So when a politician, elected by a majority and within the rules, lies to you in a way that contradicts your policy goals, then that is "dictatorship" in your mind. Interesting.

You seem to be extremely anti-American in your comments, which I guess would be a good advertisement for any American who is in favor of their country continuing to exist to... do the opposite of what you are asking to be done .


The US government can create an "altcoin" that is:

1. Called "Bitcoin" and trademarked as such, such that if you have anything else called "Bitcoin" then you would be prosecuted;

2. Compatible with the current Bitcoin's existing blocks, such that all current holders of Bitcoin would continue to have their holdings;

3. Legal in the US and it's allies to hold and trade, as opposed to anything else, which it would deem illegal;

And then they could deem the "old" Bitcoin as:

1. In violation of their trademark, such that anybody who used the term "Bitcoin" to describe it in any variant would be prosecuted;

2. Illegal to hold or trade in the US, meaning all major US brokers, apps and wallets would instantly drop this fork for fear of prosecution.

So yes, in your own mind what the US would have created would be "not Bitcoin", but in all practicality the US government would have replaced Bitcoin as we know it with their own controlled software system.

I don't know how else this can be described. The idea that any significant number of people would risk prosecution and all of their Bitcoin holdings so they could remain "pure" is just... nuts to me. Maybe you think people would do this, and bitcoin-orig would rise above bitcoin-us somehow in the market (what market?), but I simply cannot imagine any scenario where that could happen.



If you are going to start with the personal attacks then this conversation is over. I have over 30 years of system-level programming and computer architecture experience, and I know Bitcoin's architecture quite well, as well as having years of experience in transactional systems, information security, and high-value financial systems. I could easily write the Bitcoin software myself, for instance, and I have delivered systems of this complexity and scale before in my career many times.

But trying to "win" your argument with a personal attack might work for you--and might even work for a few in the audience, but it's... a waste of my time .

Bitcoin is a public ledger. All data the Bitcoin network uses is available to anybody who wants it. Anybody can create a compatible fork anytime they want.

Okay. You do you. But personally I love my country. You clearly don't, which is why you hope Trump wins here. I guess we should agree to disagree.

It wasn't a personal attack. I was genuinely curious because it seems you view the government as an extremely efficient and effective entity, whereas my life experiences and a plethora of evidence suggest otherwise. The government is a slow and inefficient organism, which is why free-market innovations like Bitcoin are always ahead of it. We can code faster than the state can regulate.

It's called a hardfork. A hardfork is making valid what's invalid. Bitcoin Cash, for example, is compatible with Bitcoin until block 478558. After that, hardfork rules apply, such as 32 MB block size limit.

Tough competitors. Remember that Craig can't tell what's an unsigned int. Hard to beat that.

You have serious reading comprehension issues:

Maybe you should stop misquoting me?

2027 won't be the same as 2025, even a low IQ person should understand this.

I think our slight disagreement here is that you are generally more optimistic with respect to the future "reserve currency" status of Bitcoin. If we could "bet" that no government would bet against Bitcoin in any time this could prevent them from attacking it.

For me, this is one possibility of many. My "bullish" prediction is that Bitcoin could compete with gold but not replace it completely - i.e. not "the", but "an" important reserve currency. But there are also slightly less bullish scenarios which could also be a good outcome, e.g. an international trade and minor reserve currency.

A point we could mention is that Bitcoin's main virtue, censorship resistance, is irrelevant for reserve currencies, at least of democracies. In the case of sanctioned dictatorships this may be different. But most countries would hold Bitcoin only to participate on its value evolution. This is however similar to gold's case.

I'd almost bet that the consequences of a "Satoshi sale event" would be far less dramatic that some people fear. My prediction would be a flash crash but of less than 50%, and mostly after Satoshi moved the first coins and not as a consequence of the sales themselves (Satoshi would be probably intelligent enough to not use a big market order, but proceed like the LKA Saxony with mostly OTC trades, almost not influencing the price at all). After the fact Bitcoin will have a better distribution and one reason for bear FUD will be gone

The problem is that we can't predict the same thing about a government or state which wants to do harm and thus sell the coins on the "wrong fork" in an aggressive way. The scenario I fear is very similar to the ETH-ETC conflict in 2016. Maybe a "FATF blacklist" would be an extreme measure (I may actually have only mentioned this one as a click/postbait ). But we can speculate about many protocol changes which would be far more subtle and "sound correct" for some user groups, for example another big block discussion, or a slight PoS addition like Ethereum's original PoW/PoS plans. They would not sound like they could destroy Bitcoin but could, for example, erode censorship resistance slightly, and move in a "certain" direction.

As I wrote I'm not totally against the "reserve currency" idea but in my opinion it's not intelligent to promote a too high state involvement.

They've been selling just to help support their own currencies (Fiat). But who's stopping them from hoarding Bitcoin? If they did it with Gold, they can do it with BTC. In a country like El Salvador, Bitcoin is already being used as both a store of value and a currency. The government keeps accumulating BTC without selling.

Would you imagine if most (if not all) of the world's countries do this? There would be a massive concentration of BTC's supply among a few (centralization). Average people like you and me will be left behind in the dust. And there's nothing we can do about it (other than forking off to a new chain). It's a free market, anyways. At least, government's adoption of BTC will help boost market prices in the long term. We all want to make money, right?

While it will be good if the government buys bitcoin on daily basis because that would skyrocket the price of bitcoin.
But then again it would only benefit the early adopters by making them rich.
Government holding large amoutn of bitcoin would impact on decentralization nature of bitcoin and so it is better that the government sells off all the bitcoin it seizes so that the bitcoin network can be more decentralized.

I don't believe any of those things, nor do any of the points I am making require I do.