Originally posted on Patriots.win by BoricuaPede
Even though Trump will be headlining this year's Bitcoin Conference in Nashville and JD Vance is a major bitcoin investor, the antipathy to bitcoin around here is palpable. It seems many pedes still think bitcoin is a threat or a Trojan horse for a CBDC. It's time to set the record straight.
- Bitcoin is the anti-CBDC. Bitcoin has these qualities that make it the opposite of a Centralized Bank Digital Currency.
- It is not issued by a central bank. All CBDC's are issued by a central bank.
- It is trustless. This means it needs no intermediary to approve a transaction, the way your Visa or your check does today.
- It is peer-to-peer. Similar to the previous point, it does not need to go through any banking system. When you send bitcoin from your wallet to someone else's wallet, nobody else is involved.
- It is globally decentralized. All CBDC's are issued by nation states.
- The government cannot seize control of bitcoin.
- When you read about bitcoin being "seized" in the news, they are talking about bitcoin stored on centralized exchanges like Coinbase. These companies are licensed by the government, like banks. There's no need for these centralized exchanges. Bitcoin is designed to be used and stored on your own wallet. There is no power on earth that can break into your wallet if you set it up properly.
- Bitcoin transactions cannot be "blocked." What about the truckers? Well, those were transactions via Coinbase. Again, peer to peer donations to them went through just fine.
- The users control bitcoin and any changes to it.
- With bitcoin, owning more or less of it does not give you any more or less power over the network. Unlike, say, stocks. It confers zero voting power. This means neither the government nor Blackrock can force changes to it.
- Transactions are processed in two steps. First, the miners. Second, the nodes. While mining is now a large industry and expensive to enter, anybody can run a node on their laptop or even Raspberry Pi. These nodes are what approve transactions
- In the worst absolute case, if the government were to try to force the miners to change something about the bitcoin code, all they could do is fork away to a new blockchain. None of us would have to follow. Bitcoin would keep merrily ticking away on the original nodes.
- Bitcoin is anti-fragile.
- Bitcoin is hugely popular in places where it's illegal. This includes totalitarian regimes like North Korea, Cuba, China, and others. They have tried their damndest to shut it down and cannot. When the Federal Reserve inevitably comes out with their CBDC, bitcoin users can ignore it.
- If miners get shut down in one place, they move to another. We saw this when China banned bitcoin back in 2020. The miners moved to Texas.
- The entire blockchain can fit on a single hard drive. There is no way they can ever seize or shut down every Raspberry Pi running the network. The exact number of nodes is unknown (on purpose), but there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.
- The Bitcoin Network scales up and down difficulty with mining power. This means that if the governments of the world were to unite and start shutting down miners, difficulty will drop. Eventually, we could even reach the point where anybody could mine with their desktop computer again. Theoretically, it could all run off one single PC.
- The Network is literally in space. There is a network of orbiting satellites that runs nodes and even some mining machines. Anyone can connect to this network from any point on planet earth using cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Point me to any other network with that kind of backup.
- Bitcoin is the treasury asset of the future.
- The nations that embrace bitcoin now will be the powerhouse economies of the future.
- Large corporations are already dumping their US T-bills and moving their treasury assets into bitcoin. The latest major corporation to announce this move is Sony. In the same way as a gold standard, a bitcoin standard ends the US government's ability to print money out of nothing. Unlike gold, it is easy to use, cheap to transact and store, and already moves globally at light speed.
To sum up, there are many other characteristics of bitcoin that all pedes should embrace. But I wrote this to address the objection to it from the CBDC angle. Bitcoin is not a Trojan horse for a CBDC. In fact, it's the opposite of one. It is the currency that we can all continue using without fear once they implement one.
Both Trump and JD Vance have looked at bitcoin and realized that it's time to embrace this freedom money. Why not you?
edit: Fixed formatting errors
Bitcoin could never be used as currency in its current form. Transactions per second are way too slow. It was never scaled up once Sitoshi left the scene. It is more in line with gold now as a storage of wealth but not for daily commerce. Bitcoin cash would be more suitable to use as currency because it’s transactions per second is much faster.
Husband walked into a bar a few days ago and bought a drink using bitcoin on his phone. It took a second or two, no different to a card. I think maybe you need to research the topic more.
What percentage of the population do you think is actively using Bitcoin for everyday transactions right now when it is a mere novelty compared to other forms of currency? Such as your husband’s single visit to the bar. How many transactions per second does that equal?
What percentage of the population will be using Bitcoin for everyday transactions when it is the only or one of the very few forms of currency available and maybe even required to use by everyone everywhere in the whole country? Or possibly the entire world even? How many more transactions per second would this be?
Maybe you should do more research.
Better to be thought a fool by remaining quiet than to be proven one by opening your mouth.
My point is that it can be scaled and you said it couldn't. App development has barely begun... Lightening is just the start.
Back in the days Moores law still applied and the prediction was that every two years the size of our desktop PC's hard drives would continue to double. This in turn would have allowed bigger blocks as we all would have had plenty of space to store the entire chain.
Then came SSD's, faster but smaller in storage size, cloud storage, and the smartphone which mostly have replaced desktop PC's among the sheep. Nobody could have predicted that back then.
Think back to 2008, back then we didn't have much in terms of micro transactions, online shopping, real time billing or similar stuff which generates a lot of transactions. You mostly used your bank to pay your bills once every month, at which point a slow network or high network cost isn't a huge drawback, as 10 minutes is still a lot faster than the 3 days it takes a bank to do the same transfer.
Today's micro transaction was always meant to be solved by an alternative system. Heck even mass transit companies doesn't allow card payments, they all have their own systems, their own money basically because bank cards are too slow when a bus or a train stop and hundreds or even thousands of people need to quickly pay in just a few seconds time. In a large city during rush hour you can have millions of transactions in a minute. No current payment system can handle that fast and cheap.
There are alt coins which although being less secure does scale much better using all sorts of creative solutions. These combined with a decentralized exchange to easily and without censorship exchange to and from Bitcoin makes the perfect combination of secure store of value combined with alt coins better suited for other task. Buscoin for instance for people using mass transit. Gascoin to fill up your car were the balance bills in real time while you pump.
The possibilities are endless, keep that in mind when they try to sell in CBDC by promoting convenience.