Elon Musk: Bitcoin Structure is Brilliant, But Has Its Cons; Paper Money is Going Away (ark-invest.com) 250
Elon Musk, who among other things, is a pioneer in the payments industry, has weighed in on one of the most divisive topics in finance today: Bitcoin. In a podcast with Cathie Wood of ARK Invest, Musk, the co-founder and chief executive of electric car maker Tesla, was asked to "go off topic" and offer up some thoughts on the most famous cryptocurrency. From a report: "I think the bitcoin structure is quite brilliant. But I'm not sure that it would be a good use of Tesla's resources to get involved in crypto," he told Wood. Musk, who founded PayPal, added that the days of paper money are numbered and digital currencies could offer a more efficient solution to shifting value. "Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons," he said.
Physical money will never go away (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:5, Informative)
If he means money made of paper, then he's probably right, but wrong otherwise.
Case in point, the Bank of England now uses polymer banknotes [bankofengland.co.uk] for their current [wikipedia.org] £5 and £10 denominations and will use that for higher ones in 2020. Many other [wikipedia.org] countries have done the same for their currencies. Polymer notes are (reportedly) cleaner and stronger (allowing them to last longer) and safer (can incorporate more security features).
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:4, Interesting)
U.S. currency has to go through certain, brutal tests before it's approved. One of these tests is to roll it into a tight cylinder inside a metal tube, then a piston travels down the tube to smash the paper cylinder down length-wise. This test is repeated multiple times. Any new bill or security feature has to survive this process before the U.S. will adopt it. This is why U.S. bills don't have large holograms like bills from some other countries - this rolling/crushing test destroys them. This is probably also why we haven't adopted polymer notes yet. The polymer notes are resistant to folding, and this test is pretty much the ultimate force-fold test. It probably weakens if not tears some of the plastic fibers substantially, whereas the more pliable plant fibers in paper bills can survive it.
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:5, Insightful)
England? Now? Australia introduced those as a complete set for general circulation 27 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Holy shit I'm getting old. I remember that.
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Even if a person cannot get a Credit Card (which they probably could find one, because they will give them out to anyone), They often can get a Debit card from their local bank, which works just as well.
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I know several people who, for various reasons, can't even get a bank account. Had one teller even try to tell me I couldn't cash a check on their behalf (Seriously? They can sign the check over to me, and I can deposit it, right? And I can withdraw cash from my account, right? Okay, then do your damned job.)
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It would seem to me, that we need to solve the problem where these conditions where people cannot get a bank account needs to be solved. The problem isn't the plastic card, but the fact the banks will not offer them.
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It would seem to me, that we need to solve the problem where these conditions where people cannot get a bank account needs to be solved. The problem isn't the plastic card, but the fact the banks will not offer them.
This problem is solved. They are called prepaid debit. Basically, unlike a credit card or a bank account, overdrafts/overlimits are impossible.
Some companies have even started using them for payroll cards. Overdrafts/overlimits for a credit/debit card is a stupid money grabbing idea anyways.
Overdrafts only really made sense in the paper check day when it took a while to verify funds.
If you can't overdraft the card then everyone can always get one even people with bad credit.
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I was reading an article a few years ago about poor people who were getting their benefits with prepaid debit cards and the troubles they have. One other thing than what you've mentioned is that there's a limit on how much cash that they can take out via an ATM in order to pay their rents. So they have have to use the ATM a bunch of times to get enough to pay the rent and each time they use it they get hit with a big access fee.
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Indeed. I believe part of Bernie's 2016 platform was to have post offices begin also operating as something like very simple, traditional, consumer banks (or maybe credit unions?). Though it seems to me that it might make more sense to simply make it a requirement for all consumer banks to make at least basic no-fee checking accounts available to everyone, just as part of the cost of doing business.
