People make fun of #bitcoin and other digital currencies as, at best, a misguided attempt to replace fiat currency so people have an alternative to government control.
But I think this is important. Just remember: if every government on Earth collapses one day, their made-up paper money will be worthless, but your crypto-backed digital value will... Also be worthless, because it requires a functioning Internet and huge amounts of cheap electricity to validate and communicate transactions, and both of those only exist in a modern global economy backed by fiat currencies.
... sorry, I lost the thread halfway through.
@mark this is one of the greatest arguments for #Bitcoin I've ever heard :)
Bitcoiners say that with gold it's more expensive to validate than bitcoin, but for gold, at least you can still kinda weigh it to check if it make sense relative to its volume even without electricity.
The problem is, if every govt. collapses, you probably won't get anything useful for gold either, so that's not a contingency you really can prepare for anyways.
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@nicemicro @mark the threat model isn't doomsday scenario but state going full throttle collectivist bullshit. like canada did, freezing bank accounts during the trucker protest.
doomsday scenario currency is cigarettes, booze, tools and guns with the last bullet saved for yourself.
@mark @nicemicro nobody is keeping people from just buying or mining now and just keeping it, just like gold.
gold will be seized as well. you can memorize the seed phrase. sure, those can be rubber hose analyzed - in that scenario you don't have a chance anyway if you aren't already innawoods or something.
@bonifartius @nicemicro Gold seizure requires person seizure because gold is hand-portable. BTC requires an infrastructure to transact upon, and that infrastructure is vulnerable to legal-means attack (as is currency logged in a bank).
I guess turn your head and squint and these are all on a sliding scale of government interventionism, but I'd argue BTC is much closer to the "bank assets frozen" side of the scale than the "government has collapsed / gone full fash and people are trading with gold" side.
@mark @nicemicro
> BTC requires an infrastructure to transact upon, and that infrastructure is vulnerable to legal-means attack (as is currency logged in a bank).
are they shutting down the net to get a handful of dissidents?
> government has collapsed / gone full fash
_those_ are opposite ends on the scale. if shit is collapsed either people are willing to keep things running where gold _might_ be useful. or everything is doomed and gold is the last you need.
full fash loves psysical assets like gold. it's ridiculously easy to target a select group of people and just take their things if you have a state at your disposal.
you just need the seed phrase which can be memorized. you might also need infrastructure, but the value is stored in the blockchain. you can split your assets into multiple wallets and sacrifice one of them if needed. i'm sure there are more things. you might end up being tortured for the wallets, but that's game over anyway and you will go to the mass grave.
crypto currencies are a tool to work around certain problems, just as gold is.
@bonifartius @nicemicro > you might end up being tortured for the wallets
Well, that's the other thing about specifically the BTC protocol, and one of the reasons I suspect it's actually a useful tool for states: because the chain records all transactions, they don't need to torture a person for their wallet. The state just needs to make a reasonable case that a public key is linked to an individual (which they can do with secondary signal) and then the whole history of transactions that individual was up to is public record. Very hard to modify public record, very admissible as evidence.
So BTC is useful to circumvent state control... Until the state decides to invest enough resources to de-pseudonymize and it becomes a secured, distributed, very robust rope the actor has hanged themselves with.
@mark @bonifartius yeah, the state (or criminal gang in case of collapse) can come to your house and beat you and take all your gold, but they can also beat you until they get the key. Or throw you in a prison, and in that case it doesn't matter what's in your BTC or leather wallet.
And at least when I give someone gold, that doesn't get recorded literally all over the planet.
@bonifartius @nicemicro A state opening that throttle up all the way also starts seizing domains, blocking ports, and arresting people for running mining rigs (which are relatively easy to find given that (a) they must have a connection to the network and (b) they draw power like someone's trying to smelt aluminum or contact aliens, or both).