(02-10-2025, 08:47 PM)FCD Wrote: I used to solve easy, then medium, then hard, then expert, then super sudoku puzzles. I like puzzles. Anagrams, cryptograms, you name it...I love puzzles.
So, I perform "work" solving my Sudoku puzzles. Therefore, I am entitled to bitcoins, right? Right? If not, then WHY not?
Bitcoin is money for nothing. It's a ponzi scheme. Please explain to me how me solving some puzzle (hash) entitles me to money in my "bitcoin wallet"?
What am I missing? I understand economics (bigtime); bitcoin doesn't "compute" in an economics world...at least in my opinion. It's technological slight of hand...and graft.
Please explain to me what I'm missing here...money for nothing...what did I miss?
Bitcoin only has money because other people invest that money. All these bitcoin miners are just losers who are trying to make something from nothing out of other peoples money (for power and cooling).
What am I missing here?
The entirety of western civilization now depends on fake value. People pay financial service providers to do work like execute trades, provide loans to collateral, maintain balances, and document secure transactions. Bitcoin is just the first attempt at attaching a standard of value to digital processing power, which is really just another evolution of turning work into a commodity. It's just what people will pay for it. Very little in the financial markets is based on the true value of underlying assets.
Bitcoin offers a transaction history that is encrypted and runs over a "decentralized" network. I don't know how decentralized it really is because it's no longer a bunch of people running this on a single machine, but huge industrial mining operations. There's a potential issue with the development of quantum processing too, for however close they are. Most of the arguments about BTC that made it compelling to me, like being outside of government reach and not giving more business to big banks, have now become moot. The BTC influencers now cheer for ETFs, bank custody, and hedge fund purchases. The Lightening Network that was supposed to make BTC practical for day to day transactions is really just a BTC payment processor no different than Visa, the transactions are approved on credits and only settled when the BTC block is finished. In reality it did very little to solve the problem of scaling up of transactions and eventually a payment processor is also going to want to get paid. Somebody is paying for it somewhere, so it's little different than using the centralized banks. You can still be blacklisted, have your accounts frozen, and whatever else a payment processor can do.
While I don't find BTC compelling from the revolution perspective anymore, that doesn't mean buying low and selling high isn't what it's all about. Once they have ETFs, futures, options, it's no longer about real value anyway.
What you'll see over the next 5 years though is that NFTs will become used as property titles. They'll just call them digital titles though, which is good because people associate NFTs with pixel art and scam artists. It's already happening, but will pick up steam. NFTs are able to maintain the entire history of a property and are cryptographically secure. For the title business this is going to be a big deal. They've also already been used as title to real artwork. Smart contracts will also begin to replace some financial instruments offered through brokers. Options trading, commodities futures, any manner of derivative can be tokenized. They can automatically settle at expiration, they can provide title transfer of the underlying contract assets, and they can streamline a lots of things. Bitcoin is being integrated into most of the other networks in some way, which also helps it remain relevant.
This is all downstream from Bitcoin, so Bitcoin remains the legacy blockchain. These other cryptocurrencies and blockchains will provide utility on the backend where most people don't notice. In theory it should speed everything up. The benefits of using blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts, is that if you tie it all into a new digital ledger then you have interoperability between all these disparate legacy systems. Rather than batch processing and two weeks wait, things can settle nearly instantly. This also means that banks no longer need nostro accounts holding cash in every country. Instead of taking weeks through BIS and middle men, account balances move at the speed of the digital ledger tech and can cross through any number of currencies or financial instruments needed in seconds.
The grand plan is that when things are tokenized on blockchain and digital ledgers, that everything will be seamless. As a rancher, imagine that you have very little observable change (aside from getting forced out of business faster). Your other work I don't know enough about to know if you might see changes. I don't know how it works everywhere, but here ranchers seem to often sell to feed lots, who then sell upstream, then it reaches a processor, then it goes back out the door to a distributor. Blockchain and digital ledgers mean that when you sell your cattle to a feed lot these cattle can be given identification. Maybe it's your DBA or business name, maybe it's all lumped under one lot number. For more expensive and exotic foods it could be tracked down to the individual growers or harvesters. They then enter the blockchain and ledger ecosystem, meaning that at each step of the way it can be tracked and data can be recorded as needed. I don't know the industry specific needs or how integrated it would be at the individual level. Since it's recorded on blockchain it means that you can also use this data to help in logistics. They'll be able to have an entire paper trail on anything, sales, processing, treatment, distribution. For manufactured goods it will be useful for law enforcement dealing with counterfeiting operations, which skews toward luxury brands.
Along with their fantasy AI and their industrial scale data processor farms, they hope that the Internet of Things and the tokenization of everything will lead to highly automated processes. Imagine the automated farms, feeding the automated wash plants, going into driverless trucks, to automated warehouses, then back down the distribution chain to a human. Every step of the way AI is monitoring the processes, tracking things on the ledgers, and gaining more data to assess. If a part breaks on some industrial process the automated maintenance AI already has a replacement part being picked at the warehouse and delivered before the part is removed. Dispatch, traffic monitoring, transport, manifests, customs documents, all handled automatically.
Bill Gates flies his jets all over accepting awards for his philanthropy, making a gorillion dollars an hour on his automated farms, and churning out GMO soy for your plant-based meat alternative which also churned out by a Gates investment arm. Life-saving vaccines every month. Imagine how health we'll all be, owning nothing and being happy.
That's the plan anyway, for their 4th turning. We'll see.
I don't see Bitcoin solving the problems we face, but the march toward digitization probably isn't going to stop. I think it will remain relevant, though I don't really see the long term plan other than becoming another commodity that is milked by market manipulators. Bitcoin has become just another layer on the house of cards now. It might go to 1 million, but it's also eventually going to zero. Everything does and Bitcoin has a number of yet to be understood systemic risks that are unique to that asset class. It may last longer than many people think and might outlast me. Now that it's just another commodity it's not that exciting unless you're holding it and hoping for profits.