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:4, Interesting)
No, mostly they're called people trapped in a bad situation created by the society they live in. Even assuming someone screwed up to create the problem in the first place, how are they supposed to go about putting their life right again when they can't even get paid for working? (How many decent employers do you know that will pay with cash instead of check?)
I do think that society should recognize that it *creates* such people, and work to fix the flaws that produce such people, and make sure that people born into such conditions through no fault of their own, find it easy to leave. "Tough love" only works when a person's problems are of their own creation, not when it's a systemic problem that might keep you trapped just as surely as it traps them, had you been unfortunate enough to be born or stumble into it.
If we want to encourage everyone to be productive members of society, we need to make it *at least* as easy for the poorest among us to be upwardly mobile as it is for most, not more difficult. But we live in a society that throws up a whole lot of barriers to that climb, some of them pretty substantial. I know people who would be financially devastated by earning a 10% raise - it would push them off the "welfare cliff", and not be nearly enough for them to reach to other side. It is to our shame as a society that we allow such traps to exist.
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Yes. After a few days and on the second and subsequent hurricanes a few places with generators managed to get it hooked up. Before that I managed to get one to take a check but handing out checks is more risky for me than them.
Those folks are already getting debit cards (Score:5, Informative)
It's sucks of course. There's fees and it's a major pain to use. But here's the rub: nobody really cares about these people. I mean, the current administration just rolled back a ton of consumer protection and anti-payday loan rules and nobody batted an eye. I only know about it because the crazy left wing sites I like complained about it (the kind that run articles on "The high cost of being poor".
TL;DR; If you're well enough off that you matter you're already getting away from cash because going to understaffed banks and waiting in line is a drag. If you're poor enough to depend on cash you're gonna get dragged into the cashless economy and taken advantage of by it, but nobody care.
Re:Those folks are already getting debit cards (Score:4, Insightful)
"Crazy left wing sites". The irony of it is that those sites would be moderate, fence sitters in any other country.
It isn't hard to wind up in that category. A former co-worker closed a bank account. A year later, some place hit the account with an ACH debit, and then the bank placed the co-worker on the Chex Systems blacklist. Even though the account was closed, that $25 for some yearly thing became $250 with all the fees the bank assessed. No word was sent to the co-worker by mail. He found out about it when his savings account was closed by the current bank.
The current US system has no protection for anyone but businesses. It is like the early 1900s, all over again, with hucksters and snake oil sellers everywhere, no laws to protect consumers, and step out of line, and the Pinkertons will end you. Only difference is that we have a recession-proof economy that only goes up and a stock market which is crashproof, so most people really don't care about this stuff.
Didn't realize that was possible (Score:2)
Also, Mod parent up. I know we're not supposed to complain about the Mods, but everything you said seemed on topic and without exaggeration.
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"The irony of it is that those sites would be moderate, fence sitters in any other country."
Only in Europe. As a European friend of mine said, he moved here because in the EU there is a far left, a crazy far left, and an even further left and nothing else and he was tired of looking at the lazy deadbeats he worked to pay for day in and day out.
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"A year later, some place hit the account with an ACH debit, and then the bank placed the co-worker on the Chex Systems blacklist. Even though the account was closed, that $25 for some yearly thing became $250 with all the fees the bank assessed. No word was sent to the co-worker by mail. He found out about it when his savings account was closed by the current bank.
The current US system has no protection for anyone but businesses. It is like the early 1900s, all over again, with hucksters and snake oil sell
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Getting COMPLETELY away from cash is what boggles my mind. Sure, all my professional and mostly personal things are handled electronically, but I often travel to weird places, at weird times, where things like electricity or signal can not only not be relied upon, but sometimes don't exist to begin with. Not having say, $200 in cash is just mind boggling to me.
I guess if I never left my green zone I wouldn't care, but why live that way.
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I think this is illegal ... see below:
https://www.today.com/money/fe... [today.com]
Or maybe was illegal before Trump watered down protections against such things.
