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Now, I have noticed more and more that people prefer electronic payment over cash because of covid, and even offer a discount if the payment is made with electronic money, including bitcoin.
Wait.
I know what you meant in the above sentence, but that sent me a shiver down the spine.
There is a big difference between electronic payments and bitcoin.
Bitcoin is digital cash, something you cannot forget on the XII whitepaper anniversary:(
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System).
Cash means anonymous, peer-to-peer mean of payment:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Other digital payments, from Credit Cards to the hypothetical CBDC are not peer to peer, that is not cash. All those payments involve a third party, who exactly knows how, when and how much you spent your (their) money.
So, please, don't mix bitcoin with Orwellian surveillance systems. Bitcoin is digital cash, as opposed to physical cash.
Good point to emphasize, fillippone.
We surely have some Orwellian double-speak shit going on in recent times, and in the USA, when credit cards first came out, there were some rules that businesses could not refuse to accept physical cash. And, sure I cannot remember the details, exactly there were also rulings about the fungibility of cash, in that businesses and the government would NOT be able to black list certain bill serial numbers - and a lot of the fungibility issues and even the forcing of businesses to take cash seem to have gone out the window due to the exaggeration of a virus.
I am not even trying to suggest that the virus is not real.. just that there seems to be a lot of convenient war upon physical cash.. and sure bitcoin is meant to be a kind of substitute for physical cash, and surely bitcoin HODLers are going to continue to find challenges in terms of challenges to fungibility...which therefore could end up affecting value if vendors have some kind of requirement to ensure the purity of the bitcoins that they are accepting.
Of course, if bitcoins are not endorsed by governments, then they have rights to treat bitcoin differently from their own government payment systems - which is likely to continue to be an ongoing challenge for bitcoin in the coming years... probably 10-20 years or longer---- who knows how a lot of this plays out, even though options are continuing to be built that could cause security through obscurity, but still both parties in the peer to peer transaction do need to feel ready, willing and able to transact and surely the more that KYC/AML is ascribed to parties then the more uncomfortable they become - and surely seems to be more of an issue the higher the amount of value - and even governments seem to want to get into the business of private transactions for increasingly lower and lower amounts.. even a $10k threshold that has been around since about the early 70s through the bank secrecy act hardly means anything as it did nearly 50 years ago...
that value has been inflated away to cause government interference into way lower thresholds, that $10k in 1970 would be worth about $67k today.. but the government still wants to know more and more and more by NOT adjusting the threshold based on inflation.