Bitcoin - A tool or an investment?

WTF has this to do with EVE? I mean really…

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Nothing at all. That’s why it’s in Out of Pod Experience :slightly_smiling_face:

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I don’t see how they will link the BTC address to the private individual, yes of course they can see all of the transactions, but how will they link an address to a criminal where a jury can believe it belongs to that criminal beyond reasonable doubt?

Ok, let’s assume you have some BTC on an anonymous address and you send some to me. Some time later I use them to buy something. Now it hit the RL economy and it can be traced back to me and I soon get a visit from some angry people in suits who tell me to give them all I know about you because you got those BTC from selling illegal clove tea on the dark net.

Right, all you will know is that you have a Tor address (the onion router) when you are on the tor address you will be given a btc account address to send the BTC to. The black suits will need to order something and try to pick up clues from the postal details on the parcel.

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Bitcoin is a scam, its making moutains out of a molehill.

It’s definitely not a scam. It’s also not really trivial to understand why. It’s probably also not very important for most people to understand why.

I can agree it is being used as a sort of ponzi/pyramid scheme. Investors have done a good job hyping people up about buying and holding claiming it’s the next new thing.

A bitcoin and it’s network and associated features are all financial tools which can be used to transfer value. Now I have done lots of research I understand this fully.

The question is why are lots of people investing in a financial tool? If we analyse this carefully we will see that curently only a good handful of people in the world require money transfer without 3rd party approval and if we look a good 50 years into the future speculatively we cant really see any reason why cash transfers without 3rd party approval would be a big thing.

So yes, Bitcoin is being used to prop up a fake manipulated value, when the absolute truth is privacy enthusiasts/ bitcoin USERS, and people who don’t want 3rd party approval in transacctions seriously couldn’t care less what value Bitcoin has. It’s a quite silly that people are investing so many billions in it when Bitcoins user base is so small and focused.

It is fact that the value assigned to a Bitcoin will increase if the scarcity of Bitcoin gets higher, all thats happened is a group of influential investors have told their 1000s mentee’s “Buy Bitcoin!!!” then everyone does it thinking it’s some sophisticated advice when it really isn’t.

You already know my position :
As long as BTC can be presented as an investment, it is intrinsically presented with the lies that allow people to exploit other people for profit.
Whatever good property it may have, is hidden by its abuses.

And therefore, it BTC viability depends on its presentation as an investment, then it has intrinsically no good property (since they are shadowed by the bad ones) : its conception has crippling defects.

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(Yes, I know)

I think youre moving too fast with your opinion.

A digital token that business people can use to transfer value and create a ledger that can’t be changed is a great BUSINESS tool. As I’ve mentioned the user base for bitcoin where it is used for retail shopping is still very small.

So the act of a normal person buying Bitcoin is seen as a type of pre-emptive investment stratergy, with the hope that the currently small bitcoin retail community will suddenly increase in numbers and demand more and more bitcoin.

In reality that is not what’s happening, the value of a Bitcoin only increases due to normal people buying and holding it which artificially pushes the value higher.

There is a serious lack of understanding as to what/how bitcoin is used and in my opinion sales people who direct their customers toward bitcoin are to blame. They know full well that the current value is only propped up by normal people buying and holding it and not by genuine retail usage from the privacy community.

We have to understand that Bitcoin is only a tool, it is not aware it simply does what it’s programmed to.

A large part of the reason why you think it’s a scam is because you are not a cypher punk, or a privacy enthusiast who will do as much as they can to give out as less information as possible when going about their daily lives. THIS is who bitcoin is for and I think people like you and I and other people should just leave them to use their own value transfer method without sticking our noses in and trying to make money from it.

Bitcoin simply transfers a value privately without the need for a 3rd party, the part you misunderstand is that the privacy/cypherpunk community who actually use Bitcoin in a non-investment way could not care less if a Bitcoin was worth £200 or £60,000. Think about that seriously for a moment.

EDIT:

So let’s say an amazing brilliant game came out in the future and 5 people in different countries designed and owned it. The owners of the game may well request that all their customers pay them the £9.99 monthly subscription in Bitcoin. So every subscriber will have to buy Bitcoin (to the value of £9.99) every month and send it to the game owner.

