Current #Bitcoin block: 808,205
Estimated day of #halving: 25 Apr 2024 20:13:29 UTC
#meme #memes #memestr
Discussion
Bitcoin is unbacked currency just like fiat
“Unbacked “😅
Unbacked = it is a meaningless accounting unit (like the Federal Reserve Note); it has no real value
When fiat dies so does Bitcoin (and all unbacked cryptocurrency)
That's quite retarded claim. How exactly is #Bitcoin going to die if all the Fiat disappeared tomorrow?
Elaborate, please.
If the supplier of my business takes Bitcoin now, almost certainly they turn it into fiat (possibly collateralized stablecoins) in order to pay their suppliers. Or maybe their supplier does. When fiat collapses, I can't keep taking Bitcoin unless my supplier does, and he can't keep taking Bitcoin unless his supplier does. And so on. So only if you have self-sufficient systems in which everyone takes Bitcoin can it continue to circulate.
Instead, most people will turn to physical barter and we will rebuild a monetary system (likely) based on precious metals.
I love both gold and Bitcoin , but physical barter like you mentioned doesn't work anymore.
Same issue as just what you mentioned.
Your supplier loves fiat. Period.
If the supplier of my business takes precious metals now, almost certainly they turn it into fiat (possibly collateralized notes) in order to pay their suppliers. Or maybe their supplier does. When fiat collapses, I can't keep taking precious metals unless my supplier does, and he can't keep taking precious metals unless his supplier does. And so on. So only if you have self-sufficient systems in which everyone takes precious metals can it continue to circulate.
Instead, most people will turn to physical barter and we will rebuild a monetary system (likely) based on Bitcoin.
That should help.
The difference is if I am "stuck" with precious metals I can trade/sell them to a jeweler, or a dentist, or an electrician, or a scientist with a scanning electron microscope - who wants the metal not for trade but for practical use.
The possibility of non-trade use creates the certainty of trade use.
I want a pencil, paper, stamps and envelopes because I can do so much more with those things besides write letters so email is not going to catch on.
What's the money value of an email?
Infinitely cheap. But the value is in the information not the letter itself.
Money is information not the physical, note/coin itself. The only reason 1/10th oz of gold is worth less than 1 oz is because we have the information that one weighs more than the other. The only reason 1$ bill is worth less than 100$ bill is because of the information printed in it.
Money is energy density, bitcoin is by far the most dense. Money is representation of calories and watts. Bitcoin is a direct measure of calories and watts. Gold is an indirect measure of calories and watts. Fiat is an obfuscation of calories and warts.
If we could send calories globally with no transmission loss that would be the ultimate money. Btc is the closest thing we have to that.
Again, the energy theory of value. Like Marx's labor theory of value, this is incoherent.
Is it information or energy?
And no, the 1tz coin is worth 10x as much as the 1/10tz coin for the same reason 10 barrels of oil are worth 10x as much as 1 barrel of oil - namely you can do 10x as much with the material.
The $100 bill is worth the same post-fiat as the $1 bill because you can do exactly the same things with them. The $100 bill is worth more now only because the fiat credit system gives you more points for it. When that system collapses obviously the $1 and the $100 will have the same value - just as Zimbabwe $50trillion notes and Zimbabwe $50 notes (from the hyperinflated currency) already have the same value.
This problem applies to Bitcoin as well. There is no reason that 1 Bitcoin is worth more than 1 satoshi except that it counts for more fiat credit - unlike oil where it is very obvious that 1 barrel is worth more than 1 gallon.
Bitcoin does not have that problem because it can't be hyper inflated.
Already was - where did it come from?
#Bitcoin is still limited to 21 million coins, where is your hyperinflation?
How did it go from zero to 21 million?
how did gold go from 0 to unknown total amount
In quantity, supernova
In price, people wanted gold for jewelry or to fashion simple metal instruments (like lead, gold is malleable & makes good plumbing)
Then because it was durable people decided to save gold (later selling it to others for material uses).
But that can't happen with Bitcoin, there is no base case of jewelry or conducting electricity or whatever to bootstrap from. Instead it is a derivative of fiat which is a derivative of gold.
There was a monetization process of gold the same way there was with btc. It's not like humans were created wanting gold. In fact gold is in the demonetization process at the moment. The same way iron,bronze,silver (all were money at one point). have all mostly been demonetized gold will be too.
To the energy / information point. Money is energy dense because it's hard to create/find/ mine whatever. Then it's purely informational (transactional). Btc will surpass gold because it can store energy more efficiently and transmit its informational value more efficiently.
If you had a way to split gold down to the atom, and be able to physically move that atom anywhere in the world with no loss of information -no friction. Then gold would be competitive but its not.
