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Now that crypto seems to be firmly on one side of the Culture War, in that Trump and co. are actively promoting it, what do we see as the future of crypto under a Trump presidency?
Personally I am only just getting into the space, but continue to be surprised by just the sheer amount of money and energy behind a lot of these projects, and communities. For instance right now in the Solana meme coin market, AI agents on twitter and other areas are a huge point of interest.
What fascinates me is the fact that the crypto ecosystem seems to offer an alternative way to get funding for startups, especially in "hot" areas like AI. Instead of going the VC route, a creator can just go straight to twitter and create an automated agent, then make a meme coin off of that agent and potentially make millions of dollars.
For some examples of this, we have @truth_terminal, which is I believe the most popular AI agent on the site which sort of started the entire wave. https://x.com/truth_terminal. The fascinating thing about this account is that it asked for $50,000 to start making money, and Marc Andreessen actually gave it the money, which it then took and became a millionaire from crypto.
More recently, there are all sorts of projects coming out around meme coins and AI. A ton of them are just general slop, porn bots, et cetera, but some seem to have real creative vision / potential behind them, like for instance @pillzumi, which seems to be like a blend of AI agents + an AI-generated anime series, or something like that.
All this to say that while many see crypto as nothing but scams and a waste of time, in my opinion some of the most genuinely novel and interesting projects are happening there.
To bring it back to the culture war - almost all of crypto and these AI innovations seem to be swinging heavily right wing. Same with the broader VC / tech environment. How will the left respond? Do you think democrats will begin to be more friendly to crypto, or will they double down on trying to lock it out of traditional financial systems?
Do you think Trump will actually make significant progress in regulating crypto and integrating it in the financial system of the U.S.? What would be the main blockers? How much political capital will he really need?
Okay, I'll bring a contrarian take to the table:
I'm a Bitcoin Maxi in the sense that I don't think any coins can possibly displace it at this point.
But there's seemingly very little stuff you can "DO" with Crypto. And the stuff you can do is based around avoiding financial regs or international monetary restrictions.
I will accept the characterization of BTC as "digital gold," but Gold can be put to use as something other than a store of value. And unlike Gold it could in theory be forked to increase supply or otherwise devalue/debase itself if the miners so chose.
So even without believing that its an unsustainable Ponzi, I just ask what goal are Bitcoin holders coordinating towards, other than getting really rich as denominated in USD?
I'm not even asking what the 'endgame' is, its just, what does one 'do' with the BTC other than hold it, occasionally buy more, and maybe sell it if you ultimately need to transact business in USD?
Because there's not a lot to 'do' with BTC, I don't think Trump will actually do much to it. He may call off the regulatory watchdogs which will lead to an influx of money into the space, but even if this leads to a lot more projects, we've been waiting for 13 years for a project that actually leverages BTC's properties to do something, shall we say, truly useful.
Yes, Bitcoin has basically failed to become a currency. Though a lot of it is due to regulators frowning on it and issuing veiled threats to jail you for financing terrorists if you try to make it useful.
Since Chevron deference was shot down by SCOTUS and Trump seems bullish on Bitcoin, it could be a good time to be a Bitcoin maxi again.
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Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok just had a great discussion about this at the propeller-head level. You're pretty close to what I think their ultimate prediction is. They think crypto will be paired with a few major currencies, and that will be attractive to a bunch of minor countries who want the benefits of access to a more major currency, but without the regulatory strings the originators of those currencies would like to attach. They think that this will drive out more minor currencies, but that crypto can't completely do it on its own; it will still need to be sort of attached to one of a few more major currencies. With the speed of calculation managing arbitrage against poor management of one of these major currencies, I guess the hope is that it will help enforce better management of the handful of major currencies (also perhaps taking away some of the value a major currency supplier could typically try to get by doing any number of the typical 'poor management' things they typically otherwise do).
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Bitcoin has been forked multiple times because the OG protocols are, to put it bluntly, really bad. However each of those times (like BTC cash) the forks have basically died out while OG shitty infrastructure bitcoin continues to go up and up.
Personally I was quite surprised by this because e.g. when Ethereum was forked the fork came to dominate, but perhaps that's because the fork kept the name "Ethereum".
Alas the BTC/ETH ratio slowly keeps creeping up (My crypto holdings are largely ETH which actually has multiple good uses, I refuse out of principle to support such a shitty protocol as OG BTC) so what do I know, but it really is jarring in a similar way to how Gamestop's share price rise and stabilization way about fundamental value is jarring.
What are those? Because I played in the ETH ecosystem for a while (RIP Augur) and I came to be dissappointed because all the exciting projects died because ETH doesn't scale well, or because its REALLY hard to avoid programming bugs, or because whatever function they serve is just better done via centralized services.
So I tossed in the towel for now, while still holding SOME ETH in reserve (never uninstalled MetaMask).