Illegal doesn't mean much if law's not enforced (Score:2)
There's an old Dilbert cartoon where the mean little Dog (Dogbert?) sets up a phony government office to take advantage of people (the "Bureau of Dogs") and Dilbert says he's complain about it to whoever manages that sort of thing.
The last panel had Dogbert telling
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When did the bankruptcy laws get changed to only 100,000 or more to be discharged?
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Wait... you guys have fees on debit cards? But Credit Cards kind of give you free money the more you use them? That's messed up.
Physical money may go away (Score:3)
While I don't think it is a given, moving to a cashless society in the US is a possible future. But the only way I see it happening is if the government stops subsidizing cash and pushes the costs on those who decide to use cash. The cost of printing money, storing money, disposing of money, investigating counterfeit money, investigating tax evasion from off the books transactions, etc. costs tens of billions of dollars a year. If the US Treasury started offloading those costs to banks who request cash, who
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There's plenty of people who can't get a bank account of any sort. It's currently about 1 in 6 in the US. Musk's attitude of "fuck poor people, they should just die to get out or my way" is pretty typical of the obscenely wealthy left.
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It's worse: printed money is mostly gone already. I don't keep my money in cash, it's a number in a bank register. The federal reserve doesn't print more pieces of paper or anything, they change the rate at which some numbers in a register change. This just demonstrates how dumb the typical bitcoin discussion is compared to the actual dynamics of currency and its management in modern financial systems. These are typically the same ignorant people who think a deflationary currency like bitcoin is a good
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or can't have a credit card
What's a credit card? As an almost completely cash free person I don't understand. Is that like those bank cards that banks in western countries and 3rd world shitholes give out free to everyone with an account regardless of age, charge no fees, and allow you to pay for anything anywhere?
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The question is how much of your time is used in dealing with paper?
Counting it, recording it, having to drive over to the bank to deposit it, then what is your plan if you don't have the correct bills to make change. How many potential customers go to your competition because they just don't have cash on hand, what about if the cash is lost, or stolen.
Not knowing what type of business you are actually in, but dealing with cash only could be costing you more then that 2%, but it is hard to see because it is
Handling paper money isn't free (Score:3)
Why would anyone give away 2% of the profits to a payment processor?
You think processing cash is free? ALL forms of payment processing cost money, including cash. You have to pay people for their time to track it, organize it, deposit it, secure it, etc. Not to mention the fact that cash is rather easy to steal. None of this is free. In some cases it might cost less than what a credit card company charges but sometimes it costs more.
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Yes. That.
If 2% can motivate someone to take on extra hassles of cash, like precisely tallying the materials for the job, then we do not have to guess what dodging ~25% (IRS) and 14% (SSI) can get via chucking the paperwork in the trash.
And I bet you are right about the fun and games part, too. The temptation would be to shove the materials costs of 6 jobs into that one job that paid with a big check, to whittle down the profits you are forced to declare. That works until someone asks questions about why
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:4)
Why would anyone give away 2% of the profits to a payment processor?
Because I make significantly more sales by accepting cards than I would if I only accepted cash.
The convenience factor of paying by card encourages people to spend more than they would otherwise. Often customers come in, pick out an item, see more items that are of interest, ask if I accept cards, and then buy several items.
Some people carry cash. Some carry only a card. Some carry only a phone. Most can pay multiple ways. As a merchant it is part of my job to make it convenient for customers to pay me.
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The trade-off is a percentage of revenue in return for potentially higher volume that wouldn't occur otherwise.
What's the difference between a personal computing device and a payment card reader? Nothing very important.
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Free, but monitored, and your purchases will be in the NSA database.
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It sounds like you gentlemen don't want to be in the NSA database. Sounds like we need to flag you for review.
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This would be a combination of a sales and value add tax. For government who focus on a progressive tax structure, this has the problem as everyone is paying the same percentage of money.
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it would be about making everyone account for all their money.