The 5 people who owned and created the game can now all see the sales of subscriptions on a ledger that can never be changed and because all 5 of them understand Bitcoin they will all understand that the ledger is 100% accurate and has never been tampered with.

I think you’re moving too fast with your opinion.
There are a lot of tools which do that. This is not anything new. This does not make it better than the other existing tools.

have critical thinking.

This is who bitcoin can scam.

You completely missed my point in my previous post.

That is wrong, it needs a 3rd party.

That was not my point. Think about it seriously for a moment.

Your use of the word “intrinsically”

You seem to think scamming is a natural part of Bitcoin which was programmed into it, it’s not. I just edited in a good example of the proper way Bitcoin is used at the end of my last post.

Can you tell me the name of these existing tools so that i can google them?

Bitcoin was made for privacy enthusiasts, not normal people looking to double or triple their money in a short space of time. This fact/point needs to be understood before any realistic conversation can take place. If not don’t worry about it.

How exactly? A privacy enthusiast ONLY buys enough Bitcoin for that transaction…so if the retail item they are purchasing costs £40, then the privacy enthusiast will ONLY buy £40 worth of Bitcoin and send it to the retailer and subsequently receive their goods. I’m confused as to where you think the scam is in this scenario. This is not a falsehood and can easily be fact-checked, feel free to do so and then get back to me.

No, I did not say it was programmed into it.
This term implies a will to do so. This is not my stance.
It is however a part of btc, because of its value volatility, and abstruse mechanism, both allowing people to make unverifiable claims about it, and therefore abuse trust of other people.

If you build a road that is dangerous, then this road is dangerous even without a will to do so.

random search : Best Accounting Software For Small Business Of 2024 – Forbes Advisor

No, it was made as a PoC for an idea.

Because, just like you, they have a misconception of what BTC was designed for, its strength and its weakness.
They are blinded by their dogma and are therefore easier to manipulate.
They are the kind of people who will become a BTC evangelist after being a privacy enthusiast.

I’m not saying it’s bad to be interested in it. I’m saying it’s bad, when BTC is advertized because of its scam potential.

When people realize it’s a scam. That any hope of benefit they make from it, is a lie.
That nobody even dares promote it as an investment ; that every government criminalize advertising for it (or at least make it in the “gambling” products) ;
THEN you can tell its value. THEN you’ll be able to evaluate correctly its weaknesses and strength.
Until then,

And if it’s not possible to reach such a point, where nobody can consider it an investment, then it means

THAT is my point.
“Intrinsically” is deduced by the inability to use it without seing it as an investment. NOT by the way it is coded. The fact that the way it is used depends on the way it is coded, does not change that.

Which is only present because normal people are buying lots of it, then suddenly a large owner decides to cash out affecting all Bitcoin holders. Or there is some change in the law which makes people sell quickly.

It’s volitile because it’s being used in an artificial way where sales people are advising their customers to put their life savings into it and then sell when the value of is higher.

They are forcing the scarcity attribute of Bitcoin to artificially inflate the value.

You see, everything is showing us it’s not an ideal investment. but yet as you can see sales people are still advising customers to buy Bitcoin.

You still need to accept Bitcoin users (like myself) couldn’t care less what the value of a Bitcoin is, only financial advisors and people looking to double/triple thier money care. A bitcoin is simply there to have an accepted/current value assigned to it which represents real life legal tender.

Financial advisors have people tricked on a massive scale, unsuspecting investors will just say “wow” when they see how the value of a bitcoin has grown since 2009, the financial advisor will fail to tell the investor that it is just the act of normal people and some large businesses holding on to massive amounts of bitcoin which raises the value it represents.

Hmmm, I think the problem might be pretty bad. Say if we have a financial advisor who has advised 1000’s of people over the years to buy bitcoin, then the people he advised 5 years ago to buy bitcoin can now be advised to sell where both finacial advisor and investor makes money off of the most recent investors. The finacial advisor just needs to rinse and repeat because Bitcoin will always have a finite number and they will keep on getting new bitcoin holders to continue the chain.

