u/No-Masterpiece2246

Other than the fact that a CBDC is issued by a Central Bank and a stablecoin is issued by crypto, banking, or investment corporations, are there any other differences between the two? Stablecoins can absolutely be programmed just like CBDCs, and their supply is artificial/arbitrary and controlled by a small group. Stablecoins can be seized by a central authority just like CBDCs, and their usage is easily trackable once a wallet is linked to an identity (I suppose with CBDC this is automatic). Of course coins can be blacklisted or rate-limited. In other words, stablecoins and CBDCs represent roughly the same "digital ID hellscape" we are currently faced with. 👀

Adam Back and Samson Mow have had a rough month. First their crappy Liquid product got hacked. Now they've been outed for selling fraudulent mining contracts with the help of a convicted felon. What's next for Blockstream?

FYI: Blockstream is the corporation in charge of the Bitcoin Core code repository.

I've been thinking about The Quantum FUD from idiots like Jim Cramer. If BTC encryption were cracked, wouldn't the price of BTC rapidly plummet? All BTC would be stolen fairly quickly, causing the value to drop rapidly as people panic sell what they still have. And who is buying it? The buyer will have it stolen immediately. For this reason I believe quantum attacks are not as dangerous as they seem. For this same reason BTC miners do not attempt to change Bitcoin consensus rules or mint extra coins, as this would cause a crisis of confidence and effectively end to crypto mining enterprises.

On the flip side, bankers and state actors DO have an incentive to quantum attack crypto, because they could destroy confidence in cryptocurrencies and corral the herd back into their electronic fiat prison. Therefore I conclude that the quantum risk to crypto is non-zero, but the odds are lower than previously thought. However the quantum risk is not of price dropping, but the effective end of the 20 year Bitcoin experiment.

Prices for goods and services in the US have doubled in the past 5 years. US citizens aren't particularly familiar with the psychology of hyperinflation, but a currency shock and panic are not outside the realm of possibility. Several currencies such as the Argentine Peso, Venezuelan Bolivar, and Iranian Rial have endured massive hyperinflations during this decade. The citizens of these countries know to not hold their money for long as it loses value constantly. The loss of value in these currencies has caused those economies to be dollar-denominated, lessening the impact of US Federal Reserve money printing. But eventually the dollar must inflate too as the supply approaches infinity.

This could explain the recent precious metals and crypto pump. Also of note is Scott Bessent's plan for the government to buy back US Treasury bonds. In essence this is the Fed bailing itself out. Meaning more inflation.

Reading up on some history of the compromise of Bitcoin development of the Bitcoin Cash fork in "Hijacking Bitcoin". So, the Big Blockers were 100% right about:

* Lightning sucks and will never work

* Fees on BTC get very high when the chain is used heavily

* The cost of Bitcoin nodes was exaggerated and a big block node is cheap to run

* Adoption of BTC was killed when the blocksize got frozen

* Segwit is an ugly hack

* The Blockstream dev team hasn't innovated anything since they took over

Prove me wrong

...Tether printed another billion USDT. That fresh billion would be wash traded for 24 hours, and bingo, BTC price was up 10%. With Tether currently under Howard Lutnick's control, that can't happen anymore. But at least the Fed can print a few trillion, some of it might trickle into BTC.

https://x.com/saylor/status/1886046076316041641

Feb 2025, what a difference "18 more months" can make.

Obviously related to price drop

I'm following the Iran Strait of Hormuz situation, it seems this is a global oil chokepoint, and the continued problems getting Middle East oil out of there is a major problem for the global economy. Obviously Iran's economy is in trouble if they can't export oil. But the blockage also causes oil price to rise, which benefits them. Iran has been sanctioned from global oil and financial markets by the US for years anyway, so all of their oil sales and purchases continue to be done via black markets. Much of the Iranian oil is sold using India and China as intermediaries. For these reasons, crypto is a good choice for accepting and making payments for Iran, since it can't be stopped and censored like SWIFT and wire transactions.

Watching the Iran government lose billions worth of USDT to seizure shows that they either didn't understand how things work, or they got tricked into using Tether. Obviously now they're done with Tether. If/when they start accepting BTC, that will be tracked and eventually blacklisted by the US government as well. Therefore I believe it's logical that they could start accepting XMR for payments. At that point, the US can really only try to limit their fiat offramps for XMR, which is an inexact process. So they'd only lose a portion of their payments, but probably not all of them.

However, at some point the process of converting XMR to fiat might become too cumbersome or difficult. At that point, the Iran government would simply keep the XMR and use it as payment for something else they're forbidden from. If we arrive at this juncture, XMR becomes a global petrocurrency. Discuss

Not sure who is following, but Paul Sztorc is launching a BTC forked shitcoin called Ecash. Never mind that there already is a coin called Ecash (BCH fork from 5y ago). Aaand, Paul is stealing Satoshi's coins and giving them to "early investors". I'm guessing with 99.9999% certainty that this coin will go quickly to zero, as even Paul says he isn't selling his BTC for his new coin.

Bitcoin forks were trendy 10 years ago but now they're mostly instant shitcoins. It seems like Paul thinks he has clout as a cryptographer, but a scam is a scam.

So... I need an exchange that will support this fork and allow the coin to be traded as soon as it lists. Dump for BTC or BCH and move on.

It seems shocking that a software developer could be held accountable for Bitcoin mixing! But the Tornado Cash dev is also facing jail time.