Topic: Bitcoin EFTs are bad for Bitcoin as a decentralized digital currency. - page 3. (Read 555 times)

Oh come on. ARPANET didn't have billions of dollars surrounding it and was not a mainstream brand name like Bitcoin is, and that was before virtually every human on earth had a device connected to the Internet.

And exactly why would you adopt a technology that does the same one the existing one does but it's way slower and way more expensive?

I don't see it as a competition.  It's not just that they aren't in the same league, they're playing an entirely different game.  It's like the difference between owning a sportscar and being a professional racing driver.  They can own as many cars as they like, doesn't stop us from racing.  They don't know (or care) how to use the asset they're holding.



ARPANET was declared operational in the early 1970s.  It took a while before that started to look like the internet we know and use today.  From nothing to mass adoption can sometimes take decades.  What ETFs are now doing is loosely equivalent to when AOL tried to build a walled-garden and sell people a watered-down and limited version of the internet.  People soon realised they were missing out on some useful stuff, so that business model died.

You know what's also a really, really, really long time in technology? 12 years  . And billions of dollars and the eyes of the whole world. And yet today Bitcoin is even slower and even more expensive to transact in than it was when it started. And blockchain architecture means it will only get worse and worse.

I completely agree with you that Bitcoin and cryptos generally don't need to serve as a currency in order to be useful. But people shouldn't make it out to be something it's not.

The largest financial institutions now have the power to sell a wrapped bitcoin and will make money regardless of whether Bitcoin goes up or down.  They can use this revenue to market their wrapped Bitcoin to the masses.  Don't forget about the exchanges doing the same thing. The result will be that most people will buy these ETFs not understanding the first thing about Bitcoin all the while giving banks more power over their assets. At the same time these financial institutions will be acquiring actual Bitcoin to hold and hypothecate.

The net effect will be that large financial institutions will own an even larger percentage of Bitcoin giving them control over the transactions that take place.  This is not a peer-to-peer transaction and it is not  trustless.

How will the decentralized Bitcoin Eco system compete with the banks now??

Okay, this is just getting silly now.  Try to gain some perspective.  Banks aren't controlling anything around here.  They have no influence upon Bitcoin's network governance whatsoever.  They've just built themselves a little sandbox to play in where they watch from a distance and place some bets.  They have their own, entirely separate, rules to play by.  Rules which don't impact us.  ETFs are mainly a plaything for the wealthy.  What they do (or don't do) doesn't matter in the slightest to us.  

At no point can those institutional investors become a threat to censorship resistant transactions and all the other stuff we care about.  Just because a bunch of foolish speculators are making a big deal out of ETFs, doesn't mean you need to blow things out of all proportion as well.



"Never" is a long time in technology.  I wouldn't be so sure about that.  Also, I suspect the unnecessary fervour with which people wish to see "mass adoption" is largely another symptom of speculators' greed.  Bitcoin doesn't need mass adoption to serve a purpose.  If it gives financial autonomy and freedom to those who wish to use it, then it has already found its purpose.  There's no rush to reach the masses, who largely don't understand it yet anyway.  And I suspect they probably won't understand it until they've lost the "war on cash".  Once CBDCs are everywhere, people will gradually start to comprehend the real importance of all this.

Cryptos are not technically Ponzi schemes, they are pyramid schemes that reward investors who get in early at the expense of investors who get in later.

Pyramid schemes, in various forms, have been around for thousands of years. In every society there was money and investment, there was some sort of pyramid scheme available to investors.

So as a product, cryptos don't need to be a practical means of value transfer in order to serve a purpose to the human race.



I have over 30 years experience in ultra-high-scale mission critical systems. My initial take on blockchain, as a technology, is that it could never scale even remotely close to what would be necessary to provide a mainstream payment system. As in, it could never get to even one thousandth of the scale and efficiency necessary to handle even world-wide credit card payments, let alone usurp other forms of payment like cash.

But being the old tech guy that I am, I was willing to be proven wrong because I know I don't always have all of the answers. I've repeatedly asked the question, and thus far nobody has been able to tell me what blockchain is being used for right now, in the real world for anything besides cryptocurrencies.

