I intend to discuss how the coming years can be very interesting and their implications. Everyone is welcomed to add their opinion and make this a meaningful exercise. I am gonna start with bitcoin. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009, a perfect time considering the 2008 recession which brought out the inefficiency in the current system yet again. It paved a way for a new financial system, one which is decentralized and free from control of a single entity or a group, I call it the people’s money. It’s a network that can’t be shut down, a currency that lets you spend your money as and when you want, without being answerable to anyone. The Government can freeze your bank accounts, they can’t take away your bitcoin. It makes the concept of borders obsolete, flow of money free, and cheap as against the current remittance systems like bank and western union. The limited supply of bitcoin makes it deflationary in nature, which means, over time, the purchasing power of bitcoin will increase, and people will tend to save more than invest. But, the people have been lied to since much before bitcoin that inflation is healthy, deflation is not. It’s the same as saying “Inflation is good, savings is bad”. Doesn’t that sound preposterous to you? Now ask youself: what economy is based on little or no savings? That’s right, a subsistence economy, an economy where you are one pay check away from starvation. I will not get into much details here. Then we have the argument that bitcoin isn’t backed by anything, which is another fallacy because the network which runs bitcoin, the network which is owned by people collectively, a network where anyone is free to hop on and start a node, the network where the people verify all transactions collectively, the network where people are rewarded for their work, this network is what backs bitcoin. And this network holds much more value than the Government’s promise, which backs the current currencies we use. Can we really rely on the promise by the government and central banks? I mean can we be sure what happened to Zimbabwe or Argentina or Venenzuela wouldn’t happen to your country? Think about it. I was gonna touch upon Libra and central bank digital currencies, and how the cashless economy, despite of all the merits, endangers democracy gravely, but this is tl;dr already. So I am going to break this into parts and call this part 1. p.s I am a bitcoin enthusiast so I use every platform that I can to try and bring awareness, I am doing my bit, you should do yours. Do it for yourself and your loved ones if not for the people, cuz the times ahead can be dangerous and scary. Democracy is in danger, we will know as we explore more in the upcoming threads.
I like decentralized currency and the inability to simply print a lot of money and overinflate currency and cause a recession. I don't understand bitcoin mining, though. It seems like a steady yet slow infaltion but what happens to that when quantum computing becomes more common and processing powers skyrocket? I don't know how the economy would react.
Mining is a way to incentivize people that keep the network running. The mining rewards are halved every 4 years and at the current hash power, all bitcoins will be mined by 2140. When processing power sky rockets, the remaining bitcoins will be mined and unlock faster. What concerns me is what happens after that, the transaction fees would go up and it wont be cheap anymore so thats one issue to be addressed. There's some more issues like scaling (Number Of transactions per Second) and such which Some other coins seem to have solved, But theyre not decentralised in the true sense of the word.What separated bitcoin from others is that it has no CEO and it Has the longest chain making a 51% attack virtually impossible. Also We have to see how the LN and segwit implementations On bitcoin blockchain pans out. I'm not saying it has to be bitcoin that has to be adopted necessarily, hopefully there will be something that addresses the flaws of bitcoin and does away with them and yet be equally decentralised along with ethereums smart contract. Fingers crossed. But for now bitcoin is the answer. The industry is still nascent and but highly innovative. How the economy would react is something we will have to wait and see. For now, the governments are scared of libra (the facebook coin)
Return to a state of bartering with your neighbour, milk for sugar. A cow for some firewood. That's our best way forward.
I don't quite get your question but um no the blocked don't get depleted, they are stored in the network. Think of each block as a new page in the ledger that stays there forever and can't be altered
Facebook's libra will introduce a billion people to the wrong kind of cryptocurrency just as AOL introduced a billion people to the wrong kind of internet.