How much energy does a Bitcoin store?
https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart
Each T/h is approx 120w and getting more dense as hardware improves.
So the later bitcoins store more energy than the earlier ones? Are they worth more?
The energy storage is cumulative. The blockchain is like a battery for the humans to draw from. Money is like a civilizational battery where we store excess labor.
The longer we can defer consumption the better off we will be as humans. Savings is just deferred consumption so in a way the early bitcoins are worth a lot now because those people deferred consumption the longest. Even tho 1btc = 1btc
Is not at 21 million. Also, where is the hyperinflation, again. 👀😆
Money is the information.
Exactly. Good money can reflect that information (price) through time.
What about energy? Bitcoin is backed by the the ability to produce the energy need to mine a block, and or the ability to procure that energy. Why is that meaningless?
That's not backing.
When FRNs were backed by gold you could take them to the Federal Reserve (or the US Treasury) and demand gold.
The issuer who created the notes "backed" them by pledging a real asset - the notes were merely a stand-in for that real asset.
I don't have a particular right to go to the miner & demand any particular amount of energy for my Bitcoin.
Similarly, gold takes energy to find, recover & refine, but it is not backed by that energy. If you think it is, then we could ask what backs the energy. Hopefully you see why this leads quickly to absurdity.
I don't think that's an apt comparison.
The energy "backing" bitcoin is energy thay is immediately redirectable. There's objective of proof this in practice today.
Using mining as a "variable load" to increase reserve capacity for any given grid, again objectively provably happened today. Increase the available energy capacity at any give time. Leading to more stable grids. This also provides a tool that allows for what was previously cost prohibitive grid expansion.
This solves a problem that has existed since energy grids have existed. Nothing has solved this, to this extent before Bitcoin.
So is Bitcoin "backed" by energy, that's kind of subjective I'll give you that. But the real world, symbolic relationships between Bitcoin mining and energy production is not.
You use a certain amount of energy computing blocks. How do you get back or redirect that energy? Isn't it mostly lost as heat?
If your datacenter produces currency, that currency belongs to the datacenter owners and operators, not the electric grid operators. You could spend currency importing additional fuel but that was true regardless of what task the datacenter was doing to produce currency. You could be renting out cloud storage or crunching numbers for LLM chatbots.
Is Bitcoin mining the most efficient way to turn electricity back into some form of currency? I doubt it. One compelling alternative is turning air and water into ammonia, which can be used to fertilize crops or burned as a fuel for mechanical or electrical output. Or you could perform those other datacenter tasks.
Moreover, Bitcoin is convertible into electricity at variable rates, not a fixed rate. I can't buy Bitcoin now and have any confidence about how much or how little electricity it will buy in 5 years. Supposedly this is the great weakness of fiat - that my fiat dollars will buy an unknown amount of real goods.
I suspect this unknown is the chief appeal of Bitcoin. Bitcoiners seem to hope that Bitcoin will increase in trade value vs real goods, while they (and I) believe fiat will tend to decrease in trade value vs real goods.
If you think Bitcoin will continue to increase in trade value vs real goods forever, why? Whatever wonderful mathematical properties it has can be duplicated in other cryptocurrency. Do you think all cryptos matching or exceeding the current properties of Bitcoin will go up in value forever?
The consumed energy, of course has already been consumed. The supply that is aimed at that source of consumption is what can be redirected. This is supply that would otherwise be curtailed in one way or another. Rather then curtailing or ramping the supply, you throttle down the mining. There is no other industrial scale consumer of electricity that can be throttled up and down or completely shut off that quickly. You can’t just shut down a data center full of servers, or take cloud storage offline at moment’s notice.
Yes the bitcoin minted by the data center belongs to the data center, but some must be distributed to cover the coast of electricity. And so long as the data center is paying the bill, what does the producer care? They never need to interact with the bitcoin.
We know definitively, that the fiat dollar will buy less in five years, by definition as an inflationary currency. We know that for the entirety of its history, that there are no 2 points on a bitcoin price chart in which it has bought less five years later. Granted it has a short history; In which it has out competed that vast majority of other currencies in the world.
Why will it continue to go up in trade value vs real goods?(I’ll give that one it’s own separate answer, its kind of a big one.) As long as bitcoin continues to be useful and people want to use it. But why can’t any other cryptocurrency duplicate what bitcoin can offer? Firstly the security of the network. The network has more compute power than any other network in the world, more then all the supercomputers, or anything else, by orders of magnitude. You absolutely can not recreate that, on any realistic time frame, or port that over to another network. Same with the nodes, it is genuinely globally decentralized, and you can’t just port those nodes over to another network.
Why go up forever?
