Topic: Bitcoin was created to reform money and provide financial freedom - page 8. (Read 1550 times)

Satoshi idea was to create the latest breakthrough called "BITCOIN" which is decentralized and has a limited supply due to his concerns about fiat currency issued by the government "Central Bank". Satoshi felt that there was inequality or no fairness in the public's trust in the banking system which often lends money in the form of credit bubbles with very little reserves. Abuse of trust from banks is considered to be detrimental to society in terms of being vulnerable to identity theft and account draining.

Satoshi criticized the system built by the government by launching Bitcoin to the public. With Bitcoin he hopes to provide justice to society. The presence of Bitcoin can bridge society back to using rare assets that are considered valuable because of their scarcity.

The hope is that Bitcoin can be used as a better alternative to fiat currencies which are vulnerable to devaluation and abuse of trust. Bitcoin which is very limited in quantity and cannot be regulated by any authority, makes most of its value come from people's trust in its supply and demand. Bitcoin has provided financial freedom for people who have always been in the grip of a government that always abuses trust.

Bitcoin was created to provide financial freedom - that's true! But do you disagree to the fact that it has it's disadvantages as well? It can't scale up to handle the volume of transactions required for global adoption. LN solved the problem to a certain extent but the reach of LN is still low and it's a sidechain. A lot of Bitcoin puritans may oppose my comments, but Bitcoin is a bad payment method if we compare to the traditional payment methods we have available in the market.

Bitcoin is a great investment asset which has outperformed every other investment asset in the market. But as a payment processor, we have better options available.

That is if you also want a piece of the kings crown on top of the bitcoins. As Fiat.

Tell me. Who pays the roads? What have the Romans ever done for us?

One problem.  Due to every body else happily abiding to Know Your Customer and all other sorts of policies and regulations, us who choose to benefit from Privacy and Security are starting to suffer.  The option to use Bitcoin as it was meant to be used is still there.  But this option is slowly becoming not an option any more if only few of us can spend and receive without giving up personally identifiable information.

By restricting us, every body else kind of enforces the Know Your Customer way into every body.  Realistically speaking.  How difficult is it today to buy and sell Bitcoin with no Know Your Customer compared to five years ago?  The people who were abiding before and who did not care is not affected in any way today.  On the other end of the stick, we are affected enormously.

It is nice that we still get a chance to use Bitcoin the way we want.  But while that is due to the lack of Censorship in Bitcoin, restrictions make it almost impossible to use it the way we really want nowadays.

Bitcoin has a decentralized use case.  More money means more freedom.  Satoshi's vision requires more adoption.  Higher price means more attention.  Attention drives adoption.

I think Bitcoin isn't really a project that came into Satoshi Nakamoto's mind simply because of the financial crisis in 2008. The development of electronic money or digital cash has been in progress already for decades before that global economic crisis hit. Satoshi's work is but a part of this progress. If you look back at Bitcoin's forbearers and inspirations such as eCash, Hashcash, and others, they were already there prior to the crisis. So I think Bitcoin isn't a response to it.

You are right, a decentralized project is slowly becoming centralized, the fact that police can size all your coins at any time if they decide your activity is an illicit one is a dead end for the game. But we still have the freedom to use our own nodes, our own wallets and trade it pear to pear.


That's cool, it would be nice to know more about those projects if you can tell us more. Maybe that way you get more developers interested on it.

As much I'd love what you're saying about bitcoin, that's not what it's for, @Mate2237's purpose of bitcoin is much closer to the bitcoin whitepaper and if you read the abstract of the whitepaper, it didn't say there anywhere that Satoshi wants financial freedom or something, maybe it was down the line but bitcoin was made so we can do a trust less transaction and cut off the middleman. Maybe that purpose of financial freedom just got interpreted by other people and now it's the norm that we believe to be the reason why bitcoin was created, Satoshi didn't have it in his mind that bitcoin would grow this high so I don't believe that it's made because of the 2008 financial crisis, it's just a convenient coincidence.

If I’m not mistaken, bitcoin was created not to replace fiat but to act as a reserved currency and serve as another option for people who prefer to use bitcoin more than fiat. Bitcoin brings freedom not actually to spare us from using banks but to open new opportunity for digital currency payment system. And I think for now, we can see a lot of people doing transactions with bitcoin but for those countries who are not yet legalizing bitcoin, they see bitcoin as an investment tool that can provide excellent profits.