The problem is that the people who are hiding their money tend to be the poor. A handyman is a good example, these people don't make all that much money, what they do make is on a cash basis and they usually pay taxes on little or none of that money. This is what makes it possible for you to hire someone on craigslist who comes and installs an appliance for a reasonable rate. There isn't much tax to be gained here.
The people who are dodging significant amounts of tax that are worth pursuing are doing it legally. The biggest dodges are dodging income entirely. There are several ways to do that, real estate is a good one, just reinvest the proceeds or if you own a boatload of stock in a company only sell what you need and give a chunk to charity or to pay a debt to avoid paying tax on it. The stock you gave away counts as money spent but only stock you cash in and dividends count as income.
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:5, Interesting)
Troll lol. I guess there are few rich tech beasts with mod points.
If you want to see an example of how the dodge income scam the rich play works just refer to the taxes Warren Buffet helpfully revealed. I'll fudge the numbers because I'm too lazy to look, the concept and rough scale is right. His actual gains were billions but he only directly cashed out maybe 20 mill and dodged almost all the tax on that giving another chunk to charity. For the most part he is able to invest in new companies, make acquisitions, etc by using stock to do it. Hell, he could pay everyone down to his lawn service in stock for all I know and they'd be crazy not to take it as the stock has a good return and appreciates over time unlike cash which depreciates with inflation.
This is the loophole which needs closed, these are the tax dodgers we need to go after. Leave the handyman alone, if he does well his business will grow and he won't be able to hide his few thousand a year from the IRS anymore. For the most part small independent business people like the handyman turn out to have a sense of ethics and want to bring it above board as soon as they have enough going on for it to be worthwhile anyway. That is why the IRS doesn't expend many resources tilting at that windmill.
Re: Physical money will never go away (Score:2)
Agreed. It's dangerous with all this talk about cracking down on the means of the little people (we need to regulate crypto, we need to go cashless for society) when the rich will always have some loophole. We don't even have to make it a 70 precent top tax either. If we could evven get the majority of the top to even pay a true 30 precent of their income without loopholes (as in they get no tax deductions) that be better than the state we have now.
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Gifting shares of stock to another just transfers the cap gains over to them, and reduces one's lifetime gift exemption.
Paying someone with stock is likely viewed as selling them the stock, and thus would trigger the cap gains being realized. Selling it for less than its market value would reduce those gains, but of course would reduce the amount of money you get for it even more.
Donating stocks does give you a charitable deduction, and avoid the cap gains on that stock, but you are still poorer than if you
Re:Physical money will never go away (Score:5, Informative)
An even better example is Donald Trump. In 1995, he claimed a loss of $916 million [nytimes.com] on his personal tax return. But he didn't lose a billion dollars. His company didn't even lose a billion dollars. The banks that lent him the money that he lost on his horrible property deals were the ones that realized the loss. From TFA:
Not to mention the fact that any money that he acquired previous to that (mostly from his father) wasn't taxed either [nytimes.com], partially by exploiting the current laws and in some cases just flaunting them to dodge taxes. Things like vastly understating the value of property that his father was transferring to Donald in order to avoid gift taxes, setting up sham corporations to funnel money to Donald and his siblings and getting paid large sums of money for "property management" services when Donald was just 3 years old. Some of the techniques were legal, some were of questionable legality and some were blatantly illegal. But rich people have armies of lawyers to besiege the IRS when anything is questioned so they rarely are held accountable even for the small fraction of tax frauds that are discovered.
And the whole reason that some of these tax schemes are legal is because the government is owned by the rich and powerful, they basically shape any tax legislation to their ends. Rich people have obscure methods for shielding their income from taxes because they wrote the laws that created those methods. It takes a hell of a lot of landscapers under reporting their income to equal the taxes dodged by one billionaire.
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Giving to charity is not an alternative to tax but that debate aside the loophole isn't giving to charity, the loophole is that you don't pay tax on stock unless you sell it and they give the stock to charity, not money that would count as income.
