I am not worshipping anything beyond the basic principles of sound money & the laws of economics & the rest of existence which all make up the body of God. But it is nice to see something as well aligned with reality as Bitcoin happens to be.
Discussion
"aligned with reality" but firmly outside of it
So you think technology & language & math are outside of reality?!
People and books and machines and chalkboards are part of reality.
Technology and language and math are not, except as descriptions.
If math is part of reality, where can I find three?
Not three objects or the numeral three, but three itself?
Do they keep it in a vault underneath the Champs-Elysee?
What does money do? Is it not a tool used to describe economic reality? Is it not a language of trade that is supposed to aggregate all the changes in supply & demand in any area down to a single price?
It is a receipt for work done & a key to future consumption in proportion to the value created.
Money does NOTHING.
It sits there.
We are the ones who DO.
It is a tool. As a tool what does it facilitate?
Which of these do you mean?
Tool
noun
1) A device, such as a saw, shovel, or drill, used to perform or facilitate manual or mechanical work.
2) A machine, such as a lathe, used to cut and shape machine parts or other objects.
3) The cutting part of such a machine.
4) Something regarded as necessary to the carrying out of one's occupation or profession.
"Words are the tools of our trade."
5) Something used in the performance of an operation; an instrument.
6) (Vulgar Slang) The penis.
7) A person used to carry out the designs of another; a dupe.
8) A bookbinder's hand stamp.
9) A design impressed on a book cover by such a stamp.
10) (Computers) A utility program.
Stop deflecting & playing semantic games.
Do you think money has no purpose? Why do we use it?
You are using language in a loose, metaphorical way while insisting that accurate language is a "semantic game".
Bitcoin does not exist. There are no Bitcoins. That is literally and indisputably true.
What does exist is human beings and computer equipment.
So to speak in a strictly factual way, you should not even claim that Bitcoin is money. You should say that INSTEAD of paying me money it is better (for me, somehow) if you mark in your computer equipment that I am owed a credit. That's a statement that corresponds to entities that actually exist and relations between them. Saying "Bitcoin is money" is a relationship of concepts, one of which does not refer to any physically existing thing at all.
See:
"Concepts are not and cannot be formed in a vacuum; they are formed in a context; the process of conceptualization consists of observing the differences and similarities of the existents within the field of one’s awareness (and organizing them into concepts accordingly). From a child’s grasp of the simplest concept integrating a group of perceptually given concretes, to a scientist’s grasp of the most complex abstractions integrating long conceptual chains—all conceptualization is a contextual process; the context is the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.
This does not mean that conceptualization is a subjective process or that the content of concepts depends on an individual’s subjective (i.e., arbitrary) choice. The only issue open to an individual’s choice in this matter is how much knowledge he will seek to acquire and, consequently, what conceptual complexity he will be able to reach. But so long as and to the extent that his mind deals with concepts (as distinguished from memorized sounds and floating abstractions), the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality."
Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, p.55
So NOSTR doesn't exist? Software doesn't exist? The English language doesn't exist? How are we having this conversation?
Do books exist? Do the words written in books contain valuable information? There are computers, there is information stored on those computers, the information being more dynamic & updatable than books does not make it any less real than a book.
If I "go for a run", running does not suddenly exist, except when we are speaking in a loose and metaphorical way. I exist, and I run.
Similarly, if your computer executes a piece of software then perhaps we can point to a pattern in the memory of the computer and say "that is the software and it exists right there physically as electrons". But usually when we talk about software what we are really talking about is the computer doing a certain thing. The computer exists but its doing does not, just like I exist but my running does not.
If you want to say that Bitcoin is a pattern of electrons in the same way that words on a page are a pattern of ink, that's totally fine. In that sense I must admit Bitcoin exists. But if you define Bitcoin in this way it is not scarce. I can spin up way more than 21 million copies of the entire Blockchain, or the Bitcoin source code, or a given cryptographic signature. The thing the computer does when it runs the Bitcoin code does not exist.
