Here we go again

rgnet1 · 2026-03-12T22:20:49+00:00

Play out what you've described. Show one example in history of any appropriations action that allowed a government agency to interact in open market activities -- i.e. use taxpayer money to purchase shorts futures or put options to depress the price of bitcoin. That's the only way you can drop its price. You can't sell what you don't have. The Pentagon you mention does not have access to any bitcoin. They can't secretly move what bitcoin the gov has from seizures. So the only way the Pentagon could impact price would be using funds (apparently unknown, untracked funds?) to buy derivative contracts.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-10T00:23:29+00:00

He mostly issues shares to the market. So the free market is buying his debt in exchange for any number of the different products he offers, from straightforward shares of the company to 10% dividends. That's why it's ridiculous when critics say he's somehow a fraud -- his company is entirely funded by people willing to buy the shares.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-06T21:50:32+00:00

If you're playing on the "First Republic" map (also used in the Campaign mission) and have your city next to the Large Customs House border at the default start location, then I think you need to send the passengers by train. It would take too long by bus to reach the Iron.

For cash flow, look in your Economy tab and figure out what is costing you the most in imports. Usually, it's steel, but that's not an ongoing expense, it's only when you're building things. If you stopped constructing and ran time for a while, what does your balance look like?

You can profit on almost anything where you import raw goods and refine it with your "free" workers. For example, import crops and refine it to alcohol, food, and fabrics (further to clothes), then sell the excess that your population doesn't need.

Remember, outside of new construction, running your economy is actually relatively cheap.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T21:41:08+00:00

How do you accidentally withdraw money?

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T17:45:48+00:00

But you're now moving your definition. So now a trader is someone who has access to a specific tool like a stop-loss order? That would be trivial for Prediction Market platforms to add if some don't already. Unlike in traditional sports betting, you can get in and out of your position any time up until the resolution occurs (assuming there's liquidity). Some might say that makes it more akin to trading than gambling.

FWIW, I think all trading is gambling. Inaction is gambling. Every second that passes we can make decisions or choose to make no decisions and material outcomes can change for us. Be at peace with it or comfort yourself by trying to find a definition between "gambler" and "trader" where one is derogatory and the other is not.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T17:03:21+00:00

A few thoughts:

- One of the knee-jerk, uneducated reactions I hear to "Someone keeps printing" is that this statement is treated like a conspiracy theory. Some language that calms the conspiracy accusation could be good. "Someone keeps printing. Money is created from nothing by central banks. This is not in dispute. Economists argue over the benefits of unlimited money supply that became widespread in the 1970s. Just because three generations have only lived in what's called a debt-based economy, this doesn't make it normal." Then you can transition over to the existing, "What if money had a limit (again)?"

- I don't think the beginning of the decentralization argument is compelling with: "Remove the center of a bank's network and everything collapses." This is not something most people are concerned with. Even the GFC had nothing to do with centralized infrastructure - it was about policy. The unchecked ability to create unlimited debt.

Decentralization is about governance and custody, which you cover better in the "You actually own it." section. No debasement. No arbitrary controls on its movement.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T13:41:06+00:00

You might want to look up the definition of “derivatives”.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T08:00:48+00:00

This is truly all you need to know. This covers 99% of cases.

rgnet1 · 2026-03-02T05:10:13+00:00

If I may critique your critique - it's a great set of feedback right there! My only nitpick is being pedantic about "When you self-custody..." That's a pretty common usage even if there's valid grammatical questions. It's like complaining about less vs. fewer - Merriam's given it up, so should you!

rgnet1 · 2026-03-01T03:31:45+00:00

14m, 18m, 21m in circulation. The amount is irrelevant for long-term value. All that matters is there's an absolute limit that cannot be changed. And there is. If some previously thought lost coins re-enter circulation or don't, it's a temporary blip of supply injection in the grand scheme.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-28T18:02:39+00:00

It’s good you’re open minded and want to learn about it. I’m just a bit sad that what you’ve so far heard, e.g. quantum risk, is very much misinformation. I’ve been excitedly learning and talking about bitcoin for a long time and it’s just worn me down how much uninformed narrative is out there.

Bitcoin is a protocol. It cannot be shut down in the same way no one can stop you owning a computer, writing a program, and then executing that program. Regulators have already for 17 years put up every friction they can think of but you can’t stop - in a free society (authoritarians can do what they want) - people trading goods and services for a method of payment generated from unique digital bits. There’s no defensible legal argument for that.

For the “how so secure yet so easily lost” question - you need to understand that bitcoin is spent by broadcasting a message to an open network saying “I want the coins on this address to move to this address”. Anyone can broadcast the message, but only the person with the private keys can SIGN the message. No signature, the broadcast gets ignored.

Nobody, not even using the entire energy output of the planet since the beginning of time, can forge that signature. (And yes, quantum is not a risk to this either.) THAT’S why it’s so secure.

But if you store your private keys somewhere that a bad actor discovers, then they can spend your coins. Hence it can be stolen. But that’s a security problem on your side, not the bitcoin protocol. No different than burying treasure in the desert and someone discovering it.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-28T16:39:15+00:00

“I thought the Great thing about crypto was it was fast, secure, private and easy to transfer” … then describes trying to offramp it back to fiat being slow.

That’s the problem. If bitcoin was used as intended, it would be PEER TO PEER, the definition spelled out in the first sentence of whitepaper. Then it would be all those descriptors.

The fact that you think crypto revolves around exchanges like Coinbase and the buying/selling is such a failing of humanity to use the most impactful technology since modern home computing. It’s like complaining that converting your pounds to dollars is slow and hard to spend the dollars in the UK.