(I cheated in this one. I was struggling putting conceptual understandings into concise statements, so I used chatGPT. So, totally fair if you want to harange me for not being able to defend my arguments....🤷♂️)
From an economic standpoint, Bitcoin's potential for perpetual price appreciation can be attributed to fundamental principles of supply and demand, coupled with the network effect. Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million, creating a scarcity dynamic. As more individuals and institutions adopt Bitcoin, demand increases. Scarcity coupled with rising demand generally leads to price appreciation.
Furthermore, the network effect amplifies this dynamic. As the number of Bitcoin users grows, the utility and value of the network increase exponentially, attracting even more users and, consequently, more demand. This self-reinforcing loop has the potential to sustain long-term price growth, especially as Bitcoin continues to penetrate global financial markets and challenge traditional stores of value. Therefore, theoretically, Bitcoin's price could ascend indefinitely as long as these dynamics persist.
the energy dynamics of Bitcoin mining add another layer of complexity and potential for long-term value appreciation. The Proof-of-Work mechanism, which secures the Bitcoin network, requires miners to expend energy to validate
transactions and create new blocks. This energy expenditure effectively "backs" each Bitcoin, imbuing it with a tangible form of value akin to the labor and capital invested in extracting precious metals like gold.
The energy cost sets a kind of "floor" for the value of Bitcoin; as long as people are willing to expend energy to mine it, it will have intrinsic value. Moreover, as the network grows and more energy is expended, the security and robustness of the network increase, making it even more attractive to potential users and investors. This, in turn, feeds back into the supply and demand and network effect dynamics, creating a multifaceted system that could theoretically drive Bitcoin's value upward indefinitely.
Is that so absurd that you don't even find it worth responding to?
My S1's will prove to the contrary.
You see this as a bad thing, I see it as the only way to use it in the digital age while keeping the money decentralized.
Show me a better option than #Bitcoin
Give up on decentralization.
Give up on "trustless" currency.
We have to build trustworthy systems to do real commerce.
If you want to ship oil or grains or manufactured goods around the world you need trustworthy security & dispute resolution.
If you have trustworthy security & dispute resolution we can also ship precious metal around the world.
If you can ship precious metal around the world in a trustworthy way, then you can transact in electronic claims on precious metal.
If you can transact in trustworthy electronic claims on precious metal, there is no need for irredeemable cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is an elegant solution to the wrong problem.
It is technologically sophisticated but economically illiterate.
Like Karl Marx, Bitcoiners (typically) assume that the difficulty of producing a good imparts that good with value. Marx was focused on human labor while Bitcoiners are focused on machine labor (energy). But this is simply not a coherent theory of value. If all goods can be reduced to a single scale of value, then why does exchange occur at all? Exchanges become more for less (exploitative) or equal for equal (pointless) rather than A for B (mutually beneficial).
The labor theory of value was rightly discarded for subjective theory of value. For exchange to make sense in the first place, the parties must disagree on the relative valuation of the goods or services exchanged. I prefer a snack of cookies to carrots, you prefer carrots to cookies, and so we trade. If we agreed on the relative valuation, the individual who had the more-valuable-to-him good would not give it up for a less-valuable-to-him alternative.
So the value of a good is the highest use to which the individual can put it, which varies from person to person. For Bitcoin, this is only the ability to trade it on to the next fellow. So long as there is an infinite chain of fellows, this works well enough.
But, the acceptability of Bitcoin right now depends on fiat, which depends on gold. If I want my business to accept Bitcoin I can take it and exchange it rapidly for fiat (including collateralized stable coins). So I don't have to care whether my supplier takes Bitcoin. But if fiat collapses & my supplier does not take Bitcoin, I need to find a new supplier or stop accepting Bitcoin. And my supplier is in the same boat, and his supplier, and so on. Unless you have a local economy which is self-sufficient and where everyone takes Bitcoin without exchanging it for fiat, Bitcoin acceptance will likely diminish dramatically during a fiat collapse. Only the "true believers" will take it.
The rest of us will turn to physical barter and rebuild a monetary system (likely) based on precious metals. We could then have markets which exchange Bitcoin for precious metals (or claims on metals). But again, what would be the point of Bitcoin in a world where we have trustworthy electronic claims on precious metals?
So the question is - how do you ever get to hyperbitcoinizatjon? How do you ever get to general acceptance of Bitcoin without some other underlying money or currency which people regard as the real deal? How do you make everyone a "true believer"?
Also, if “trustworthy claims on gold” actually worked in the modern world… we wouldn’t have gotten fiat
US got way ahead in industrial & technological terms & was able to force most of the world into effectively a tribute system
That lead is practically gone
No disagreement there. But there’s no reason to believe the same thing wouldn’t happen again. That’s just the way the tech of gold works - it’s easy to seize.