It is a doing, and not a being.
You are just trying to define things out of existence so that you don't have to give up your shiny rock ideology.
Trade & economic coordination are the most valuable sources of wealth & value creation in all of human history & because these are actions & not a physical things you are trying to suggest they don't exist.
Let's say there's a vault full of gold & a "gold standard" token that perfectly repesented the amount held in the vault with no way for anyone to engage in any sort of debasement. The tokens trade easier & with far less cost than moving gold (which is why the gold standard started in the first place). And somehow, without anyone knowing aliens steal all the gold, but the tokens remain impossible to debase & work the same as if the gold was there. When does the system fail?
"Trade & economic coordination are the most valuable sources of wealth & value creation in all of human history & because these are actions & not a physical things you are trying to suggest that they don't exist."
Are you trying to suggest that they do?
There's some entity called "trade" out there spitting out gold coins or wheat or convertible automobiles?
I suppose there is, but only in a very loose and metaphorical sense.
However these claims about trade can be translated into claims about actual entities without any loss of meaning.
We do this automatically.
"Humans who trade & coordinate economically have produced more wealth & economic value than by any other action"
Do you agree that this statement fairly reflects the content of your original without supposing that there is an entity called "trade" out in the world?
Trade is an action that produces an increase in value (which is always subjective). People really do perform actions, so "trade doesn't exist" would be an incorrect statement. But it is not a particular item you can point to.
I don't think the path you are trying to walk makes any sense. An atom of gold exists even if I need some special tool to see or hold it. The tools we need to store & process information are not an indication that the saved information itself does not exist.
Is Bitcoin (in the sense of "I have 5 Bitcoin") an entity or an action?
If I said "Sherlock Holmes does not exist" would you give me all this argument or would you understand and agree immediately?
This is the sense in which Bitcoin does not exist.
Yes, there are words on a page. There are books and films about Sherlock Holmes. There are even electrons in computer memory with a pattern that corresponds in some way to the name or character or concept of "Sherlock Holmes". But obviously he does not exist.
It is the same with Bitcoins.
It seems you are implicitly admitting that "Bitcoin" (the currency, not the Blockchain or source code or whatever) is an action and NOT an entity.
Are you willing to agree to that?
No. I think language & computers & software are real things of immense value & that to suggest otherwise is really kind of silly. A written or recorded word is not an action. A saved pattern of 1s & 0s is not an action. Saying words & interacting with computers are actions, but the things themselves, the results of those actions, still exist.
OK so are you saying that Bitcoin (the currency unit) is an entity?
It's a recorded entry in a distributed ledger, a UTXO. And the power to destroy & create new entries is controlled by a private key, or keys. So long as one copy of the ledger remains then the unit(s) accessed by your key(s) exist.
So... yes? You're claiming Bitcoin currency units are entities?
[Bitcoin the currency] unit is a recorded entry in a distributed ledger
I don't want you to tell me what is the record of the Bitcoin, I want you to tell me what is the actual Bitcoin.
They are different.
The record is not scarce - I can spin up 21 trillion copies of the entire blockchain.
I want you to tell me what characteristics make a good money & how fiat would fail without a way to inflate the supply.
Money is a thing you give to someone as payment.
It has to be a thing (and not an idea) otherwise you can't give it to someone (except metaphorically).
To make something better at being a thing you give to someone as payment, it can be more durable (so you don't have to give it right away), more uniform (so there's no debate about whether this unit of the thing is more or less valuable than something else) and more divisible (so if I get some number of units of the thing I don't have to spend them all at once).
"How fiat would fail without a way to inflate the money supply?"
You're confusing two different things. There is no 'money supply' of fiat. Fiat is currency. Fiat, like Bitcoin, is an attempt to settle accounts WITHOUT money. I can imagine multiple failure modes, but the most obvious is that a group of people starts using real money and other people decide they'd like to participate with the first group and receive real money rather than tokens.