It's a shame, but I don't think people, for the most part, are going to learn.  The longer I'm a part of this, the more I become cognisant that most people don't truly appreciate what any of this is really for.

The option is certainly there for people to use Bitcoin in the correct manner if they wish to.  They'll be the rare fortunate ones to gain the privacy and security benefits.  I'll always advocate for taking this approach.  But I think the number of people actually doing it will remain relatively small.  Even if it is safer and more beneficial.

However, if the majority want to piss that gift up the wall and use Bitcoin in a way that completely sacrifices the security and privacy, that's their choice.  When the coins get stolen, or the exchange disappears, or all their personally identifiable data gets leaked, they better be aware of the fact that they have no one to blame but themselves.  

You get exactly what you choose with this.  On your head be it.

Nothing wrong with using Bitcoin as an investment, ETFs, entities besides individuals owning Bitcoin. That's all natural because Bitcoin is money.

But for sure it would be good if we could development a much larger ecosystem of decentralized exchanges. The ones I know of have almost no volume compared to crypto exchanges and so you don't get good prices on them. Also they are naturally harder to use.

I think getting a DEX movement going and getting people on LN is the way to go.

LN allows payment to be cheap and instant, which is the only way payments are going to get popular. Even if at first its just used how Venmo is used to pass money between friends, rather than pay at merchants which requires merchant adoption. Though taxes are of course a problem if you're passing bitcoin between friends that's all taxable. Though it'd be a a pretty small use of bitcoin (not like selling lots of bitcoin) and the IRS wouldn't even be able to track it so maybe that's the sort of thing that could slide under the table without any real issues, sorta like when workers get paid in cash.

And then if DEXes could get popular enough to get real volume their prices wouldn't be so far away from the spot price and they'd become more useful. And then you can keep your bitcoin privacy. But its hard to get to that point because crypto exchanges are just so much easier to use.



Realistically I think building p2p connections happens at the local level. There are small communities in various places in the world who regularly use Bitcoin because they have a weak currency or don't have easy access to digital banking services and stuff like that, so it benefits everyone in the community to use Bitcoin. I think p2p usage gradually spreads out from those places to encompass a wider and wider net. The average person in a first world country and lots of non-first world countries don't have a huge need for p2p payments. For those populations growing one's wealth and wealth sovereignty I think are currently the main use cases. Though of course eventually being able to easily spend the wealth, including in p2p ways rather than just customer-merchant ways, would be ideal.

The process you mentioned, where banks and other big money places gather up Bitcoin to support things like ETFs, shows how things are changing. But, the world of cryptocurrency is full of changes and different parts.

The problems you've pointed out also mean there are changes for new ideas and solutions that come from the community itself.

Though I might be wrong on this but I think the main or the core reason of creating bitcoin was to use it to trade p2p which is to buy goods and services online but that part or function of bitcoin creation is not working perfectly yet and I don't know if it will work in the nearest future. Because everyone one is going into the investment aspect of it and not the goods and services function. As for me the most interesting part of bitcoin is the part you can use it to buy something like Laszlo Hanyecz who used bitcoin to buy Pizza.

I like to do that but no store in my area is accepting bitcoin in fact they don't even know the name. And those who use exchange to buy bitcoin because it is the fastest way to acquire bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created as a response to the financial crises of 2008.  The idea was to create a decentralized electronic cash system that had a limited supply.  The current fiat currencies used worldwide are both centrally controlled and have no limit on how much the issuer can create.  The US dollar, as an example, has lost 98% of it's purchasing power since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was granted the power to print US dollars.

The Bitcoin solution was to create a currency that had a limited supply and transactions that were peer-to-peer so that no financial institutions would have financial power over the individual.

Fast forward 16 years and almost all Bitcoin transactions are run through third parties.  To buy Bitcoin most people use exchanges which you must KYC on. To store Bitcoin most people use wallets that require the use of 3rd party nodes for transactions. This includes Hardware wallets.  Most people use Bitcoin like an investment not an electronic cash system. Banks are buying up large quantities of Bitcoin to hold for customers buying their ETFs. Arguably developers are adding things like ordinals to the code which have slowed transactions and increased fees above what would be reasonable for small financial transactions.

I see the potential for Bitcoin and am working on projects to help with the original mission - financial freedom for individuals world wide.

I am not going to give up on the dream!  Are you?