I'm critical of the way governments handle traditional money as well, including the US dollar's grip on the world backed by military power if you resist the dollar. Oil shall be priced in dollars, no euros, or else.

Yet apart from a cryptocurrency not being owned by a government, there is really no other benefit to it and certainly won't help to lessen the gap between poor and rich. It is flawed from design, it needs a radical change to become a viable currency instead of basically being a stock.

Btw what do you propose instead of using debt? People borrow to buy a house, should they live on the street until they can afford one? Governments borrow to get through a pandemic. Should they just kept everyone under lock down instead of free vaccines and stimulus cheques? The reason the gap is so big is because the rich have leverage on the government and can bend policies in their favor. I don't see how crypto can change that at all?

But the Crypto lobby is already strong at Cop26, for example "In a candid statement, the company expressed its intention to go further than merely balancing its emission output, citing a recent purchase of 7,110 tonnes of CO2 credits, approximately valued at $100,000, in partnership with AI carbon data tracking firm Pachama." That's a scam in itself, that's not helping much of anything.

@bowserthedog How is crypto going to replace the need for physical money? Which is getting less and less anyway. Which is maybe also why crypto is interesting as paying under the table in cash is going to be more and more difficult (or rather going to stand out more). Yet for those situations where physical money still makes sense, small payments, flea markets, tips maybe, crypto doesn't make much sense to use. It's not practical for small, fast payments on the go. Anyway printing paper money doesn't stack up to printing GPUs and power plants to get crypto to the same scale.

What happens when the system fails, well most likely the internet will fail as well or become a target. Crypto's achilles heel is fast reliable internet. At least with physical money you can still get through a couple weeks power outage!

I think part of the problem here is I'm not sure if we are having a conversation just about bitcoin or about crypto currency as a whole. A lot of the arguments against Bitcoin are strawman. People love saying bitcoin is volatile therefore its not good to hold your day to day spending money in bitcoin. Correct. But anyone that knows anything about this understands this concept well. Realistically you would hold some cash right now for your day to day living needs. You would hold stablecoins for your emergency fund and make 20% to 40% apr on it. And then you would hold coins like bitcoin and ethereum with additional money that you have that you won't need to access. Similar to the money you might put into mutual funds etc. Mutual funds and s and p 500 are basically a joke when you can make more than 20% apr on stablecoin in crypto.

The argument about illicit transactions happening in crypto is also not much of an argument. There are many facets to that discussion. First of all as a matter of privacy does the government have the right to track what you do with every penny you spend? And yeah some illegal activity is done and bitcoin is used for payment. But far more illegal transactions are settled in fiat currency.

There's certainly value to physical money right now. But we need a backup plan. Similar to how we need to expand beyond the planet earth. Sure living on Mars might not be everyone's cup of tea but in a situation where the earth is no longer liveable, we could live with a few inconveniences.

When you are using volcanic energy for bitcoin mining its not really a waste of energy. Because you can generate income off of it and you can replace someone who was using coal for bitcoin with a renewable resource. Good luck getting energy from a volcano in El Salvador to an area where the energy is needed without losing it all by the time it gets there. We have massive issues with this here in Manitoba where were produce hydro electricity. Every mile the electricity has to travel you lose more and more of it. Over the course of time more and more bitcoin mining will make use of otherwise wasted electricity.

So basically bitCoin is a stock, good for diversifying your investment portfolio. That doesn't make it a viable currency.

The argument that you might as well use volcanic energy at the source to mine bitcoins instead of transporting the electricity where it can be better used is very weak. Why not farm WoW gold instead, needs a lot less energy and less expensive equipment! There are plenty more productive things you can do at the source with the energy. Heck those data centers could run medical tests / simulations instead of solve useless math problems.

As for a backup plan, what's wrong with the good old rare materials, gold, silver, etc. And why do we need a backup plan? What's coming? And how are cryptocurrencies going to help? I'm curious.

Its funny how ol musky connects bitcoin and tesla.
Tesla the brand whose marketcap towards its actual financial results is extremely cooked

The reason why you wouldn't use it for world of warcraft gold is because there isn't enough value in it to really boost the economy in El Salvador. El Salvador is doing it to generate income for the people of that country. Your arguments are extremely weak. This stuff is common sense. 

When I say that crypto is developing towards being a monetary system that could be a backup to government controlled monetary systems is much larger than currency. 

We already had a banking system meltdown once already.  The concern is that if America doesn't get its debt problems under control soon they will lose control of it. Eventually there will be a massive collapse. A modern world is not going to move to gold and silver when that system collapses. That would not work in today's technology driven society. All of a sudden people are going to have to lug large pieces of gold around?  You already have charge cards that connect to a bitcoin wallet and can be used at any store. How exactly is gold going to replace that capability? 

Im no defender of Musk.  But their financial results are far from cooked. Tesla gets a bad rap because people have poured money into it speculative. They view it as an energy company of the future. The current earnings don't justify the valuation but it is a long term play for many investors. Tesla is to oil stocks what bitcoin is to the American dollar. 

How? Did someone solve the scalability and instability problem?

A massive collapse like that has no guarantees something as complicated as blockchain, relying heavily on the internet, is going to survive through the turmoil. Simpler methods prevail through those kind of times.

