Topic: Will BTC's umbilical cord to USD eventually throttle it? - page 2. (Read 2449 times)

Consider what would be the rational / game theory response by Central Banks to Bitcoin when their investigative sub-committees confirm it as an existential threat.

The answer is to acquire a useful percentage of Bitcoin, or any similarly growing crypto-clone. With 21 million possible coins, 11 million issued, a CB representing a large economy could hedge against the new threat by acquiring between 500k and 1 million coins, and mining more. At $120 each this is pocket money to neutralize a novel threat.

Of course such an acquisition will quickly drive the fx rate up, perhaps into four figures. Still cheap for a CB to do this, especially as they can print fiat for their purchases!

How many CBs can do this though?  One or two, then the strategy fails as the rate goes stratospheric...

China's knows its yuan will not be a reserve currency for a long time, especially since they had hyperinflation as recently as the 1940s. It takes a very long time to earn this type of trust from the rest of the world. They are amassing gold in record amounts, but what strategy is better than having the largest Bitcoin holding as well. If fiat fades, then they are in pole position for the rest of the 21st Century.

Whats to stop a government making a NATIONAL Pool to try to grab a large slice of the bitcoin mining.

I think a lot of people find it very difficult to get 'cash' of any kind converted to bitcoins.

A recent exposure to the 'group buy' setup in NZ for some of those ASIC usb sticks has shown that there is interest in purchasing via bitcoins, but no easy way in short notice for newcomers to get hold of bitcoins.

Yes this has crossed my mind too and I wonder what will the Chinese government's response will be:

"It's a threat, kill it!" or "It's an opportunity, grab it!" ?

While the US pushes Bitcoin away, China is grabbing at it...

http://bitnodes.io/

Largest concentration of nodes, and near-monopoly on ASIC production.

This is a genuine question. I've been thinking a lot about how the ease of buying BTC with USD no doubt fuelled its uptake and eventual price spike. Things are changing now and again we have to look at the bottlenecks of global BTC uptake: a flaky exchange in the form of MtGox and an increasingly-hostile US government.

It seems to me that in the near future, a hedge against US meddling might be to have a European exchange which does NOT TOUCH USD but does business in EUR, BTC and perhaps LTC. Drop the dollar, drop the junkcoins.

Site it in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Malta, anyone of the financially-liberal countries which doesn't look like it's going to tank.

I wonder, though of course figures can only be guesses due to the mostly-anonymous architecture of cryptocurrencies, how many people who hold or trade BTC actually have USD bank accounts?

Half? More, less?

My point is I think there is enough non-USD fiat to support this kind of exchange. The days of thinking "international business" equals "USD" are slowly coming to an end, in fact, is this not core to the very idea of Bitcoin?

This is a brain dump really and I know there would be massive hills to climb to get something like this up and running but I fear that the land of the free will do all she can protect the position of the almighty dollar in the global economy and this would be a way to pre-empt that.