GLD & LBMA are easy to seize, my personal safe less so.
Try take your personal safe across borders. #Bitcoin in ones memory is unconfiscable.
Bitcoin in your memory is also imaginary
If you can get others to imagine with you, that particular form of imagination can prove very effective - for a time
We are going to wake up from the fiat dream at some point, and Bitcoin will be left behind
The bitcoin in my mind is no less imaginary than the 10 commandments, which are written in so many copies around the world that they can’t just be forgotten (they’re really even more secure, because you can’t change a single UTXO without rewriting the entire chain thereafter… virtually impossible)
Also your gold is just a shiny rock unless you can find someone to trade you something for it. Desert island gold is no more useful than desert island Bitcoin.
It's a little more useful. It's a physical metal I can shape into a bowl to carry water.
Carry it over the Ukrainian border when escaping war with your family.
Will you have the necessary metallurgic tools to shape gold on that island by yourself?
Pure gold is a very soft metal and can be hammered into shape with a rock.
But I'm planning for fiat collapse, not the literal evaporation of all tools.
I think in a fiat collapse I might lose electricity or Internet temporarily.
I don't think my metal coins will evaporate.
I actually don’t understand why goldbugs are so obsessed with the physical atoms of gold.
“Money” is a psychological phenomenon that arises in groups of humans. There’s no mandatory reason it needs to have a physical representation in the physical world. If that were necessary, we wouldn’t even be able to use fiat like we do today. It just would be impossible.
But no, indeed, we do use immaterial abstractions as money. We do it across the world every day. The problem is that there has not been, prior to Bitcoin, any way to rate limit the manufacture of these immaterial abstractions.
Incredibly, the same mathematical equation that solved this problem of limiting money creation also improved upon other desirable aspects of money - secure defense of the asset, ease and speed of transfer, ease and cost of verification.
Gold bugs insist that money needs a physical manifestation to be “real” but I don’t understand that logic at all. In fact, the physical manifestation of money introduces a host of downsides and security challenges that purely abstract money doesn’t have.
If we evaluate money as a technology, it seems unlikely we would return to an older technology that was replaced by a more recent one - we wouldn’t have adopted the more recent tech if it weren’t better at solving more of our problems. However, we may in fact adopt an even newer tech that solves even more of our problems.
I guess, in summary, that’s my question for you - what problem does gold solve that Bitcoin doesn’t? (Most times I see this comparison, it’s argued that gold has a 5,000 track record and Bitcoin has only 10 years. To which I would simply say… I’m not going to be living in the last 5,000 years, but rather the next 50. Which tool is going to be more useful to me in that timeframe?)
As always I appreciate the debate and I’m sorry that this particular forum is going to lead to uneven sides 😅
Gold can fill a tooth cavity, or coat a surface for a scanning electron microscope, or conduct electricity.
The money value of gold derives logically & chronologically from its material use.
The value of fiat derives from gold. The value of Bitcoin derives from fiat. You've just added another derivative, another epicycle on the fiat hallucination.
You’re contradicting yourself. You said all value is subjective, meaning it’s derived from nothing but my subjective analysis. You also pointed out that gold has been money for thousands of years… but during those years it didn’t fill cavities, there were no electron microscopes, and no one used electricity. For most of those years it was a shiny rock. Material use cannot explain why they valued it.
The value of fiat no longer derived from gold. It is entirely subjective, like the value of every other commodity (which you correctly pointed out). The subjective valuation for most people is something like “I can buy food with this and also the government is strong and powerful and they say this is the money to use and I owe them a cut denominated in it so it’s the most practical money for me to deal in”. However, it loses value annually, so everyone who accumulates even modest amounts of it begins acquiring other assets as savings vehicles, of which gold is merely one. Others include bonds, stocks, and real estate. There is widespread agreement over what the best unit of account and medium of exchange are, but totaschizophrenia/tribalism over the best store of value. An entire industry has sprung up to help you “diversify”.
Again, “money” only has value because of the expectation that someone will give you something for it in the future. Your choice of money is subjective, and everyone is free to use one form for spending, another for saving, and even a third for accounting. And today they do.
Any of these uses of money is a bet on the subjective evaluations of other people. Thus, money’s value is both your own subjective evaluation as well as your subjective evaluation of others’ subjective evaluations.
One thing I haven’t mentioned too is that doing accounting with gold is an onerous process. Accounting with fiat is much easier. But accounting with Bitcoin is by far the easiest. Accounting innovations have arguably launched our species the furthest of any technology innovations - from single entry accounting and coinage in the cradle of civilization to double entry accounting and banking in the Renaissance.
