Topic: Do you really think governments will allow a 500 billion dollar crypto-economy? - page 3. (Read 8807 times)

Yes, they have to.

I'm new on here but I always pay close attention to your posts, after reading through some older epic threads (circa 2011) where you posted and seem to always know what you're talking about

I understand that you can't quite compare GDP market caps with bitcoin (it's just encouraging and fun to see the comparison)

What would bitcoin's market cap be more comparable to?

Well once again $1T economy doesn't require $1T in cash.   i.e. the world economy $75T annually runs on ~$10T in cash (M0).

Money supply is a timeless value.  Values of economies (i.e. GDP) are timed value (i.e. usually $x per year).  You can't directly compare the two and they will never exactly equal each other unless velocity is 1.  Usually the same unit (dollar or Bitcoin) can be used in MORE THAN one transaction per year and thus the velocity is >1.

The size of the Black market economy is 10 Tr USD. So if BTC goes mainstream, and gets accepted by the black market mafias, a 1,000x increase in valuation is not impossible. 

I think you are conflating two values.   There is the money supply and then there is GDP.  Unless velocity is 1 the money supply will be smaller than GDP.  For example globally the M0 is ~$10T however GDP is $75T that implies a velocity of 7.5.  It is unknown what the velocity of Bitcoin will be but given the low transaction cost it could be very high.   Thus a money supply (I hate the term market cap) of $500B could support many trillions of dollars in annual economic activity.

agreed 

True that, didn't even think about that possibility

If governments keep losing their legitimacy at the current pace, we will probably reach some kind of critical mass soon, where the population no longer believes the best advice is coming from their governments. In such a world Bitcoin can survive even in the face of a massive government effort to ban or destroy it. It might even become the vehicle for a new way of organizing our societies. The current paradigm is coming to an end. National states as we know them is not necessarily something we will have in 10-20 years.

that comment made my day. thank you for that.

i finally found another person on this forum with some clarity - and fucking sense and reason.


on to my opinion: in short, i don't think it really can be stopped. various government agencies have studied Bitcoin long before most people here even heard of it. they are very curious as to what this could lead to. and, how they might benefit from it.

No crypto can make all the banks close down.
You have to understand that banks don't just issue credit cards or allow you to deposit your money with interest.

Banks also lend money!
How will bitcoin lend money? Stop with the transpiration and FUD theory.
Banks and bitcoins can go along very well.

It is whether the banking cartels which largely control governments will allow bitcoin. Clearly they are already scared as you see US bank accounts shut down for depositing and withdrawing from exchanges.

But Governments aren't just run by bankers, there are other interests involved, like Silicon Valley in the US which now holds a lot of sway in Washington D.C. and is all for BTC. We in the Bitcoin community have to get organized. We have to support those with counter interests to the banks and the Basel based Western powers, so they can support us. We need to set up a rock and a hard place for the banking cartels of Basel, New York, London etc.

The banking cartels will not allow themselves to be relegated to an obsolete middle-man of history pushed aside by an emergent technology. I'm not saying that their victory is assured, but they will have no choice but to take a swipe at us, as they are already doing.  Right now without any real organization we look like easy prey. We must tip the balance and quickly.

I am considering how good strategy might play out, both from the bankers' perspective and ours, but it is clear to me at least that we must become organized if we are even to have viable discussions of successful strategies. I don't know that being nebulous and distributed/decentralized is enough. Although certainly educating every user back to annonymity is important.

Yes, the most important part is that this bubble will never pop

A traditional bubble always pop after central bank raised the rate and tightened the money supply, together with the added production of the speculative target, many sellers could not find enough buyers with enough money, so they panic sell and the price crashed hard

But in bitcoin's case, there will never be added production no matter how high the demand is, and when central bank tightened the money supply, the bitcoin holder do not need to sell the coins for fiat money, they can simply spend it to buy goods/services, so there will not be a total panic sell caused by central banks' monetary policy. When there are enough merchants accepting bitcoin payment, the sell pressure on exchanges will get less and less each passing day

You only need the US and EURO to ban crypto setting the president to make other countries follow suit - they all share the same fear that they'll lose control over their own money supply and with it the ability to regulate their economies.

Enjoy the ride now while you can; there is a lot of money to be made but the clock is ticking.

Can the bitcoin protocol create and sustain a 500 billion dollar economy?
The way it is right now , certainly not.

Google pays taxes and also bends over and gives the gov't whatever personal data about us that they want. 

To put this all into context - big government has been burnt before with the evolution of the Internet itself.

I (para)quote William Gibson of Cyberpunk fame:

"If the government had known what the internet would become, it wouldn't have allowed it to."

Reference: http://williamgibsonboard.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2866012481/m/1156066104

What I take away from that quote is that had the governments of the day known in advance what a major impact the Internet was going to have on privacy, security, equality and leveling the playing field then they would have taken early control of it and shaped it according to their own image. Yes, we would still have had an Internet but one I believe would have been tightly controlled with an artificial high cost of entry limiting benefits to all but a select few. They would still have us still using Fidonet style messaging systems that were slow and could be easily intercepted and controlled.

Once bitten, twice shy.

The Internet wasn't originally designed with civil liberty protections in mind - that was an unexpected side-effect of the connectivity the Internet gave us and it didn't happen overnight but rather evolved over time. Cryptocurrency on the other hand is an immediate and direct competitor to the current financial system, designed from the ground up to be an open and free alternative.

People often compare the current stage of cryptocurrency development with that of the Internet circa early 1990's. Big government would be well aware of what developed when they previously chose to be ignorant. It would be folly to think they are going to let history repeat itself, and so close to home.

Still... I'm an optimist, and while I can't predict the future I do have faith that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general has the potential to overcome whatever obstacles are thrown in it's way.

It's still going to be an uphill battle, enjoy the ride!

In order for bitcoin to scale up, SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) has to be implemented, this makes light-weight clients possible so that not all clients have to download the entire public ledger. For more information: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability and https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_verification in particular.

We're closer to 100 pixels now. 

I always thought CC's /Bitcoin~PeerCoin were going after a much larger cap/target that the global monetary supply rather many of the other asset classes as well. now where's that picture gone