But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
The stablecoins you mention are arguably more liquid than Bitcoin, but, except for DAI, they're issued by central-bank-like institutions such as Binance and Coinbase. You're right that they're not officially central banks, but that just means you get all the drawbacks of central banks without the advantages.
The fact that the pools haven't intervene until now doesn't change the fact that they can definitely do it, and would if pressured by governments. Economic sanctions using the US dollar weren't a thing until they were.
And you only need to have leverage against 50% of the mining power to make that happen, which is pretty straightforward given how centralized the power structure of bitcoin is (although less centralized than for most crypto, for which the developer has full control).
I didn't sign anything, make any appointments, buy any insurance, walk into any offices, present any identification, or even tell the guy my name. The total time involved was about 20 minutes, but only because I wasn't using Lightning. I had a similarly informal and short, but more argumentative, experience with the previous transaction, at a winery whose owner loudly insisted that he hadn't received the money... until he realized he was checking the wrong phone.
You are so full of shit comparing this to a real estate transaction that I am at a loss for words. You're about as full of shit as the winery guy. He, too, was blathering all sorts of nonsense at me about Bitcoin that showed he didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine a block (because it might allow the laundering of tainted coins). That would be a global and extremely obvious disaster for the Bitcoin network, and it would be remedied by whatever measures were necessary to end the attack, possibly including a hard fork or strategic bombing.
Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion dollars tied up in Bitcoin, and they do not want to see it collapse, and such a successful attack would greatly undercut investor confidence in the value of the asset. The Bitcoin crowd has enough pull that they extracted a pardon for Ross Ulbricht and got a friendly SEC head this year. Even before that, when one or another pool would grow to the point where it might be able to mount a 51% attack, it would get hit by DDoS attacks to bring it down.
You're comparing that to a bank declining a credit card transaction because you're in another city.
Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15 years; it's outright illegal in many countries. The hashrate dropped by more than half when the PRC outlawed Bitcoin mining. The effect on the functioning of the network has been pretty much undetectable.
Seems like an extremely inconvenient process and it’s unlikely you’d easily find that many people to agree to this unless without a significant premium (>5-10%).
Also $100 is not a lot.
The fact that it wasn't a lot is precisely why this is a good example of Bitcoin being more liquid than real estate. You can't sell US$100 of real estate, not even here in Argentina.
Really? You can’t imagine any process which would take 40x less time than 20 minutes?
Sure bitcoin is more liquid than real estate. That’s rather obvious and not a particularly high bar. It’s not particularly liquid compared to actual money or many other financial instruments though.
Rebutting the grandparent's claim that Bitcoin was no more liquid than real estate was one of the main objectives of my comment. I am glad that you agree that their claim is obviously false, but I think it's unfortunate that you didn't respond to their comment to say so.
I agree that Bitcoin is less liquid than dollars, which is why I was making the exchange, actually. For other financial instruments, it depends on who you are, and whether you have an account with a stockbroker. You can't open an Interactive Brokers trading account with US$100, and it's going to be challenging if you are in Venezuela. You are going to have a hard time finding newsstands that will accept your SPY shares, but they are more liquid than Bitcoin in the sense that, given that IB account, you pay much less to convert them into dollars even if you have to cross the spread, and if you're willing to wait 20 minutes, you have an excellent chance of earning the spread instead of paying it.
But none of that compares for convenience with a guy handing me a US$100 bill.
We're talking about this quote:
> Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a liquid asset, it's even less liquid than most commodity for which there are digital exchange marketplace. You can sell it over the counter, but that makes it an asset comparable to real estate in terms of liquidity.
There is nothing in the tone of this utterance that suggests that it's joking, sarcastic, or hyperbolic; it's a series of apparently serious, sincere, literal claims which simply happen to be completely unrelated to reality.
This is hilarious, you talk shit to people and then whine about people being discourteous.