Even Blockbuster outcompeted the mom and pop video shops because its computer accounting system permitted it to track and remit shared profits to the studios, something that was not possible with pen and paper.
In other words, a return to gold coins from an accounting perspective is so onerous and costly that I cannot imagine anyone doing it
Subjective value = the highest use to which I (the subject) can put this good
This is the Austrian/Misesian notion of subjectivity
In contrast the Objectivist/Radian notion of subjectivity is something like "I just make up whatever I feel like"
Economic value is subjective in the Austrian sense, which frankly the Objectivists would call objective
I see, you’re saying “subjective” but still rational
Well, the amount of gold I would hold for filling cavities is rationally quite small. The amount I would hold because I can sell it later for something I need is much higher.
But the physical limit of how much I can actually hold and defend does force me to consider alternatives like Bitcoin, where the cost of defending a small amount and a fortune is basically the same.
I won’t hold any Bitcoin for filling gold teeth, but as an accounting and monetary instrument I expect it will see tremendous future demand (my subjective analysis of others subjective analyses), and since it’s trivial to acquire and secure, I do so.
That depends on Bitcoin having value which it does in the current fiat regime, but so does fiat.
If Bitcoin didn't have value, it's security and transportability (etc) would not add to its value.
Do you see the circularity?
No central group or ruler mandates Bitcoin’s value be pegged in any way to anything. It trades against electricity at prices set by a hard-coded computer program and the free market. Bitcoin is not fiat. You will not suffer at the hands of any tyrant if you choose not to adopt it.
There is an electricity cost for the computation of the next Bitcoin block. As long as there is demand for for space in the next Bitcoin block, there will be a demand for that computation. So as long as there is demand for blockspace, there will be some electricity value of bitcoin. And as long as electricity is a real commodity in the real world, this Bitcoin/electricity price can be converted to a Bitcoin price for other commodities in the real world.
As long as fiat currency is a real commodity in the real world, there will be a Bitcoin/fiat price. But if fiat becomes worthless, the Bitcoin/fiat price will go to infinity.
Bitcoin will still have its BTC/electricity price. And since gold will still have value relative to electricity, there will still be a BTC/Gold price. And a BTC/chicken price. A BTC/oil price and so on.
You’re hung up on Bitcoin’s price in fiat as if that is the only exchange rate it has. In fact, it’s exchangeable for literally anything by virtue of its floating peg to energy, which is the real liquid universal commodity.
Why should there be demand for Bitcoin in a post-fiat world?
Only because it has value in trade. And it has value in trade only because there is demand.
In contrast there will be nonzero demand for oil, meat, and yes even gold in a post-fiat world and even excluding the possibility of trading it on to someone else.
Bitcoin is the world’s first and only immutable record. As long as there is anyone who wants to use this immutable record (and in a civilizational collapse, I suspect most record keeping will go to shit and so it could become even more valuable to people) they will have to pay others to provide the computation and energy to make that record immutable. The only currency that can be used to facilitate this exchange of energy and record-keeping is Bitcoin.
You may say - why will anyone sell their precious energy to to the Bitcoin network when the going gets tough? And the answer is simple - there is stranded energy in the world that has no other value. It would not cost much to tap it, but there is simply no buyer.
Well, now, the Bitcoin network will literally buy any energy from any where in the Universe. This presents a quasi-gold rush for otherwise stranded energy.
In this way, we managed yet another civilizational breakthrough. We didn’t just improve our use of money in every dimension, we also developed immutable record keeping and incentivized the development of any and all energy sources in the universe.
As long as there is demand for an immutable record, and as long as there is stranded energy that can’t be sold for other uses, there will be a market for the exchange of these two things.
And as long as the token of that exchange is a Bitcoin, a Bitcoin will have relative value to the rest of the physical universe.
Government money has absolutely no bearing on the equation.
Ok, let me check myself… the 10 minute block time is a limitation that most likely prevents us from using Bitcoin as-is beyond our planet. So we run into our next challenge when we colonize Mars (and considering I don’t think we’ve been to the moon, I’m not concerned that Mars colonization is a near-term concern). But “universe” is a fun word
Still not limiting, IMHO. You just wait longer for a confirmation. Nobody said we won't change the time in between block to one hour if we needed to deal with other planets.
I agree, that’s why I said “as-is”
Also far-enough down the road so as not to effect my thinking at all
Also, unless we find some way around the speed limit of the universe I can’t see a lot of back and forth trade with Mars, so it seems like they could have their own fork of the protocol or a side chain 😂
How do you bring the 'post fiat world' up? Will you politely ask FED?
#Bitcoin is the only thing that can separate money & state. If it dies after this point (it won't), we have to get there first. We won't get there with your 'trust' or gold.