For normal people that wouldn't really be a loophole, $100 in stock is like a $100 more or less, the charity just sells it. But you don't pay tax on stock until you sell it. The argument is that you have to sell it eventually and you'll pay tax then but if you give
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There is a trust enclave on any GSM based phone. Ever since AT&T did the Softcard offering which required a distinct application to be placed on SIM cards to handle a trust enclave, all SIM cards are able to handle secure computing and banking.
I'm actually surprised that more phone makers don't take advantage of this. A SIM has a good amount of room to not just store stuff securely, but be able to have areas that are sectioned off and can be PIN protected. Moving the secure enclave to the SIM means l
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What is sad is there are sane and coherent logical arguments to support a subset of what you are saying. You and those like you are a sort of strawman that lets those sane and coherent arguments appear to be easily defeated. You are a character that results in actual rational debate ending because anything associated with anything you'd say is laughable.
Personally, I don't think it is an accident. It's like The Colbert Report except the Colbert's don't even know they are a mockery of actual rational and edu
Forgets digital money relies... (Score:3)
... on power. If there's ever a power outage of any significance your "economy" is fucked. Doesn't seem very sound to have such a point of failure. It would make it trivially easy to fuck up anyones economy in case war broke out. Seems like a recipe for disaster.
Re:Forgets digital money relies... (Score:5, Interesting)
We are already past ten toes over that line. When there is a power outage most businesses shut down, because they cannot process credit cards. Many cannot even process cash.
Obviously much of this is still solvable with cash around. Supposedly.
Of course, this larger ominous question is why the banks were bailed out with the 2008 meltdown. Because if all the big banks were suddenly forced to file for bankruptcy, would the credit cards still work? Could you get gas and get to work? Can that gas station actually get gasoline delivered? Can your grocery store get restocked?
Once a business, say, a gasoline distributor, goes into bankruptcy, they cannot suddenly create a novel procedure to extend credit to the corner station without approval from a judge.
Power outages (Score:2)
We are already past ten toes over that line. When there is a power outage most businesses shut down, because they cannot process credit cards. Many cannot even process cash.
When there is a power outage there are plenty of business that keep going just fine. The reason many shut down isn't just because of payment processing, though that certainly is one significant consideration for some like large retailers. Smaller ones can usually get by for a while. My company shuts down in a power outage because we are a manufacturing company and our equipment requires power to be useful. Payment processing isn't really a big issue for us and we don't depend on it to function day to da
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"A company like a lawn service might not really even notice a power outage of just a few hours."
Yes but the typical brownout or thunderstorm isn't the issue, the issue is natural disaster. Think weeks without power and you can't drink the water because it is contaminated with sewage even before the cities pumps stop and the tap goes off.
Re:Forgets digital money relies... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a good reason for keeping the banks alive, not a good reason for bailing them out though. Buy them out, to the tune of their existing debt, break them up, and send them on their way, with large low-interest government loans to repay. After imprisoning all the executives that decided their personal profit was more important than national security. And all the regulators who were either incompetent or corrupt enough to not spot the problem sooner.
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Other banks will be more than happy to fill the void of the ones that crash. We shouldn't keep avoiding turmoil like the plague, we should be letting it happen and learning how to cope. You end up with a more flexible system that can take it in stride that way. What we have is a fragile house of cards with too many central points of failure.
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Some businesses can't process cards or "process cash", whatever that means but there are definitely backup plans available.
In the case of cards, any business that wants payments should have one of these old school devices for emergencies [banksupplies.com]. Given the cost of this device, it seems foolish to take the chance of missing sales because you don't have one. AFAIK, you process the payments electronically somehow after the power comes back up. Back in the day I don't know how they did it--perhaps they mailed a carb
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What you say makes sense, but my most recent credit cards will not work with that imprint technology.
