It'd drive the price down to a level it wouldn't really matter.

I'm trying to relate it to something.

Lets say America decides to ban all Honda Civics. For arguments sake, all Civics are worth $10,000. I own one, but I know if I'm caught driving on the road with it I'll be fined and jailed. My family previous had something worth $10,000 that had a use case as well. My neighbor actually has 2 Civics in his garage, so he's out $20,000.

These were previously bought at fair market value and I even paid tax to the government when I sold one my of Civics at a profit last year.

Now because of the ban and the fact no one can use a Civic without fear of jail/fine, my previously $10,000 valued Civic is now worth $50.

Don't you think the government doing this would create a major issue? I think if they were to do so, they have to say, as of today, anyone that holds bitcoin can trade it in to the government for $6,000. Only coins held on or before this date will be accepted. Any coins acquired after this date will be denied.

No, the government does not have to pay for your Civic. Look at the Gold Confiscation act of 1933. The compensation was a minimal amount of USD, which was nothing compared to the gold value. The government made private gold ownership illegal to prop up the us dollar.

Of course gold continued to have private value in the rest of the world, even back then. While gold has 5,000 years of history on its side, bitcoin is far more useful. Bitcoin is not easily faked with tungsten, bitcoin can be sent around the world in minutes cheaply, and bitcoin is easily divided for small transactions.

Anyway this thread has derailed - no western country is banning bitcoin anymore than they are banning the internet as they are essentially the same thing. They will crack down on the fiat/btc trading exchanges for surveillance purposes.

It's already an asset for tax purposes. They're just going to change banking and/or tax laws to control the flow of money as they see fit.

Or pass some corrupt bull**** law like the UIGEA.

I apologize in advance sounding alarmist and like I'm fear mongering, this is not my intent. However, don't put it past gov't to wreck even the internet. They wreck everything.

Not unless they made some pledge to recognize it as a form of currency.

Would you compensate owners of stock in a company any time a policy adversely impacted its price?

bitcoin isnt dead yet? lol

developing countries governments will kill this at some point soon with their own e-currency

Far from dead. Despite the doom and gloom news you hear, bitcoin is up 50% in the last year. Much more if you go back further.

Lol, venezuela already tried their own e-currency. Nobody uses it or will use it. Same with any other government cryptocurrency, there is no reason for it. Say Murrica creates one, then the euro creates one, then russia. What is the difference between just using their currencies? None.

But bitcoin being decentralized crosses all borders is an international gamebreaker as no government, bank, or centralized entity is in control of it. No goverment or corporate "bitcoin" can have that attribute.

Government decisions change people's lives all the time. They don't get compensated.

Whoa, sick gainz, bro. I wonder how sick they're gonna be YOY once mid December hits?

I guess we'll find out in mid-December? Wonder what the 3year and 5year returns will look like then too? Probably pretty damn good. But hey, cherrypick your own time frame, enjoy.

The benefit of blockchain over paper is the transparency to the government (automated tax collection via smart contracts is governments' dream). People will be forced to use the national blockchain if it's made the only legal tender while paper stops being such.

The reason why Venezuela has failed was that most of its population was too poor to afford a cold wallet. If they become cheaper to produce, then they may eventually replace paper altogether.

The reason why Russia is enticing individual entrepreneurs to register as self-employed in a mobile app that collects a 3% tax on gross income automatically is that the tax office manpower that's supposed to collect 6% is expensive and inefficient, and a lot of entrepreneurs choose to remain unregistered because the probability of the overloaded tax office going after their undeclared profits is quite low when there are too many companies to go after that are likely to be finable for bigger amounts per taxman-hour if caught.

lol

That's what YOU did. It's nonsense, and you know it.

Anyway, this thread is confusing sometimes. People seem to talk about BTC as though it's awesome, which I accept, but don't really put forth a thesis of sustainable price growth. They're talking up BTC and/or tech almost as if they don't understand that this is the BFI forum. I'm not seeing any plausible explanations as to how the price will continue to grow and be sustained, thereby making it something worth parking money into.