This is well put. Fiat (violence + debt notes for more violence) conquered gold (durable shiny rock) and it’s unclear to me what has fundamentally changed about either technology that suggests a different outcome in the next century.
Gold is entirely sufficient to blow up the fiat ponzi, but I suspect silver (or even some base metal) will be the trigger
When Comex runs out of something I think we'll have a run on the commodity "bank"
This is an interesting point where we actually agree.
You see the ponzi collapsing with a bank run. I do too.
I actually see the many bank runs in Bitcoin’s short history (eg Mt Gox, FTX, Prime Trust) as proof that is exactly the asset to do the job.
We can add to the list of good qualities of money: “the ability to quickly and effectively withdraw your money if you suspect shenanigans with a third party”
Yet, gold cannot do the job. Silver won't separate money and state either. Both need centralized authorities, #Bitcoin doesn't.
On gold/silver, just another fiat (backed by metal) will take over the USD position, nothing will change, just the central issuers.
If it's backed by metal it's not fiat - you can express your lack of confidence in the issuer by redeeming the currency for the metal and peacefully withdrawing from the system
Fiat makes this peaceable withdrawal impossible (at least, not for everyone)
If it's backed by metal it means a central authority. You can peacefully withdrawn unless you get cheated by one of many trusted parties
https://decrypt.co/34033/chinese-firm-dumps-83-tonnes-of-fake-gold-on-the-market
Fiat withdrawal is indeed impossible; metal withdrawal I think is simply impractical. Bitcoin withdrawal is trivial so I think it will keep blowing up the people who try to play ponzi games with it (exactly as it should).
Do you really think the same people who use violence to mandate dollar usage are the same people using the same methods to give a fair market value to Bitcoin?
The knowledge of certain properties & how they may be useful is what allows people to see value in a thing. Bitcoin's provable scarcity, its ability to be teleported anywhere, the security that keeps what is mine safe from ciminals even if they kill me, the ease with which it can be hidden or transported, and the ability to programatically mitigate risk in a trade relationship (among other things) makes it valuable.
Physical gold has far fewer useful properties, which is why people are constantly trying to replace it with some other system of accounting. As far back as the story of Babylon, the wealth there was most likely an early discovery of the power of double entry accounting. But because the ledger was centralized the authorities could ultimately corrupt the accounting to direct all people & all resources toward one idiotic goal & destroy everything. But the discovery of double entry accounting was obviously important, quite literally in a Biblical sense
Bitcoin represents either the discovery or the first useful application of triple entry accounting, which eliminates central authorities, allows distributed coordination, & prevents corruption of the ledger. That, in my estimation, will prove far more significant than the discovery of double entry accounting & more sustainable than any one system of double entry accounting to ever exist. I think we are literally living through a Biblical shift in human history.
Gold is not special beyond the basic properties (unique to gold) which make it a good accounting tool—mostly scarcity & a good stock to flow ratio. Both of which Bitcoin improves upon. Material uses were only needed to bootstrap gold's use as money. Once a thing has value as money, the monetary premium outweighs everything else. Bitcoin's value is all monetary premium, it was designed to be valuable as an accounting tool from the start.
And this is the problem with “trustworthy claims on gold”… you need to trust they won’t be confiscated by authorities. You have not only add a third party as issuer, but self-inserted fourth parties all along the way.
Also, 1930s Germany might disagree that your personal safe is all that safe. Either way, though, it’s certainly one or two orders of magnitude less safe than the same amount of Bitcoin, which can fit in your brain or be teleported to the other side of the world at the push of a button. Or can require 3 of 5 signatures to move, etc etc
Do you really believe Nixon had the power to end a 5,000 year old practice with a mere announcement?
That's the show talking my man
He didn’t end it, FDR did in 1933, for everyone except foreign governments.
But in practice the telegraph ended it. If you wanted to keep up with the pace of modern commerce and not get out-competed, you needed to do business with the banks that could “wire” money across oceans. These banks, like all banks, cheated the issuance and were insolvent. So they created the central bank to literally paper over this problem.
Sounds like you're just making our point. The "gold backing" was already a fraud at that point because international redemption of any large amount was always going to be denied. Gold backing isn't something anyone can ever trust or enforce.
If you can't trust or enforce gold, why do you imagine you can trust & enforce shipments of oil, or grain, or manufactured goods?
This is my point - there isn't really anything special about gold (except for uniformity and durability which make it an excellent money but don't somehow predispose it to theft)
Either we develop enough trust to conduct remote trade in physical goods, in which case we don't need Bitcoin
Or we fail to develop that trust in which case we also don't need Bitcoin
Because you can trust Bitcoin... actually you don't have to, you can verify it yourself.
That's the whole point you're missing.
