- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
The Treasury Department plans to print President Donald Trump’s signature on every new U.S. paper bill. Treasury announced the idea Thursday.
The Treasury Department plans to print President Donald Trump’s signature on every new U.S. paper bill. Treasury announced the idea Thursday.
I’m impressed at their creativity in devaluing the dollar in a new way every day!
and Gold down
I’m really surprised that BTC has dived alongside it. You would think people would see the risks of a compromised state-owned currency and want to flee towards a decentralized alternative (which is currently below 70K down from it’s all time high of 123K).
Bitcoin is more centralized than the dollar. Most is owned but a few large holders, the whales.
It is a poor store of value as it is hard to access in an emergency. Has no utility beyond storing value, unlike gold or silver or shares or bonds. The reason people put their money there is not to escape the fiat system or to make transfers easier (both valid use cases). It’s to try and make a quick buck. Unfortunately, most won’t. As more and more start to lose money, it will continue to drop.
The technology is sound but the processing speed and acceptance and cost to process transactions, computationally and in dollar value makes it useless for its stated purpose. Which was part of the design.
As card prices have gone up, and energy prices for up, mining Bitcoin becomes uneconomical, so I’d expect less hype and many players to exit leaving others holding the bag.
It may resurge when there are cheap cards after an ai crash. However, I don’t see Bitcoin taking over as a payment system replacing the existing banking system. Even Europe faces with visa and MasterCard being a risk for payment processing after American fuckery aren’t looking at Bitcoin as the answer. They are looking at block chain technology, though, as being part of the solution.
Market cap on BTC is 21M coins and the largest individual owner has 1.1M coins while the next two largest owners is 70k coins and 30k coins respectively. I think a small country and the FBI are also major holders.
The capability for those owners to devalue it via selloff is infinitely less than the capability of a country to devalue its currency via selloff, inflation from minting and loan interest rates, poor trade practices, etc.
A country devaluing their currency has negative effects for them. So they don’t have incentive to do so. Even with hyperinflation in countries like Argentina, people start to use a different currency, like the dollar.
For Bitcoin I’m just copying and pasting: Top 10 addresses: The 10 richest Bitcoin wallets (excluding Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant holdings) collectively hold roughly 1.1 million BTC, about 5.5% of the total supply. Top 100 addresses: The 100 largest wallets control approximately 2.9 million BTC, around 14–15% of the circulating supply. “Whale” wallets (>1,000 BTC): There are 2,000–2,100 addresses that each hold at least 1,000 BTC (worth $100+ million apiece). Collectively, these large holders own over 36% of all Bitcoin.
This also assumes that wallets are individual people. Some wallets may be only part of some holdings and the same entity might have multiple addresses.
In the case of Bitcoin if they decide it’s not viable and want to sell, there is no negative effect for them once their holdings are gone, should their sale cause a crash. Theat level of control of the market is unheard of. Even looking at the plays on GBP in the past, it was based on much smaller amounts.
Assuming a world of only rational actors only takes you further away from reality.
Haha, true that. However, I’m pretty sure the whales will act in their interest. Financially or otherwise.
And you should, but it’s foolish to think that the nations will.
The difference is the nations effects have diminishing returns. So as they make moves that crash the currency. There is pressure on them to stop or change. Either financial if it’s for corruption or political if it’s for other reasons.
For Bitcoin whales, there is no such pressure or negative effect. Once they sell their holdings, they are done.
It’s not designed for used as a currency. A block gets mined every ten minutes and can contain only 3000 transactions.
For comparison, Mastercard processes 3000 transactions in 0.15 seconds instead of ten minutes.
Can you imagine being in a store and waiting your payment to be confirmed in 2-3 blocks to avoid double spending
30 minutes to confirm (if paid enough for fees) vs 0.15 seconds
And so much efficient!
To mine one block, the global network consumes approximately 2.5 to 3.0 GWh. 3000 transactions = 1 MWh per transaction
That’s like the same concern as waiting in the store for two weeks while the bank transfers cash via armored truck to the store’s bank. That’s not how anything works.
Mastercard and Visa have been threatening to shut down online platforms they don’t like, recently they blacklisted a judge from the international justice court for ruling against Israel. And hey, if we suddenly want to release the IBM source code and banking secrets which are the backbone of almost all modern transactions, I’m all for it.
The only reason to use BTC is its adoption rate being so much higher than any other cryptocurrency.
Also, the majority of power wasted is due to competing miners racing to mine the same blocks, which is presumably about to end given the 21M coin limit and the 20M mined so far in 2026.
But let’s not pretend to care about the power for digital transactions when we as a collective race are spending terawatts generating AI Porn and writing worthless inaccurate articles.
It is a concern when by design you can literally spend the money again within ten minutes by choosing an higher fee.
If bitcoin is valued at $70k it’s still over valued by $70k.