A modern world simply moves to another widely accepted currency like the Euro or Yen. But it is fascinating that Bitcoin can boost an economy. Although not that strange if you look at how Star Citizen still keeps on going and expanding. In the case of Bitcoin, it is indeed redistributing wealth in a fashion. From the 'rich' average Joe to the poorer average Joe. Too bad the environment suffers in the process and there are much more efficient ways to accomplish this. But basically using greed to redistribute wealth is a nice side effect.

Anyway from what I understood from a post a way back is that bitCoin was mostly a proof of concept for blockChain, and not really designed for replacing money. It ran away from the creators it seems, reaching values that I doubt were ever intended. For the actual rich it's not about having a lot of money, it's about assets, real estate, shares etc. bitCoin won't change that but is a nice speculative extra.

I just hope bitCoin doesn't get too huge before it collapses. It could be messy.

Thank you for your help, everyone! I feel like I kinda have a slightly better understanding of what bitcoin is now...sort of. I'm still confused about some particulars though.

Based on what's been shared about bitcoin being designed to increase in value over time through built-in shortages, it doesn't exactly sound like some populist rebellion against The Establishment like the bitcoin proponents here seem to be contending. If a currency is gaining value over time, that means a steadily decreasing share of the population has access to it over time, which means that it's designed to exclude most people and become affordable increasingly only to wealthier and wealthier people over time. The actual populists of old demanded just the opposite. They demanded the creation of "fiat currency", i.e. the replacement of the gold standard with the silver standard, and eventually paper money, so that they could afford to pay back their debts more easily by getting easier access to money. Bitcoin, by contrast, sounds to me more like rich people missing the exclusivity of the gold standard and rebelling against "fiat currency" to reassert something vaguely analogous thereto. By creating an increasingly scarce (scarce relative to population growth, that is) new currency that's designed to replace established national currencies that are subject to taxation and regulation by often democratically-elected governments, the hope seems to be to circumvent all remaining venues of democratic control over finance so that the capitalist class might avoid all remaining burden of social accountability altogether: all taxes and all responsibilities to the public. It sounds to me, in other words, like a thoroughly backward, reactionary, and deeply, deeply elitist concept.

What I'm still not understanding though are the core mechanics of it. I'm not a tech wizard. I'm just a 39-year-old grocery store clerk who dropped out of college. How exactly does one go about acquiring bitcoin, for example? Like in English? And exactly how is bitcoin "mined"? Like is there a computer somewhere that's calculating that whatever-it-is magic math equation that creates bitcoins automatically and that computational process is just popularly known as mining or something? Also...how again does this cause ecological damage? As best I can tell, bitcoin is just an idea, and one that doesn't have a physical form like paper money at that, and as such it's not actually being physically mined from the earth and extracted from trees. Just like...bitcoin is such a bad idea that it pains the Earth and metaphysically causes ecological damage? (I could almost believe that actually. It sounds a sufficiently terrible concept to me!)

Bitcoin is divisable, up to 0.00000001, which is called a Satoshi. So you don't need to buy an entire Bitcoin. It's not expensive to get into Bitcoin at all.

Bitcoin can be bought from a Bitcoin exchange, like Coinbase, Kraken and others.

Some people call Bitcoin bad for the environment because it costs lots of energy to mine it. I think coal energy is bad for he environment, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin mined with renewable energy is not bad for the environment at all. Some people think that energy is wasted by mining Bitcoin, in which case I understand why they think Bitcoin is bad for the environment. However I'm of the opinion that Bitcoin needs to exist in this world, it will fulfill an important role in our monetary system.

I think I tried to explain the technical basics in my earlier post. Simply put: a block of bitcoin is a computer file, containing some bitcoin transactions and also verifying the block before (therefore creating a chain of valid blocks). Everyone could create a block, but to be accepted the transactions need to be valid and the block needs to fulfill a certain mathematical restriction. To fulfill this, the creator of the block tries to fill a field with different numbers and calculate the hash for the whole block. This hash needs to fulfill the mathematical restriction. If it doesn't, you pick the next number and try again. You need to try billions of times until you find a number, that leads to the hash of the whole block becoming valid. The first block found this way is accepted in the network and the next block is created. This process is called mining. The transactions in the block are validated through this process. The perk for the miner is, thta in the beginning he can put newly minted bitcoin in his own account. But this number decreses, until the number of bitcoin is fixed. The second perk for the miner is, that he can demand a fee for every transaction he puts in the new block. He can ignore transactions, which don't pay enough fees, and therefore may not be validated. As many computers make a lot of calculations in the process of mining, this process needs energy.

The question of sociological impact is more one of the society itself. Bitcoin is just a technical concept. It is not a savior of humanity nor the downfall. It is just a concept. In the end the ones who are powerful in society, will probably find out ways to profit the most.

How to get Bitcoin? One way is to mine blocks. The other is to pay someone who own Bitcoin any other currency and get him to make a Bitcoin transaction to transfer some of his bitcoin in your account. There are brokers that do this, but as this cryptocurrency stuff is mostly unregulated as of yet, there are a lot of scammers among them.