If you could teleport oil, grains, or manufactured goods across the internet for much lower cost than shipping them in the physical world, that method would eventually be adopted and eliminate the alternative.
The history of celluloid film is probably the most instructive. The studios used to spend millions of dollars every year manufacturing 35mm prints of their movies (~$50k/each!) and shipping them all around the country to be exhibited. They didn’t stop because this didn’t work, but because an alternative was developed: digital exhibition. Suddenly they could accomplish the same thing for a fraction of the cost in money and time. And within a decade, this multi-million dollar sub-industry vanished. Kodak, once synonymous with the photographic image, totally missed the boat and is no more.
It’s not that you can’t ship gold around the world for international trade, it’s that it is cheaper and easier to use fiat. And it’s even easier and even cheaper to use Bitcoin.
It took a decade to go from Blockbuster’s best year ever to bankruptcy.
I suspect the next decade will see a real phase change in money, for the same underlying technological reason.
If we could teleport gold around the world that would be a great invention.
But we cannot, and the people who are telling you that Bitcoin is digital gold have not thought through why Bitcoin enjoys nonzero valuation right now. They take it as a given that Bitcoin has a nonzero fiat price, which it certainly does. But why?
Why exactly did the pizza manager gift two pizzas for a bunch of Internet points he didn't understand and had no use for? Was he the first true believer? Did he read an advance copy of Broken Money?
Or if Bitcoin was already trading for a few cents or fraction of a cent, why?
The pizza manager didn’t accept the Bitcoin. Someone else on the internet paid the papa John’s in fiat and received the bitcoin. What’s interesting is that this was even possible - because the bitcoin settled fully, the other person had no problem extending credit to the buyer to facilitate the transaction as the major corporation demanded.
Bitcoin got its first fiat valuation by comparison to the relative electricity cost required to mine the equivalent amount of bitcoin.
So in fact it was the electricity cost that Bitcoin obtained naturally that provided an anchor for the first fiat for bitcoin exchange on record.
This doesn’t mean Bitcoin is “backed” by electricity or that it is “pegged” to electricity, but that it has a non-imaginary relationship to the cost of electricity from which basic shared valuation calculations can be made.
It was possible for two reasonable people to calculate and agree on the price of Bitcoin in electricity, and to calculate and agree on the price of fiat in electricity, and thus, calculate and agree on the price of Bitcoin in fiat. And so they did.
Electricity usage and its necessity in the computation of Bitcoin issuance is the real world peg of Bitcoin. With gold, it’s the atoms of gold, which no matter how hard the alchemists tried, could not be cheated. With Bitcoin it’s the energy cost of computation. If that can one day be cheated, it absolutely will be. But today it can’t be, and so Bitcoin has a peg to the physical universe.
Machine labor theory of value
Not at all. Electricity is a commodity. Anyone on earth is free to exchange their electricity for Bitcoin at a mathematically predictable rate, set by the computer program that issues Bitcoin. Why the first people would want to do this is immaterial, but today many people do. And because many people do, the relative valuation of Bitcoin vs electricity is maintained (there is a market price for Bitcoin vs Electricity). This is both your basic peg to the physical universe and your initial basic utility use case. Bitcoin and electricity can be exchanged for computation, and computation is perhaps the most valuable resource in the coming millennium.
Fiat can also be exchanged for electricity, Bitcoin, compute-time, etc
Your challenge is to explain why Bitcoin has value and fiat in some fundamental sense does not (or will not)
So just pointing to the nonzero market value at present doesn't advance your case unless you intend to defend fiat as well, which currently shares nonzero market value
Of course fiat has value. Is that even a question? The protection of the American Empire proved more valuable than the assurances of non-sovereign money. The destabilization of the rest of the world created a demand for the debt notes of the Empire. A strategic arrangement with Saudi Arabia created further demand. The threat of violence that will be visited on you if you don’t pay your taxes creates further demand. On top of all of this, it’s pretty easy to spend fiat in tiny denominations for coffee, or large denominations via wire transfer. It’s relatively easy to track with double entry accounting systems. And if you can get legal permission to manufacture this currency in the form of credit, you can actually acquire material goods as well as power and influence with those tokens. If you and I don’t, someone else will. Then they will use that power and influence to rule us.
Now, that may not be a fair game; indeed, it’s extremely rigged. But that didn’t stop those playing that game from literally conquering the world with it. It was the better tool for conquest and power, and it was used to those ends.
Fighting against this reality has been futile - it’s a self-powering flywheel. The fiat monopolists print the money that gives them the power to hire the violence to enforce the monopoly, and around again we go. Participating in this system is less an empowering choice and more a survival instinct.
Subjectively, people value the life they can live participating in this system more than the life they will live trying to fight it. Survival and conflict avoidance is a perfectly rational impulse.