The Mt Gox coins still haven't been sold off, and the run up to nearly 20k was pure FOMO. Whales who hold coins are eventually going to cash out, no? Will there even be demand for all those coins? What about enough to drive the price to, say, $50k? Is it even possible to get to $20k again? How? Nobody seems to answer this question weaving it in with the continual touting of BTC's future, or tech itself.

it could rise

Perhaps you have heard of supply and demand? The new supply halves every 4 years. Look at the hashrate, it continues to go up - mining is getting more expensive yet the reward will be cut in half in less than 2 years. And then again in another 4 years.

So perhaps look at the supply side as well as the demand which you are so worried about.

Supply is a known. Demand is where the question is.

I think it's more likely that miners without state-of-the-art ASICs or without access to cheap electricity will quit just before every block reward decrease than that BTC/USD will routinely double up in time for the reward decrease.

I guess the big pools who're increasing their hashrates now are doing so in the hope that the difficulty falls dramatically at the reward decrease, particularly after many minor competitors dump their worse ASICs and quit, or that they (the bigs) will be able to reprogram the ASICs for another task or upgrade the worse ASICs bought for cheap, or that they'll have earned so many Lambos within the 2 years that they won't care about the rewards anymore and will sell the hardware to someone who can reuse it for a real-life task.

hashrate has never decreased significantly leading up to or after a halving, why would it this time? Yes the miners know the reward decreased, but it's not "priced in" until their supply cut, which is mostly sold to pay for expenses actually happens.

At least that has been the case after the last 2 halvings, price has increased significantly. Again, why would this one be different?

This time, the market cap and the price are so large that the demand, which is pegged rather to USD than to BTC, would be matched (by whales) even if the hashrate dropped to the 2013 level.

Mining is needed to maintain the integrity of the blockchain, but the production of new coins is its side effect that's not indispensable (if the miners were rewarded with an equivalent amount of USDT instead of BTC, it wouldn't make much difference to the price). The existing 17M coins are just about as enough to enable transactions as 21M coins will be, as long as blocks are found at all.

The BTC miners can't simply go on strike and demand high transaction fees, even if there were a monopolist pool, because there are some PoW altcoin networks where the difficulty is adjusted in real time, which guarantees that at least one miner will be profitable at any time (i.e. without the need to wait until the 2016-block cycle resets), and the buyers could move into those coins instead of agreeing to pay a high price to keep the BTC blockchain alive.

The reason why the hashrate is growing is not that the network needs it to grow but that mining is still profitable. Compare that with the poker ecosystem. If half the regs are gone, the casual players won't be upset - the games will be still running smoothly, and they'll even be losing less. The number of regs is growing not because poker sites need them, and not because anyone is bullish on the poker economy, but because stables need to put their money to work, and the easiest way of doing so is to use the coaches' existing skills to train new regs and improve the current ones. Likewise, it's still profitable for mining pools to create new hardware that computes more hashes per watt.

The theory is not that the miners will demand higher transaction fees, it is that they will demand a higher price when selling their coins to maintain profitability given the sudden lower reward and mostly fixed costs.

It doesn't matter what the miners demand.

It has been explained 1000 times itt how it could go up. Every time the response is, "WUTT BTC can never go to 30k".

No it hasn't.

The production rate of BTC is 1800 a day. Its daily trading volume has been ranging between 500K and 800K. So the vast majority of the volume is speculative.

If an overwhelming majority of the whales created a cartel refusing to sell, that would drive the price much higher than if a high % of the hashpower stopped mining until the next difficulty adjustment*; but the whales are too scattered to ever make a concerted effort.

Cryptos aren't consumable goods, they're a pure storage of value (can't even be molded into shiny jewelry), so their shortage can be created pretty only artificially via a cartel or FOMO-inducing news.

* If the entire hashpower stopped, that would actually drive the price down because a coin with a significant downtime would earn longterm notoriety for being too unstable to transact with.

The BTC network is the leader of the blockchain payment processing market but by no means a monopolist.

Easy, bunch of ******s will buy it to $50K in same way they did to $20K last year.

Does the prize pool of an MTT grow sustainably after the late reg ends? Yet, aren't there folks who have consistently positive EVs at MTTs?

The fundamental component of cryptoasset price evolution is rather small if positive at all, however, the market is still inefficient, and behavioral finance may prove useful