not the ones who would have been paid by money otherwise not spent? All transactions have two sides, no?

For most of human history the money was stable.

Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.

However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.

But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).

Hahahaha, oh my. You think the world was some idyll halcyon pre bretton woods? My man Enmentrna is going to come back and declare a jubilee for your great revelation. When has any historic monetary system been “stable” for an appreciable amount of time. Debasement is a very literal ancient word and problem.

Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.

I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.

During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.

(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)

There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.

At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?

At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.

The other option is to make everyone gamblers, either speculate on properties or stocks. Pick your poison.

The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise.

Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.

Tail emissions and infinite divisibility are proposals to address this.

AFAIK it can be changed later.

Yes, they could change that, too.

However I expect that adding more decimal places will actually happen, but adding extra bitcoins won't.

Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.

21M is the theoretical cap. At the moment there are 20M and more are constantly being mined. Miners have to convert bitcoin into real currency to pay for their electricity both for mining and transaction fees. This means that there is always a supply of bitcoin for sale. Which is fine if there is still demand for new bitcoin, but who's buying bitcoin these days? It has underperformed both the S&P 500 and gold over the last 5 years. I expect bitcoin inflation to continue. (AKA the bitcoin price to continue to go down).

at this point bitcoin will be worthless

How does that work?

Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?

Only if there has been an outgoing transaction from that account. If the address has only received deposits then only the hash is available.

Technically it might be more profitable to mine extraterrestrial diamonds.

I mean, it's the opposite of that; it's forced illiquidity when people lose access to their keys. There is no way to gain access to those coins and you cannot "force" liquidity on the bitcoin protocol.

If people are trading bitcoin on margin or if Strategy is forced to sell a large percentage of its holdings.

This could become the premise of a near-cyberpunk heist movie..

Similar to Swordfish? :)

Bitcoin doesn’t pay interest. And that’s a good thing.

Hype vibe investors, probably.

"Not being seizable" hasn't really worked out for bitcoiners who've been arrested. Or for that matter robbed at gunpoint.

This seems orthogonal to the ability to seize assets.

There are plenty of legends of old wallets "waking up" due to the person getting out of prison, as it seems the only plausible way someone can sit on 30 BTC for 10-15 years, through all the news and price movements, without touching it once. One would only expect to hear about the successful seizures law enforcement makes.

People who want to be scammed.

"Number go up" people

Pretty much everyone. There's a reason people lost money with ftx, Mt gox and other scams.

Managing your private keys is cumbersome, error prone, requires some computer literacy, the list goes on.

Tbh I have been kind of impressed by how fast L2 businesses brought back centralisation in every possible way. I guess it's more efficient for them.

In the same way, the internet was supposed to be decentralised, everyone being in charge of their own servers. But in practice nobody has the time to set up their own MX servers.

but what sort of people keep their bitcoins on the exchange ? the whole point is about not being seizable by dirty governments...

For most people, cryptocurrency is just another stock market / betting app.

not being seizable by dirty governments

If you believe that, I have some land to sell you

Most people don't care about that at all

Or this. https://www.osc.ca/quadrigacxreport/

Has cryptocurrency gone away?

Improving or standardizing the approach is all well and good, but if it's not natively integrated into MEW / MM / Coinbase Wallet / Phantom it's sort of irrelevant. Argent was the best attempt but they failed so bad commercially that they pivoted to a google drive recovery mechanism and changed their name.

Also see: https://m.xkcd.com/2501/

The other day a neighbor asked me about AI. I said I wasn’t really up to date with things anymore. They asked: like what things? And then I said: like the Astra model that OpenAI released yesterday, I know nothing about it. And they were like: “bro, yesterday?! And you feel you’re not up to date?! Pfff”

A better solution (than Shamir secret sharing) are threshold signatures.

The difference is that with Shamir you have to reconstruct the private key in one place before you can sign. With threshold signatures multiple servers can collaboratively sign without ever reconstructing the private key in a single place.

For chains like Solana, Aptos, SUI that use ed25519 (schnorr signature), there's a pretty clean solution called FROST.

For Bitcoin and Ethereum/EVMs that use ECDSA it's a bit trickier but there's been a lot of research recently, so there are solutions.

code is law , remember? Lol

consensus is easy. its that people want to not pay taxes and still use public infrastructure anyway. thats the real theft.

We slid down that slope a long time ago. Taxes are good and pay for my important things, up until the moment they pay for someone else's important things, then it is theft.

and on the other hand we have trillionaires who spend their wealth on fascist party propaganda and censorship

Well, it is socialist in that the government basically gets to own more of everything you own every year.

What will they think of next? tying healthcare to employment that you lose the moment you get fired to meet quarterly profits? Madness i tell you!

If your goal is to reduce investment that creates jobs for labour, then you should do that.

If the government forced transfer of ownership %, instead of forcing a sale, it would be not as bad?

Makes sense IMO, much better to tax wealth than discourage transactions.

It's much, much worse to tax wealth.

No, people who die as a direct result of capitalist economics are not counted because that would be inconvenient and wouldn't fit the CIA's narrative.

You'd need a definition of capitalism first. Since for most people, it's just the default mode of living -- e.g. the very term "capital" comes from "head", as in "head of an ox", as early cattle culture practiced capitalism, so it predates the agricultural revolution and was practiced by nomadic groups.

A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power.

So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers.

Nothing, hence my point about it being a straw man :^)

Communism is not socialism. What Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung did was wrong because they did basically the exact opposite of a socialist policy, centralizing power out of workers hands and taking all surplus value into the central government instead of distributing it.

They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority.

Because our current social safety nets all work by assuming the next generation pays for the care of the current elderly. Those elderly do need 'stuff' they need doctors and nurses and nursing homes. Thus taxes will have to go up, and if it has to, it may as well be progressive.

The fascism we CURRENTLY HAVE is far more preferable

Neovim’s current donation page says that funds are managed by OpenCollective — a 501c6 organization in the US. 501c6’s are tax exempt.

So assuming they are the holders of the bitcoin as well, there would be no tax liability.

then they would sell some of the bitcoin and pay the taxes. If they don't have the wallet anymore then they don't pay any taxes.

Rainy day fund. Everybody needs one. Love neovim for living under their means, great program!

For a reference point, when I was unemployed and between jobs, I got involved with Neovim for fun, and after some contributions, I eventually tried some full(ish)-time paid work. I wrote the native lua LSP client (:h vim.lsp, and the nvim-lspconfig repo) for Neovim in a few weeks for about $3k USD (circa 2019)? This amount could fund quite a lot of work to be sure.

well, I just emailed the project just to see if they're aware of it

part of me feels like this is most likely a defunct wallet and nobody involved with the project has the keys anymore

I got the Bram Moolenar reference.