All of this tells me that my initial take on the blockchain architecture is right: it won't scale. It won't even get within four orders of magnitude of what is necessary to be a real currency.

I created a system that does scale to the level necessary to take over worldwide payments, and it's a paradigm that is simpler and more private that blockchain. The paradigm is so efficient that it allows anybody to create a currency and start using it in a few minutes, and I can give away the service for free.

But as you might guess, it's not decentralized, and it's not blockchain. That's the hard tradeoff until they repeal the laws of physics.

Most people here have thrown in the towel.  Bitcoin is not now, and will never be a currency!!!!! 

Then what are you paying $42,000.00 US dollars for exactly?  A way for wealthy individuals and institutions to sucker the masses into a ponzi scheme. Run the price up so we FOMO in and them sell their shares and transfer billions of dollars of wealth from the dumb money to the insiders?

Why would you continue to support a ponzi scheme when you know that is what it is?

The other option is to fight for what Bitcoin was meant to be. 
 
If the core principles of Bitcoin are adhered to Bitcoin can give the people back control of their money and the entire political and banking system.
If you allow the banks to control Bitcoin then you are allowing the wealthy to run your world using the fiat monetary system they have created and control.

The fact is that Bitcoin has been almost nothing but a speculation instrument for the last 10 years of it's existence, and it will never be anything else.

Blockchain is a needlessly complex technical architecture that will never allow Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to get even remotely close to scaling to the level necessary to rival other forms of payment. It's not even within 1000x the speed and price it needs to be to rival even credit card payments alone, and that's after 10+ years and billions of dollars of trying.

And 98% of crypto holders aren't going to care about any of this--they just want the price of Bitcoin to go up (in US dollars) so their investment does better, so they can convert it to US dollars at some point and buy stuff.

There's nothing "decentralized" about storing your private key in some app, which is sitting in some relational database at some start-up company like Binance or Coinbase, who follow all the government's KYC rules and connect your wallet to your entire life story.

Whatever the mythos was when Bitcoin was started over 10 years ago was, it's pretty much dead now.

The good news, however, is that cryptos have created something new and interesting: pure meme investments. There's nothing wrong with this, and indeed, investors have put billions of dollars behind these investments, so clearly there is a demand.

But it's time to get real about what cryptos really are...

The ledger is public but transactions are pseudo-anonymous. So you can see view the flow of coins from one address to the other, but would not know who is sending what. With certain practices, like not reusing addresses, not sending out of cold storage, using a mixer etc, you can increase the level of privacy.

These are the levels of privacy I am referring to.

I don't remember anyone in the Bitcoin community ever saying that Bitcoin ETFs are "good for Bitcoin".
Most of the Bitcoin supporters wanted  ETF approvals because they expected a big price pump, not because they thought that ETFs are good for Bitcoin. I think that ETFs are neutral towards Bitcoin. They aren't good, but they aren't bad, so there's no need to overthink this.
The discussion about ETFs helping mass BTC adoption or stopping mass BTC adoption will continue forever.
There was the same discussion about BTC futures trading and we saw that BTC futures trading didn't stop the BTC price to reach a big ATH back in 2021.
You can hate financial derivatives, but you can't stop the traders and investors from using them.

People will only see the short-term gain for themselves and not for the whole project. It's everyone for themselves now that bitcoin has hit mainstream and everyone and their mothers are wanting to get a piece of the action.

Huge financial institutions having the legal green light to meddle with bitcoin and crypto directly is something that has been wanted by the majority of the community since it was teased a few years ago. Now that it's here, I'm sure people will come to terms that it will not give in any unbelievable returns any time soon but rather make the space highly regulated that it will eventually turn into the playground for the rich and powerful and not your average Joes.

At the least though, bitcoin ETFs became somewhat a benchmark of bitcoin's legitimacy in the eyes of doubters and non-believers, but at this point do we really need that anyway?

Everything has pros and cons, many people celebrate the approval of bitcoin ETFs because bitcoin will get more attention from people and the demand for bitcoin will increase from there. But there's nothing wrong with many people being concerned that bitcoin will become more centralized with bitcoin ETFs, but again, everything has its pros and cons. You cannot ask for 100% perfection. Just as many people demand the highest level of privacy, they also want bitcoin to become a currency and be globally popular. Isn't that contradictory?