The scarcity attribute of bitcoin can be manipulated by an army of dodgy investors, And the actual users of Bitcoin won’t be concerned about the value of a bitcoin because they will only ever use it on an ad-hoc retail transaction where they only buy a small set amount of it related to that retail transaction.

I definitely understand your view, really I do. as I’ve hinted above it seems easy enough for sleazy financial advisors to set up a money chain.

Have you read the white paper? I believe this was written as and when bitcon first appeared and can definitely be taken as fact, it was made to be decentralized and free from government/bank control. It was simply supposed to be a digital currency which transfers value without a 3rd party. Dates of white paper are confirmed there are also forums which the creator of bitcoin spoke on which confirm the motives for creating it.

This software is great, but;
1, It does not create a “trusted” ledger users are free to enter any info they like into it.

A business asking their customers to pay in bitcoin will enable all owners of the said business to completely trust whatever sales ledger is generated without question.

You can scroll back up and note the real world examples I wrote and the fact i am a bitcoin user. Are you purposely ignoring where I wrote “cypherpunk or privacy enthusiast” they use bitcoin without seeing it as an investment. feel free to fact check, these communities existed many years before bitcoin and have actually always been working on a digital currency.

The creator of bitcoin is the only person in the world who was able to solve the “double spend” issue which arose with ANY digital currency idea making all previous attempts fail. Bitcoin is the only creation which addresses the double spend problem.

The “only” part has yet to be proven, and its proof is required to not have the issues I call “intrinsic” to BTC.
I’m saying, if BTC can’t reach a point where it’s not used at all for scamming (ie as an investment), then it’s value will remain one of a scam tool.

That’s precisely my point.
For BTC to not be a scam, it needs to be not an investment.

{citation needed}
it’s not present in https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Only present elements are

  • electronic, decentralized money
  • prevents desync of the db (double spending)

Precisely, which is a quality.
Those are still

A digital token that business people can use to transfer value and create a ledger that can’t be changed

The ledger can be changed, otherwise it can’t support new transactions. What you mean is that users can’t alter existing transactions. A lot of such exist, even if sometimes as simple as the one to manage the Plex or the ISK in eve.

Ho yes, I’m purposely ignoring everything, there is no way I would rather focus on the important points where you mistake my stance rather than on specific parts where you deduce things based on those mistakes, and your argument is already invalidated since it relies on wrong assumptions :roll_eyes:

No. The double spend is only possible in a decentralized system.

is it ?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4259780_Combating_Double-Spending_Using_Cooperative_P2P_Systems

My argument is actually for people to stop trying to double or triple their money using Bitcoin. Currently all they are doing is allowing a longer term bitcoin holder to cash out when they buy in.

My further argument is to leave BTC alone if one doesnt have a need for privacy/no 3rd party in transactions/ ledger that can’t be edited.

Bitcoin is not for the normal person, it is a sophisticated business tool where you need solid knowledge to buy or hold it. Yes it can be invested in, but sales advisors must be more open as to how an investors will make money and that the value of it is artifical.

That’s the definition of an investment.

Also, of gambling. Because “solid knowledge” is actually “luck” - unless you are actually able to force the market to fluctuate yourself, that is, you are the one scamming other people.

A bitcon investor should really be persons who are prepared to pass their investment on to future generations due to the actual retail usage of bitcoin being low. It is definitely going to take a good 30 or more years for the retail usage of bitcon to increase.

You misunderstand me, when I say solid knowledge I just mean knowledge about using Bitcoin in a retail capacity only which is absolutely nothing to do with investment. I’ve mentioned many times now that I myself use it for some retail purchases. You will need to accept at some point that there is a community of people that use it in an ad-hoc way like I do and are not interested in investing or holding it for the purpose of doubling our money.

Yes, you are correct. The only way to increase the apparent value of a bitcoin token is to make the scarcity of it go sky high. this will mean that “investors” after you will assist in raising the value which will sooner or later enable you to cash out with profit.

We are talking about the double spend in the digital realm with a digital currency, not an existing fiat currency which already has safeguards in place to protect against double spend. Factually Satoshi Nakamoto (bitcoin creator) is the only person in the world to solve this problem, I’m not talking about proposals, I am talking about actual functioning solutions where Bitcon was the first to solve the problem.