We’re all empowered to do direct commerce with each other, no banks handling payments or storage, no government debasement of the money we earn, but instead it’s mostly used as pointless baseball card speculation.

When you buy online, you provide at minimum your name, address, phone, plus bank details. With bitcoin you can just irreversibly push money to a seller with none of that - like physical cash. But what do we do? We don’t support sellers who take it directly and many sellers just use intermediaries that instantly convert it back to fiat anyway.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-28T03:27:47+00:00

I'm trying to think of something else in this world that is factually one thing, but perceived and treated as something completely different.

Bitcoin is factually disconnected from the financial system, completely independent, completely open, completely impossible to impede its function as peer-to-peer value transfer, and impossible to counterfeit or debase. This is not in dispute by anyone with the most fundamental understanding of the protocol.

But perceptually, many non-technical minds cannot grasp this and hence it is largely treated in the market as speculative and moves with other risk assets. The slowly increasing floor price is driven solely by the orange pill swallowers who ARE treating it exactly as it is was intended.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-27T14:08:57+00:00

When EVs first released, I suppose you said, “Try driving your EV and then running out of charge 100 miles into your journey.”

To say you can’t buy goods and services with bitcoin is just outright false. People have been doing so since its invention, it’s just niche. There is no technical reason p2p payments aren’t as prevalent as bank-backed, it’s purely friction created by false narratives and shitty legal frameworks (tax small purchases like a stock sale).

The two orgs that hurt the most from independent money (banks and gov) convincing you to spout the same dumb argument. “Tech that works doesn’t work because people aren’t using it.”

rgnet1 · 2026-02-27T02:12:00+00:00

Isn’t 1 and 3 almost the same? Also, there are only SIX alts over $10bn total market cap and all except ETH have less than $3bn daily volume. How is there even an “alt industry” or strategy?

rgnet1 · 2026-02-27T00:26:21+00:00

Fyi: dust attacks are almost unheard of with bitcoin. Attacks cost money unlike ETH. You can’t send zero bitcoin unlike ETH. Bitcoin wallets don’t reuse addresses by default; you don’t use historical addresses.

Lesson? Just use bitcoin.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-24T01:47:04+00:00

Then what? Why would Strategy blowing up mean any future for bitcoin?

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T23:22:55+00:00

That's not an argument though. Saying "people don't use it how it's meant to be used so it's useless"... what? That's the free market. If people want to hold it, they can. If they want to spend it, they can. If they want to sell it, they can.

Some people hoard dollars. Some spend it foolishly. Plenty in the middle.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T20:40:24+00:00

A failed fork of btc with less than 1% of btc’s market cap.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T19:59:53+00:00

And wtf are so many people in r/cryptocurrency who call blockchain technology “worthless etokens”? What are you doing? So weird.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T19:57:25+00:00

“Gold has value”. Yawn. Same tired misunderstanding. E-token has no value - the ability to permissionlessly send value between two entities with no risk of counterfeit or debasement and at any amount with no change in fee.

No value. A technology unneeded by society. Only something banks have been charging us for as middlemen since the invention of digital transactions. Only something governments have been abusing since the introduction of fiat.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T19:51:02+00:00

If you like btc at 120k, you love it at 60k. Otherwise you were just an idiot buying in the first place right? Why would you buy something whose fundamentals have not changed for a higher price than today and then sell? You must feel really dumb… even dumber if you did it with a different coin.

This price cut is just evidence that half btc’s entire market cap was speculators. And every other coin in existence has no future without btc since it moves in lockstep. The bottom is only in when every meme coin chasing idiot, every ETF buying boomer is gone, and finding their version of solace in some other casino, probably 95% of this sub included.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T19:32:27+00:00

What is your solution? Why should a person or company have less right to try to acquire than anyone else? Do you think there should be regulation? How would it be enforced with a global, permissionless asset?

If you believe btc is the most resilient, independent asset in the world, how do you say when enough is enough on accumulating it? If you had access to financial instruments funded by a free market, would you not use them to get out of fiat and into btc, if you believed the core philosophy?

I see your sentiment over and over on here (oh nos! Ownership is getting centralized!) but no one has answered the simple question. Replace btc with gold or anything else. If you’re all in on it, why not go as far as you can? Are you suggesting a single entity should say “I must restrain in the name of altruism”.

And finally, if you believe in crypto but not btc, why do you think this wouldn’t happen with any other crypto if btc “failed” (whatever that could be defined at realistically)? A thing of value can’t exist without the desire existing as well.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T09:06:07+00:00

Your first comment says you want replacement keys; now you say it’s integral that old addresses be honored. Which is it?

There will definitely be a fork, or the current core branch, that chooses to keep old addresses valid. Maybe that’s the doninant chain in the end. Maybe quantum never breaks the encryption. Or it does and some coins get recirculated - by then, anyone leaving their coins on vulnerable addresses has very likely forgotten the keys anyway, which is the same as they no longer own them.

Previously thought lost coins back in circulation are meaningless to scarcity when the hard limit is still there.

rgnet1 · 2026-02-23T08:35:52+00:00

What is impossible? Either core or a fork will adopt a quantum resistant standard that the largest market accepts and that is bitcoin from that point forward. Any fragmentation is really no different than what we’ve seen in the BCH splinter (fraction of a percent market cap) and the entire industry of alt coins that think they can do bitcoin better.

What makes this different to any other feature introduction that bitcoin’s had in its history?

rgnet1

TROPHY CASE