Not all the banks were bailed out (Score:2)
Banks are smart enough to keep profitable business (Credit Cards) separate from risky ones (Mortgage backed securities).
I wish I could say the same about average Joe consumer. That numbnut let the wall between Main Street & Wall Street banks get busted down and he keeps letting more and more banking regulations get repealed because they're "job killing regulations".
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Obviously much of this is still solvable with cash around. Supposedly.
Much of this is solvable in many ways. Having a business continuity plan should be a requirement regardless of what you use.
Last time there was a national outage of debit processing I paid for petrol the same way as many other people, by bank transfer when my bill arrived in the mail a few days later after handing over some ID.
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If there's ever a power outage of any significance your "economy" is fucked. Doesn't seem very sound to have such a point of failure.
If the power goes out, what are you going to buy with cash? The cash registers at the grocery stores won't work, and it's not like anyone knows how to make change these days. Can't buy gas, as the pumps won't work. Banks can't operate without power these days, so you're limited to cash on hand.
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And some places won't sell anything even if they could, because it's all tied into their inventory systems.
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. I don't know if you have ever worked a retail customer facing job but I bet you 100% of the time they do not "shut down" the store when the power/cash registers go out.
Most of the places I've lived, they not only shut down, they lock and barricade the doors to deter looters.
Expert in something != Expert in the other thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Expert in something != Expert in the other thin (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's an expert in getting other people to invest in his business ventures, even the government.
I wonder what stock he's planning to start selling to venture capitalists this time.
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Bitcoin isn't exactly hard to understand
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Paypal not aside he is the founder of the largest digital payment system (some would argue currency) on earth.
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We can't all have a Bachelor of Internet Trolling.
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Paper money is not going away (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the bitcoin structure is quite brilliant.
The blockchain technology might be brilliant. Bitcoin very definitely is not. We shouldn't confuse the two. The jury is still out on blockchain but I think the more interesting uses of it won't be for currency. Bitcoin is an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment which might also be a pyramid scheme either intentionally or unintentionally.
Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic. Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
If he actually thinks the dollar is trading bits of paper he has no idea what money actually is. (I doubt he's that naive) The vast majority of currency is nothing more than digits in a ledger somewhere. Paper currency is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money in circulation. Somewhere less than 10% of the total.
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Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
I agree with you and have no mod points so I have to comment instead of modding you up. I like Musk but he does say stuff off the top of his head at times that is dubious, like he believed that the odds were really good that this life of ours is just a simulation in a giant computer somewhere. Anybody interested in the subject can look up online and find some really good refutations of that idea.
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Blockchain also isn't the only thing brilliant in the Bitcoin implementation. It isn't really an individual technology but the masterful way in which they were combined and the economic concepts applied that makes it so impressive. Frankly it scaled beyond what anyone could dream of with a beta protocol.
Hopefully when all the hype dies down and the crazy market swings that come with uninterested speculators Bitcoin continues.
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This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions.
I haven't carried paper money in years and do perfectly well. In the past it wasn't viable because there used to be a £5 minimum spend on card transactions, but now there's no minimum so you can pay for everything on your card. Contactless payment has made this even more convenient, and you simply flash your card to make the payment, which is far easier than fiddling around with coins and notes.
Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
You don't need an expensive computer, all you need is a debit/credit card. I fail to see how carrying aro
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Visa and Mastercard would love the idea of collecting 2% toll on every transaction. There are lots of enemies for paper money.
They might succeed.
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Paper money isn't going away anytime soon. People tend to be distrustful of the government in the US. If paper money in the US stopped being printed and the mints stopped working, people would start using loonies, pesos, and centavos.
One other thing: Governments make money every time they print a unit of currency, be it a coin or a paper bill. Good old fashioned seigniorage. The US government isn't going to cut itself off from this revenue source.
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China *already* proved you wrong. Even the beggars in the streets wear alipay QR codes. For daily use, cash already effectively went away in China *right now*, not in the future. No reason this is not going to happen in the rest of the world, Africa might be next. No opinion when it will happen in the US in particular, but who cares.
