Crime is absolutely not non-existent. Plenty of crime gets reported in the media and the Singapore Police deal with plenty more that never gets reported in the press.
Every time Bitcoin goes through a major move, the "bubble" crowd comes out of the woodwork, while having done absolutely no effort in understanding what Bitcoin is.
I mean, what is it if not a worse gold? All assets can be roughly divided into few categories: currency, debt, equity, derivatives/bets, collectibles. It's not an equity or debt instrument, it's not a derivative, and it's not a currency as nobody settles transactions in it. It's a collectible (like gold or paintings), with a short history (unlike gold), that delivers zero value for the holder in the meantime (unlike paintings).
(And please spare the tech; people really do understand it, at least to the level that matters)
Essentially, yes, except that: 1) this is a rough categorization, there's a lot of things out there that do not fit into any single one of the categories (a convertible bond is debt, equity, derivative? a little bit of all), 2) there could be something genuinely new, outside of all the previously known categories, but it hasn't appeared so far in thousands of years (yes, I mean thousands).
Gold is a collectible, with a marginal use as a commodity. A commodity is an input to industrial processes, not really an asset though you can call commodities assets too if you want to.
It used to be a currency quite a while ago - people would actually use it in contracts, most importantly long term debt contracts (long term contracts is where the value/acceptance of the currency really shows; imagine taking or issuing a 30yr mortgage in Bitcoin, as in the homeowner is obliged to pay fixed X Bitcoin per month, lol). A big part of the great depression fighting/relief was to make debt contracts denominated in gold unenforceable.
A digital trading card that's used for speculating and buying drugs?
I understand what fundamentally motivates people to trade it and that they tell themselves all sorts of stories about a "new financial system" because it feels better than saying they invest in Charizards. I also know not to touch it.
To Bitcoin's credit, it made a lot of people think about what makes something a currency, the differences between investing and speculation, consequences of deflation, etc.
> having done absolutely no effort in understanding what Bitcoin is
To see its value, I don't need to make an effort to understand what a pear is, or a bar of gold, or a house.
I and others have looked at Bitcoin, and its trillion dollar market cap (which means Bitcoins are worth more than JP Morgan Chase and Johnson and Johnson put together) and realized it has absolutely no value.
At least subprime mortgages, 1999 dot-bomb stocks and the like had some value. Bitcoin has no value. On the next market contraction like 2008 or 2000 or the like Bitcoin value will collapse. Maybe even before that.
I wonder how long ago that "realization" occurred, and if you have since then "realized" how much the market has disagreed with your conclusion, or if you've "realized" the size of the opportunity loss?
The market also said 14 years ago that subprime mortgages were worth over $1 trillion. This year it says Bitcoins are worth $1 trillion.
There is a language of such bubbles - not, here is why it has value, like a loaf of bread or chair or bar of gold, but think about FOMO and that type of thing. There have been fly by night scams since Ponzi's postal reply coupons, or Dutch tulip bulbs and before that - I don't worry too much on missing out on the latest scam.
You use the word "value" in this comment to mean something different than the market price, but the definition isn't obvious to me. Maybe it's your personal values?
That's an important concept to grasp for newcomers. Making good trades in a trending market is relatively easy. Making money, or at least not losing money, in a ranging market is the hard part.
I think this article describes it well, including the absolute cultural prevalence, belief, and influence :). It is written in regard to a single country (Croatia) but applies to Balkans and few other parts of Europe as well:
My family members used to yell at me for sitting down on a stone fence or concrete bench, because something something cold stone ... lower back / kidney disease.
The same irrational belief is common in Germany as well. Cold air is thought to cause things like the common cold and bronchitis.
Some people would feel a slight draft indoors and immediately start yelling for the windows to be closed.
I knew a very wealthy guy in Germany who bought a Mercedes 560SEL - at the time, the top-of-the-line model. He ordered it without air conditioning because he didn't want to get bronchitis.
More importantly, there will never be more than 21 Million Bitcoin. That is the primary value it serves (beyond censorship resistance) it is not inflationary...
any scaling solution or consensus change that doesn't retain this important feature wouldn't be bitcoin, just another fork. potentially could go from PoW as long as supply is not inflatable it could still be considered Bitcoin (depending on whether users switched to the new version or not)
In case there's ambiguity here, I think GP means "core to the ideals" of Bitcoin, not the core of its implementation.
GP is correct. The Bitcoin community is fiercely conservative, and a proposal to switch from PoW to PoS would be met with about as much scorn as a proposal to increase the total supply.
Ethereum, on the other hand, has never had any strong attachment to PoW -- quite the opposite, really. Switching to PoS has been a major goal since the early days of the project.
