Debt Rattle August 14 2025

[my parents said know]

I hope the Optimists are right.

[John Day]

Thanks TAE Summary, you sentimental old coot!
😉

[₿oogaloo]

aspnaz,

Again, I am not really sure where you are going with this? What do you think is the most fair financial system? The fiat banking system, which can be manipulated by human whim, whose ledgers are not transparent, and whichhas never been audited on a system-wide basis? Or the bitcoin system, which is regulated by code, which has a fully transparent ledger that you can download and verify for yourself, and which is audited every 10 minutes? If those are your choices, which one do you choose?

You say mining is not open to everybody. But if you want, you can order a Futurebit Apollo II for $1000 and mine Bitcoin at home. It’s really just for hobbyists at this point. It is not economical, and you will probably lose money. But you can participate in the network if you want, and you might get lucky and mine a block. But what do you expect if you are starting 16 years after launch of the network and Bitcoin is already over $2 Trillion? Of course the economics were going to make it more difficult.

If you don’t want to mine, you can still participate in the network by running a node. You cannot win a block that way, but you become part of the decentralized network that verifies the ledger. Nobody can stop you.

You raise concerns about mining becoming more concentrated. But even if it is, the miners cannot control the network. Yes, in theory they can censor certain transactions in the block they mine, but they will never be able to mine all the blocks. Bitcoin is not a majority rule system.

You raise the issue that Bitcoin is not “backed” by anything. In fact it is backed by something: The energy that secures the network. Just as it requires energy to mine gold, it requires energy to mine the bitcoin. What do you think backs gold if not its scarcity and the energy to mine it? But even if you were right, money is a consensus phenomenon.

You say that Bitcoin is “just another fiat currency” – what what do you mean by “fiat” when you say that?Who decreed that people shall use Bitcoin?

You say that the government can “close down Bitcoin”. I do not think that was ever possible. Rather, the risk was that governments shut down all of the onramps and offramps linking Bitcoin to the fiat system. Yes, this was a real risk, and this could have effectively destroyed the project by pushing it to the periphery. But now it has taken root in the legacy system, so the risks of that happening are much lower today than they were a decade ago. To do that now could destabilize and threaten the legacy system, and politicians always do whatever they can to protect the legacy system. So I think Bitcoin is here to stay.

You say that China banned Bitcoin. But in fact a substantial amount of mining still takes place in China, and there is a growing number of Chinese companies that hold bitcoin on the balance sheet. You can look them up on bitcointreaturies.net

[Author]

Posts