Like, DAOs had a moment, and then seemingly nothing has been done with them. Same with NFTs.
NTF were useful only for scams of get-rich-quick variety and for scams of "this will be unique valuable collector item" (if these two scams are considered to be separate).
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Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin, and I would not characterize it as having "died out". Its transaction volume is about half that of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's design makes transactions super expensive so you'd expect it to have low transaction volume (note your graph is by number of transactions, not dollar value of the transactions) relative to its true size and so litecoin having half of even that (despite being a significantly better protocol for facilitating transactions) just shows how few litecoin transactions there really are. If you add Ethereum to your graph which is a more reasonable comparison it handily beats all of them and you can see there are around 6x as many Eth transactions per day compared to bitcoin.
Given the market cap differences between the two if bitcoin had a decent protocol for transactions I'd expect there would be between 15-20x as many BTC transactions per day compared to LTC.
The graph for that metric indicates near-identical median transaction sizes of around 230 dollars. (Mean transaction size is 250 k$ for Bitcoin vs. 50 k$ for Litecoin.)
I don't see how that's relevant to the original question of whether Litecoin has "died out". In my opinion, even if Litecoin has died out as a store of value (I have no opinion on that question), the combination of half-as-large transaction volume and near-identical median transaction size means that Litecoin has not died out as a medium of exchange in comparison to Bitcoin.
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Is crypto-skepticism contrarian now? I guess here it might be!
This is, while unlikely (after all, bitcoin is an attempted "fork" from fiat, and it's been remarkably successful so far), is maybe a good thing, it means that if a change is considered good by a consensus of nodes then it can be implemented, less subject to the whims of a single government than fiat, more amenable to change than gold.
The end game is that a significant amount of transactions are ultimately settled in BTC, and I guess also that a significant amount of reserves held are also denominated in BTC. You can argue that bitcoin is not good for day to day transactions between individuals, but it's way faster and cheaper (though the latter might be a matter of just not having a big regulatory structure above it) than the big movements that happen in the background.
Which I guess speaks to @faceh's objection: For all this to be "real", bitcoin's price needs to be a lot more stable. The simplest model of the value of bitcoin is something like p(it happens) * (total value of eventual transactions settled in bitcoin + all bitcoin eventually held in reserves), the idea being that, as p approaches 1, the price should start to settle. The thing is that the second factor is not constant either: Is BTC going to be used by developing countries? Is it going to replace the USD as the dominant currency? Is it going to just take over the world? The notion that further success begets more appreciation makes it hard for it to bootstrap its way into being a medium of exchange.
I'm not a turbo-optimist to begin with, but I guess you guys have managed to move me slightly to the more skeptical side.
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We can avoid worldwide CBDC tyranny if we establish a convention that currencies (and especially digital currencies) are more than just bits of paper arbitrarily created and destroyed by politicians and their banker buddies. Better to have Doge, Shiba and even HarryPotterObamaSonic10inu than to own nothing but digital good boy points.
I prefer digital good boy points because my decades-long experience is that I can reliably exchange them for goods and services that I desire. I grant that there is some systemic risk incurred by relying on said good boy points instead of the new and very reliable shitcoins, but I find that level of risk over the course of my lifetime to be acceptable, particularly when compared to the likelihood that I'll ever be in a situation where Delta or my local steakhouse are accepting Doge.
I get it, you just want to grill.
But what happens if the local steakhouse starts being rationed? Maybe they haven't met their Climate Obligations? Or maybe you aren't doing your part of the Green New Deal? You might want to go to a market... oh your digital good boy points can't be traded to Non-Licensed Traders?
How are you going to protest if you can't fund anything individually or collectively? How can you have free speech if you can't pay for a journal or web hosting? The next thing you know the police have invited you over to 'have tea' like they do in China and there's nothing you can do about it, certainly not paying for a lawyer.
Without freedom of transaction, there are no other freedoms.
Assuming this, I expect I cannot buy them with BTC either.
To avoid such scenario other methods are more efficient.
You can buy anything with Bitcoin, an early use-case was illegal drugs. They physically cannot stop you making the transaction. In this scenario they'd probably watch all the BTC addresses, so you'd actually be using monero or some other privacy-coin.
Anyway, no revolution can work without financing.
Still, in such case (meat being rationed) I expect that BTW will not help much compared to other barter and that it will be worse at barter than other mediums of exchange due to insane transaction fees and long confirmation period.
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I think my odds of being able to go to the farmer's market and buy beef with American dollars for the remainder of my life are quite high. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my general monetary plan isn't based on not desiring the ability to freely transact, but based on my evaluation that I can pretty much do so in the United States and I don't expect that to change any time soon. I'll be absolutely shocked if it turns out that in 2034 I can purchase brats with Bitcoin, but not US dollars.
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