DonK retweetledi
I'm a huge fan of most Bloomberg content but this opinion article by @matt_levine is really bad. I respect most divergent opinions but it's written either as propaganda or from the perspective of someone who has never actually sent a bitcoin transaction.
For example:
"So if you send someone Bitcoin to pay for something, there will probably be a typo in the address and the person won’t get it and you’ll have to send it again and your first payment will just be permanently lost."
Usually you copy it, not type it. And there are checksums in a bitcoin transaction. It's pretty hard to mess up, kind of like IBAN. It's designed well. "Probably" implies the majority, whereas a true mess-up would be a tiny minority. This is neither journalism nor serious opinion.
And then I get to this line and have to double-check to make sure I'm not accidentally on The Onion:
"The third classic problem is that, if you are using Bitcoin to pay for goods and services, there is a good chance that you are paying for something illegal, and Bitcoin payments are traceable. So if you send someone $16,000 worth of Bitcoin to buy a $16,000 thing, (1) some of your money will go missing in transit, (2) the Bitcoins you send won’t be worth $16,000 and you’ll have to send some more, and (3) the $16,000 thing was a murder and now you are in prison."
He then went on to describe where someone hired a hitman for $8k and accidentally sent it to the wrong address and had to do it again. I mean... okay. Way to find the fringe idiot as though that's standard.
I had to double-check that this article wasn't from 2012, because it's a weird set of fringe-cases presented as normal.
It's like saying "You want to pay for something in cash dollars? They're covered in cocaine and you're likely paying for a mob hit. Let me tell you about this guy that..."
Bitcoin is just global open-source money. There are 160+ currency jurisdictions in the world and many of them rapidly dilute their peoples' money and censor their peoples' transactions. Bitcoin is an emerging alternative for them.
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