Successfully fighting this Empire is impossible with outdated technology. You’re not resisting this tyranny with shells and bow and arrow, or even gold and gunpowder. The Leviathan got the upper hand technologically in the 20th century.
While it is not yet certain, it is my hope that the balance of power shifts away from tyrants and empires in the 21st century, enabled by the radical defensive technologies of encryption and Bitcoin.
You can trust or enforce the shipment of goods monetarily if the money only flows when contracts are fulfilled. That's the whole point. People don't get paid unless they send goods. They don't have to send goods until money is provably locked in a form of escrow that can be settled immediately upon the arrival & inspection of the goods. With gold you can either ship it first & take all the risk, or they can ship the goods first & take all the risk, but there's no way to balance the risk. And the added cost of shipping gold doubles the cost of the exchange.
Well you *could* add a third party escrow service who receives the gold and then forwards it along, and actually triple the cost
And arguably increase the risk by introducing another party to the transaction. You could be screwed by a trading partner or by an escrow service that could pick sides or screw both parties, whether on their own or threatened by a govt or other interested party.
So you’re saying add a fourth party (the government) and quadruple the cost (through compliance and taxes)? Sounds great! 😂
Bitcoin's value has nothing to do with the labor theory. Both the value of the token itself & the amount invested in mining infrastructure are a fuction of the overall demand for Bitcoin. The fact that it is expensive to mine is only a reflection of market demand & some assurance against any rapid changes in supply.
Trustworthy trade comes first from having a monetary system that can't be cheated. Gold tokens can never be that. The more trustworthy some gold token becomes the more it gets used & the more it is used the more incentive there is to cheat & the easier it is to hide the fraud. Gold tokens literally have horrible incentives that runaway into all the wrong directions. Bitcoin's security in many ways gets stronger the more people participate. Proper scaling solutions do come with some tradeoffs, but not the foundational supply restriction issues that gold has.
Bitcoin also makes 2 party escrow contracts possible. This means that I can initiate a payment in such a way that you can be sure that the money exists & is now locked between us, but you cannot collect until I get my goods or services as promised. A simple contract like that is the real foundation of a trustworthy decentralized global trade network. Insurance contracts of all kinds with real monetary weight can be built on Bitcoin. Risk can be balanced in a way never before possible even among unknown trading partners. You cannot ship a gold payment (at great cost) & be sure that you will get your goods shipped back. Similarly you cannot spend or accept gold tokens & be sure that they can ever be redeemed. Even if you have an army at your disposal there is no way to be sure of such things.
Bitcoin is a liquid & free floating currency. It is currently the 22nd most valuable economy/currency in the world. A collapse in any nation's currency just means that paper is too easy to come by so larger amounts are needed to exchange for valuable things. There have been multiple currency collapses in other countries & the value of Bitcoin in those places simply goes to all time highs. In fact there is usually a premium on Bitcoin in those areas because it is suddenly so greatly needed & much more sought after. Gold is never going to be a practical way to do day to day commerce. It really hasn't been for many hundreds of years, & gold IOUs were what got us into this mess in the first place.
Are you trying to say gold is a better option than #Bitcoin if we all can trust each other? We have tried for thousands of years. It didn't work.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to give up on decentralization because of some boomer who likes shiny rocks requiring trust.
Show me a better system that actually works, please.
Either we develop trustworthy systems in which case Bitcoin is not needed
Or we do not develop trustworthy systems in which case Bitcoin is insufficient
Gold did work for thousands of years. Why are you so confident of the success of fiat? A few decades is nothing in human history.
Bitcoin is the first monetary system that makes it possible to build contracts which balance risk & make all potential trade partners trustworthy.
Tell that to Warren 😂
I'm not confident in fiat, I'm confident your "trust" system cannot be built without central authority.
#Bitcoin doesn't require either of them.
Gold worked for the Roman Empire too. Until it didn't.
Bitcoin’s success isn’t due to irrational exuberance… I think that most of the time we would have to be optimistic about Bitcoin. It is a ‘factor’ that acts on prices drawn from reserve active parallels (Gold, Silver, etc..) & previous economic attempts...
If Bitcoin is worthless then send me one for free
Zapped
Thanks bro. Now imagine you are anywhere else in the world, government confiscation, civil war, police state. If you had to leave that country with your family- how would you bring your metals through the border checkpoints? Much better chance to bring your seed phrase with you. The value of Bitcoin protects human rights to property.
That capacity depends on Bitcoin having nonzero value in the first place.
Currently irredeemable currency enjoys nonzero value and irredeemable cryptocurrency enjoys nonzero value. But as goes one so goes the other, because they are all irredeemable currency.