OK - your turn. What is Bitcoin [the scarce valuable currency unit]? It can't be a computer record or computer code or cryptographic signature because any of those can be copied infinitely without losing the original (because they are patterns rather than actual entities and a pattern can be copied).
Well, you can transfer full exclusive control of the digital units on the bitcoin network.
Trying to separate "money" & "currency" is nonsense.
Currency is debt. Money extinguishes debt.
What are the digital units on the bitcoin network?
Do they exist in any real sense at all?
Or are they just as fictional as Sherlock Holmes?
I still think the distiction is retarded. Debt is debt. But maybe we can agree that with a money, work has to be done upfront to produce it... Like the costs associated with mining bitcoin or gold.
No I don't agree to that at all.
If I'm lying on the river bank catching fish and a gold nugget happens to wash into my pocket it's no more or less money than an equivalent gold nugget mined from an asteroid.
Bitcoiners often default to a labor theory of value or energy theory of value, both of which are absurd. Value is subjective (meaning it relates to the subject, not that I just make up whatever I want). I value an additional unit of a good equivalent to the highest-valued new use to which I can put that good.
It's not a labor theory of value at all. There is no specific amount of work that has to be done. You could run mining software on your phone for 5 minutes and find a block which rewards you with bitcoin. It just generally requires more effort than that to acquire scarce things. If gold was just freely available it would not be money.
Yes, scarcity is a requirement for something to have economic value.
That does not mean that work has to be done or that the scarce thing derives its value from the work done to obtain it. Those are fallacies.
I agree that making up records of new Bitcoin units is expensive. So is digging a hole and filling it back up. If I could prove that I had dug a hole of a certain size and filled it back up, would that receipt be a candidate to use as a money unit?
If the only way to reverse the transaction history is to do more work than was done to record the history in the first place then the setrlement assurances provided are a function of the cost of the work done.
settlement of what?
it's easy to build a better mousetrap when the mice are all in your head
Money is valuable because it can facilitate trade. It has nothing to do with how tagible it is. Gold's tangibility has nothing to do with it's value as money. All other metals would be money too if tangibility had anything to do with it. Tangibility actually makes it worse at being money in a digital economy.
But the reality is that none of this bullshit matters. Bitcoin is going to keep working & keep being money whether you understand or agree or not.
Again
If there's a vault full of gold & a "gold standard" token that perfectly repesented the amount held in the vault with no way for anyone to engage in any sort of debasement. The gold standard started because tokens trade easier & with far less cost than moving gold.
If the gold is suddenly gone, but the tokens remain impossible to debase, & they work just the same as if the gold was there. When does the system fail ?
- The point of the illustration is to show that the entire reason that physical gold is part of the equation at all is simply to limit the supply of tokens to the supply of some good with a high stock to flow ratio.
Gold has actually caused destructive periods of inflation too. It is not any sort of "intrinsic value" that prevents inflation. It is simply the physical constraints on finding or acquiring more, which makes it better at transferring value across time.
reset your context and GFY
All tools are forms of technology. Language is a technology. Math is a technology. Software is a technology. Software allows more accurate & repeatable interactions with existence than any other tool we have ever created. Automating a sound monetary system is an innovation on par with the invention of the printing press or the discovery of zero or any other foundational shift in human history. You don't have to agree, reality doesn't care. Bitcoin doesn't care.
Existence exists.
It is not a law.
The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Do you get it?
Your image of reality is not reality.
Reality is reality.
"Your image of reality is not reality"
Yes, the map is not the territory, but some maps are right, & some are wrong, & some are useful & some are not.
Maps can still help us better operate in & appreciate existence. I don't trust my mental map over what reality is telling me, it seems kinda like you & Peter Schiff prefer your ideological mental maps over what the real world has to say on this issue.
I'll homestead the territory and you homestead the map and we'll see whose perception matches the real world in the long run.