Do you stream a lot of video or something? I can't figure out how people reach these figures. I mainly use my phone for Web browsing, podcasts (mostly downloaded at home), and chatting, and never remotely get close to these figures.
The way you exceed 10-20+ gb a month is by being so used to having such a high cap if any that you don’t even bother to turn on the WiFi when you’re at home.
I too live in Singapore and the internet infrastructure is excellent. Currently I’m sitting at about 10gb/month on 4g without YouTube/Netflix/social media. I do use a fair amount of Reddit though. I don’t really want to go back to having to care about how much data I’m using.
That makes sense. My Internet connection and especially WiFi (yay Unifi!) at home are quite great though, whereas cell reception in my apartment building is quite spotty, so WiFi is the obvious no-brainer choice for when I'm at home. And these days most of my phone usage happens at home because of WFH, so yeah, not much mobile data consumption. Even before then though there wasn't much; I don't tend to watch streaming video when I'm out and about.
I never exceeded 1GB of mobile data, personal and work combined, literally ever. But I can totally understand how one reaches these figures without doing anything weird: video call meetings, video streaming while commuting or traveling, music streaming throughout the day, maybe also work via tethering when not in the office or at home... it's just that one can choose to not do these things.
On the one hand, I feel like I'm preaching and practicing abstinence by doing things like downloading videos that I want to watch in the bus ahead of time over WiFi. On the other, long-range mobile data only works because we're not all using it at the same time, that's why we we meter it per month: it's a poor man's way of limiting concurrent usage while allowing bursty traffic and keeping the limits understandable to consumers. If you use a lot of data or need a lot of bandwidth reliably (e.g. IT company), running a local network yourself is the obvious way to go today. But with small cells coming to a bus stop near you, and seeing just how easy mobile data is compared to WiFi that can be out of range more easily (or you may be connected to a faraway access point), can be down and nobody is on call to fix it (in a company, someone might be on call for WiFi, but at home?), etc., it seems clear that for 98-99% of people and 90-95% of companies, using mobile data exclusively is the medium-term future (let's say around 2040).
And if it is the future, and since I use anywhere between 50GB and 2TB per month in data on my home internet connection (not counting others in the house), mobile data will need to handle such figures per person as well. More, even, because it will be in the future.
Someone having a 20GB+ mobile data plan is not exactly weird to me, even if with a little bit of foresight you can limit your usage to 1-2GB a month (and that still allows for quite a bit of video calling and occasional videos on the go) and save a bunch of money in 2020 (something on the order of subscribing to both netflix and spotify premium).
IG killed a gb for my cousin in about 2 days. How have you not done this? Streaming not required. We checked it before and after setting the save bandwidth option. It did 100mb in maybe 10mins of scrolling
There are also clients that can just download those gifs while you're on WiFi for later consumption.
I'm not saying you should do this, just that it's also quite easy to save 90% of your data usage without reducing media consumption if you are so inclined.
Just watching one movie or ~2h sports game in a hotel with crappy wifi (so you use your 4G) in HD, will eat quite a bit of data. Same if you watch netflix during a 2x30 minute commute every day.
Obviously if you don't watch video it's extremely hard to get close to these bandwidhs on a smartphone.
I mean, if you're catching the train or bus, is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service? I suspect most people who avoid it are doing it for data reasons.
> is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service?
To want it perhaps not, but do you see people do this around you? I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train. There have been more people that watched videos but when they pause for the conductor it's virtually always VLC or WMP, revealing that it's pre-downloaded. (I know VLC can do streaming but I'd have seen buffering here and there and they're much more likely to use the service's own client because of DRM.)
So while I don't say it's weird to have that desire (it would certainly be easier not to have to plan this ahead), yes, it is unusual in the Netherlands. And now that I live in Germany I'd say it's not just unusual but impossible, given their mobile data network coverage.
>I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train
My experience has been different. Sydney, Australia for reference - our data costs are relatively low at about 0.68 USD per GB (down from 1 USD or so last year if I were to guess). When I've looked around on packed trains in the past, about a third of the occupants were watching YouTube or Netflix (very rough estimate). Although obviously this strongly depends on where you are - for instance, when I was living in Japan, most people would be either playing games or reading news.
>revealing that it's pre-downloaded
Sure, but is because that's the way the prefer it, or is it a workaround that they've resorted to due to high data costs? Behaviour is a symptom of circumstance just as much as it is of desire, if that makes sense.
The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not that it's not that there's no demand, it's that the low supply results in people pursuing lower cost/higher effort alternatives.
Edit: But I'm not trying to say you're wrong. It's definitely interesting to hear what happens in the Netherlands and Germany. I appreciate your input.
You're right about the surveillance and tough stance on drugs. This results in crime being virtually non-existent.