Hi Sophie, thank you for your input
Bitcoin is impossible to confiscate when kept in a self custody wallet. The Canada example is very illustrative. The government managed to freeze banks accounts and exchanges (not self-custody) but was unable to do anything about cold wallets. In fact, they beg the exchanges not to promote the use of cold storage in a pathetic attempt to maintain some control. When you have bitcoin in a cold wallet no one has access to it unless you decide to give them your private keys. Nakamoto’s wallet contains over 1million BTC, the address is public, yet it remains untouched for 13 years. These coins are worth over $50 Billion, yet no one but Satoshi will ever be able to retrieve that.
Banks are fine when everything runs smoothly but when SHTF, don’t count on being able to withdraw your money. First, it’s not your money, technically speaking it belongs to the bank. Second, they don’t even have it. Thanks to the unlimited fractional reserve they have lent it many times over and during a bank run, you would lose everything.
The guarantee you are talking about is very theoretical and it only covers the first $100k but even that is not guaranteed during a liquidity squeeze.
Banks and governments can do basically anything they want, they can freeze, block, confiscate and we have seen this already in many places including super democratic Canada. When you need permission to withdraw your money, is it really yours?
The 51% has never happened, not even close. It could have been possible in the beginning when the network was small. Now, there is not enough computer power in the world to do it unless you somehow convince all the miners to attack themselves and destroy the network and all the value in it. Not going to happen.
Bitcoin is mainly a store of value because that’s what the market has decided. It’s also used as a medium of exchange for small transactions where is more convenient to pay with satoshis than dollars. The dollar is a good medium of exchange but an extremely poor store of value so people use it accordingly. Gold has zero velocity but has been a great asset to hold for the last 5000 years. Bitcoin has also the potential to be used as currency and people are using it in places where the local currency is very weak. Whether it will ever replace the dollar or not remains to be seen but I don’t see any reason why not, it is already legal tender in El Salvador and the experiment seems to be working rather well.
Instead of increasing entropy, Bitcoin reduces it. It uses stranded energy that would have been lost ( that is real entropy) and stores it in the blockchain as monetary value. Besides, it aims to replace a financial system that is far more wasteful and entropic in its use of energy. How much electricity do you think your bank uses? How much entropy was dispersed building all those towers? Bitcoin is actually promoting clean energy and it is very efficient in its use. It could well be the best thing happening to the planet for a long time.
Don’t believe the FUD. Don’t trust anyone. Verify.
