Yesterday I had a back-and-forth with a fellow and it led to this question: what would be a situation where bitcoin is useless?
Background, I posted this: https://peakd.com/hive-124838/@crrdlx/hostr-snaps-2wkmzf0c5d on Nostr and Hive.
Reading "Cryptonomicon" (Neal Stephenson), there's a too-long "email" about finding $120 million in gold bars in a remote area of jungle. How do they get the gold out? First thought, bring in a helicopter. But, that would require first to clear cut the jungle to form a landing area. They thought of hauling it out, bar by bar. But, there are commando-police set at checkpoints on every route that would lead out. They would find the gold, even if hauled out one bar at a time, they'd catch on that something is up. They thought of bribery, but that had issues too. Bottom line: they had a real problem with how to get the gold out of the jungle.
My note hinted that bitcoin does not have this problem of transportation.
I know the gold vs. bitcoin argument is a fun game. To me, it's simple, both are great. But, bitcoin has two advantages.
(1) With gold, you don't know for sure that it's 100% gold. You must either trust the person you got it from or pay someone to assay it (then trust them to be correct). Then, the person you sell it to must do the same thing.
(2) Transportation of gold is cumbersome and tricky, like with the jungle.
Bitcoin doesn't have either of these problems.
A guy from Hive seemed unimpressed. Here's most of the back-and-forth:
Guy:
how exactly do you use BTC in a jungle with no wifi or anywhere if there's no wifi access, for that matter?
My answer:
I dont know exactly, but the gist is that you create a transaction then broadcast it when you do get connected.
Guy:
It was a rhetorical question. The answer is that Bitcoin is useless in many scenarios
Me:
Can you give an axample scenario of how it's useless?
Guy:
You can't think of just one yourself? I'm not feeling the need/want to type it out...
I left it at that. He seemed more interested in arguing, or whatever, than actually discussing bitcoin. (I did find it funny that despite him stating how bitcoin is "useless in many scenarios", it seemed like too much effort to mention one, and asked me to do it for him. Though it was too much to offer one of his examples, he did have the desire and effort to go ahead type out his lack of desire and effort to respond!)
That guy got me to thinking, though, when is bitcoin useless? My thinking out loud essentially follows here:
I thought he might come back with the old, "You can't buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin?" That, of course, is not true; people buy coffee and other small things every day with bitcoin. I'd point that out, but then I thought he might say, you can't go to McDonald's and buy a cup, they don't accept bitcoin, it's useless.
It's true not all merchants do. But, that isn't a fault of bitcoin that it can't be used there, is it? That's like, we don't accept the Discover card. Or, we don't accept Monopoly money. Or, we don't accept chickens for swap. If the merchant, simply said, "We accept it," it immediately becomes useful. Same with Discover, Monopoly money, or chickens. The fault is not with the currency, it's simply the choice of the seller to make a deal or not. You can't buy a cup of coffee with a gold bar, I know that.
Anyway, since Stacker News is full of bitcoiners, I have two questions here:
(1) Was I right about a bitcoin transaction in the jungle that gets broadcast later?
(2) Just to be devil's advocate, can you think of a scenario where bitcoin is useless?
Bitcoin is useless if the internet is shut down. I'd love to hear what bitcoiners in Iran were doing when they shut the internet down for months.
There are of course other ways to broadcast a TX like with Block streams satellite. People are also working on offline payments using ecash and I saw another on SN recently called Kagikai but it hasn't got much attention yet.
I understand you here. Certainly, when the internet is gone (Iran, Venezuela after earthquake) and you want to "buy with bitcoin" right then, it's not useful. Doing an satellite tx or "on paper", though technically possible, isn't really practical in an I-need-it-now situation.
To be fair, the same is true for most of the way I purchase things now: credit card or debit. When things go stone age, we go back to sticks, rocks, and chickens.
True.
For extreme circumstances people might revert back to swapping physical goods they need locally.
It would be good if Bitcoin were somehow able to use offline. I think it's a priority too.
If the internet went down, it would come back at some point. Satellites etc. for more coverage. Broadcast the transaction to the ledger then.