It is true that "Not your keys, not your bitcoins" and it is risky if you spent money and in return, you don't own the private key and don't own your bitcoins. It is actually not your bitcoins even you already spent money with a deal to purchase bitcoin.

It is risky practice to invest in Bitcoin through Bitcoin Spot ETFs but something to know. As a small investor, you won't be able to buy Bitcoin Spot ETF shares directly and will also have to use middleman companies. It increases the risk.

If people felt safe with custodial wallets, centralized exchanges, they can trust Bitcoin Spot ETFs even it's risky. There are many options and they are responsible for picking risky ones.

In another view, Bitcoin Spot ETFs will have to use money from investors to buy bitcoins before they can issue their Bitcoin Spot ETF shares. The point is new capital, that is big, will appear in Bitcoin market. Those companies can buy bitcoin from OTC market or Spot market but soon they will have to buy it directly on Spot market because available bitcoin on OTC market are not enough for their big capital and demand.

The vast majority of people I know also don't understand absolutely anything about bitcoin, we need to do the work of converting people to really understand bitcoin, it's a shame that the vast majority only come for greed in times of ATH.

Anyway, our generation is not yet ready for mass adoption, I believe that only our children and grandchildren will be able to understand bitcoin as they will be born into a world where it already exists.

Bitcoin failed as a currency because it can't process a lot of transactions per second and the precise is too volatile for economic planning. But instead Bitcoin thrived as an investment, and already on this forum most users are interested in its price growing rather than using it as a currency. The anti-fiat and anti-bank rhetoric is mostly just empty talk for hyping up the market.

I agree with it but it is really how it works, it is legal to do it.
Just like what happened in Gold when there was the first ETF. It is like you are owning a fake Bitcoin, not actual Bitcoin, you just had a paper or a data that is stored in the database that telling you own x amount of Bitcoin.

As everyone understands here, Bitcoin is a public ledger.  Privacy is not one of it's core tenants. As a matter of fact, one of the arguments we use to defend Bitcoin as a tool for criminals is that all transactions are recorded on a public ledger so it would be stupid for criminals to use it to commit a crime.

Bitcoin was created to be a currency that is decentralized and peer to peer with limited supply.  It is decentralized so that no one organization can create more of it.  In order for it to be decentralized it must be peer-to-peer.

Not one application created for bitcoin except Core is truly peer-to-peer.  In order for a transaction to be truly peer-to-peer both parties must be using their own node. If they are not then a third party node is in use and a third party is involved in the transaction. Satoshi made this very clear. That is why the node was designed to work on a standard PC.

ETFs are the ultimate third party.  Banks will custody it, KYC you and hypothecate Bitcoin just like they hypothecate other currencies.

 

Trust me, users here understand Bitcoin and are strict supporters of its privacy and decentralization. Just look up topics on freedom and privacy and you'll get so many instances of it.

We can't fight against ETFs and also understand that it is the only access some institutions have to Bitcoin.

As a second point, multiple posting on the forum is not allowed. Best to edit your new post into the first one.

If you want a decentralized currency that is peer-to-peer then how is that good for Bitcoin. It only servers to give banks more control of peoples money.

If you look at Bitcoin as an investment, which is what the banks want, then an increase in price will benefit Bitcoin holders.  Who holds the largest percentage of Bitcoin? Large institutions and wealthy individuals? A run up in price will make the rich richer and our greed will give them complete control of the one thing that could have transferred the wealth back to the people who create it.

The issue here is that individuals work and large institutions(banks) control the representation of that work(money).  The people who work should be paid with a currency that is controlled by them and can not be inflated(stolen/taxed) without their permission.

Don't lose sight of what Bitcoin was meant to do!!!!!

This forum is what I would consider to be the home of the Bitcoin core.  This should be the place where Bitcoin's core tenants are fought for.  But instead, Bitcoin is being sold down the river as fast here as it is in the general public.

Most people I talk to don't understand the basics of Bitcoin but people on this forum, as a general rule, should be fighting for Bitcoin.  

If Bitcoin is not a decentralized currency then what is it?