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"The blockchain technology might be brilliant. Bitcoin very definitely is not. "
Bitcoin very much is brilliant and not just the blockchain technology, blockchain alone isn't all that fantastic. Bitcoin also leverages many existing technologies in a new and unique way. Yes, ultimately bitcoin has turned out to have a choke point at a certain scale and that needs resolved but the scheme is brilliant.
"Bitcoin is an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment which might also be a pyramid scheme either intenti
This is Retarded (Score:2)
You can have my paper money (Score:4, Interesting)
when you pry it out of my cold dead mattress. /s
Especially when I can get a discount for using cash instead of the seller having to pay a transaction fee if a credit card or some other method of payment is used.
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Even with the /sarcasm, it sounds strange. Was your mattress alive at one point?
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Yes, it was called Zem and lived in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them are slaughtered, dried out, and shipped around the galaxy to be slept on by grateful customers. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Mattresses [fandom.com]
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A fumigator can take care of that for you. Bedbugs are an increasing problem in many areas.
Wide swings in value is not a "con" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wide swings in value is not a "con" - it's a non-starter for the general public. Ask the Weimar or anyone unfortunate enough to live in Venezuela.
...or anyone that used gold for that matter. People want a currency that has stable value, and that means the currency supply must expand with demand for said currency. Bitcoin's creators assumed rising demand for Bitcoin would spur more mining activity. However, they made it too costly to mine, and the supply dried up. New currencies can learn from this and make mining less expensive to stabilize prices.
Solving this money supply issue would be a very useful and novel invention. This is currently a t
Because fire is a much greater danger than quantum (Score:2)
Yes, let's please put all our faith in cryptography we know will become 100% obsolete with the proper implementation of quantum computers.
Paper may be the foundation of civilization, but it can get wet and burn so it must not be nearly as safe or secure.
In other words... (Score:2)
crypto (...) has its pros and cons
Translation: a number of those pros excel at using crypto to pull cons on the rest of us.
This week's pump... (Score:2)
...and dump. Watch those coins burn.
Thanks Rei (Score:2)
Re:Thanks Rei (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I just had a heartwarming thought. I could drop dead tomorrow, and yet for years to come, people on Slashdot would be crediting any story that gets posted about Musk/Tesla to me. It's nice to know that people think about me when I'm not around :)
Cannabis (Score:2)
I'm not giving Visa/MC 3% (Score:2)
Podcast (Score:3)
But it's not our call, is it? (Score:2)
It seems to me like paper money will go away the day a government declares it so. In the U.S. right now, it would be entirely possible to issue some sort of government "cash card" to everyone, and dissolve the U.S. mints and all of their operational costs to offset the expense of issuing them.
All of this talk of paper money never going away because "the poor won't have bank accounts or credit cards" misses the point. All of the cash people walk around with had to be produced at considerable taxpayer expens
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot groupthink hates it when you point out the groupthink.
All we need is a story about Musk, Bitcoin, and global warming for the perfect storm of clickbait.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot groupthink hates it when you point out the groupthink.
I know, right? The unofficial logo for Slashdot is a bunch of panties crumpled into a tight ball. Maybe a black hole with a constant stream of panties swirling outside the event horizon.
All we need is a story about Musk, Bitcoin, and global warming for the perfect storm of clickbait.
Yep, closer every day! I can almost feel it coming, the Clickening.
Re: (Score:2)
There was https://www.coingecko.com/en/c... [coingecko.com]
But it's been dead for a long time.
Re: (Score:2)
I have also not seen paper money in years.
p.s.: I'm Canadian.
Re: (Score:2)
"Musk is an very rich idiot who made his fortune running a payment processor, I think he know more about money than you and I."
Really because that just sounds like he'd be more biased toward digital payment processing than you or I.