Meanwhile, use temporary offline solutions like ecash.
Or in bartering situations when lack of fungibility becomes an issue, people would revert to trust or paper contracts.
Bitcoin is money for the internet. Internet blackouts might still be a thing so gold, silver, copper, lead, food items will still have a role in commerce.
I know that some of them were using starlink.
In a disaster scenario, your priorities change dramatically from using a fancy BTC wallet to instant looking for a costume like this and hoard other important resources (like water).
water, potatoes, and lead (or just sticks and rocks if you've got no lead)
consider a scenario where 99 out of 100 people in ur chosen environment are dumb & retarded - these will call the policy enforcers at the slightest demonstration of weirdness... or sabotage ur progress thru idiotic actions - then bitcoin might be useless... definitely useless in correcting the conditions & behaviors; other forms of magic may be required; 👼💦🍃🍄👸
#1439763
The current one. No point, constantly debating in value, coopted by BIPtards and Sailorbois
I guess my view on these two things:
Combined, I disagree that bitcoin is coopted by these two. It keeps churning regardless.
Never in this lifetime, I presume!
Here! Here!
https://crrdlx.vercel.app/music/bitcoin-polka-la-dadda-lay-da.mp3
If practically no one accepts it in exchange for something of value.
I suppose you could, but what's the point? Should the other party you exchange with also withhold completion?
Why does the exchange absolutely have to happen in the jungle?
There are endless hypothetical scenarios. You just need to be motivated to convince yourself of them being realistic enough. Even if only to make a point.
And no, it's not just gold or fiat maxxis doing that. Bitcoiners do it all the time.
Offline or grid collapse is Achilles heel of bitcoin.
Same may be true of Gold but its less obvious why. The real issue (beyond verifying it) is "making change". If you have 1 oz gold coin but person you are trading with only has 2 chickens to trade - how do you do that? Give him the gold coin and hope he will get 1000 chickens in the future to pay you?
For most of humanity we were in a tri-metal scheme: Gold for big purchases and long-term savings (like bitcoin), Silver for wages and medium value purchases, and Copper for day to day stuff.
This is why most real preppers realize that although having a gold stash is good, canned food + lead (bullets) + silver are a better immediate solution.
There is another failure mode of bitcoin: Interest rates go to 18%. This of course would destroy the current financial system but would conversely save the monetary system (ie. just holding dollars would be sufficient for savings). This would benefit the poor but destroy the current rich, which is why we are very unlikely to ever see it.
I also thought of this. If I tried to buy a cup of coffee with my bar of gold and the person said they'd love to accept gold, I need to now scrape off a coffee-worth of gold. To get that exactly right...well...not easy.
Depends who you define as the rich...
#794566
Assuming the lizard people wield all the power and just want us killed off and out of their garden, save for a few slaves, simply turning off the money printer is one way to do it. Little more reprisal risk to that vs. installing Hillary to start a nuclear war with Russia while they ride it out in their bunkers/submarines which is probably the only reason it hasn't happened.
A scale is useless when you have nothing to weigh, Bitcoin is a scale, everything is relative to infinity/21M. So, it's obviously useless in a post-apocalypse scenario where there is no functioning economy and everything of physical value is scarce to the extent they are largely controlled by force (global internet down would count at this stage)
Any other framing of Bitcoin misses the forest for the trees so you can go on retardedly about useless scenarios forever in that case... like the jungle one, where there's no fucking economy to measure... thats why its a fucking jungle.
If someone sees Bitcoin only as a payments rail and invents a payments vacuum situation they're not worth debating. Bitcoin is how you carry your extra-jungle wealth through the jungle in your head to come out the other side.
I like the Mars colony thought exercise, a corporate city where all resources are allocated by the corporation. There, SpaceX-ville uses its own internal ledger to allocate things and therefore individuals have zero use for Bitcoin. It's only useful for colonists once they go outside of that boundary where SpaceX does not control all the resources.
Even in that scenario, SpaceX itself however would be the user of Bitcoin since they still need to acquire or store resources on Earth to achieve said colony.