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Why are you arbitrarily selecting the price of buying all goods only once?

Why are you arbitrarily selecting the value of spending all the money only once?

Couldn't there be too many goods to ever be bought with all the money in one go? Yes. Money circulates, the same $1 bill has bought maybe $600 worth of goods.

Goods also circulate, so I don't understand how you settled on 1 sale once for each thing.

There is no invisible hand pushing 'the value' of a money to match the price of buying precisely all of the goods in an economy precisely once.

You and I value everything very differently, and that valuation is not in terms of a nominal amount (25420 of another good) but an ordinal ranking (1st, 2nd, 3rd). This also applies to BTC. I don't value it at the index price. Never have.

If you valued things in terms of nominal amounts you would sit there clicking Buy until you are broke. Whenever you buy anything. And that's what a lot of people do with Bitcoin, because it gets them in the mindset of nominal objective value. The Bitcoin mindset says value is an objective, nominal thing that is wide open to manipulation through central planning (like the artificially fixed rate of supply and periodic halving). Not the subjective, ordinal ranking clearly articulated by the Austrian school.

Guess how much I value 1 BTC at? I wouldn't give up my salad. If you say that's a lie, I would resell it, all you're pointing out is that I value what I could sell it for -- not the BTC. That in itself is less than worthless, because it comes with and leaves a surveillance snail trail. That something is scarce doesn't "make it valuable" in an objective sense. But you cannot understand why until you understand there's no such thing as objective value.

Mysth 2y ago

I'm not arbitrarily selecting anything, I'm just taking an example that can be simply understood as a thought experiment.

- "Couldn't there be too many goods to ever be bought with all the money in one go? Yes. Money circulates, the same $1 bill has bought maybe $600 worth of goods."

I disagree. Because, transactions have to be settled.

Bitcoin on base layer guarantee finite settlement after 3 to 6 confirmations.

Assuming your $1 bill bought $600 worth of goods at $1 each, it didn't do it in one go, but it took 600 different transaction over several months or years.

But through fiat, your $1 bill could be rehypothecated 600 times and produce $600 of buying power at once. That's one of the things Bitcoin is trying to fix.

- "There is no invisible hand pushing 'the value' of a money to match the price of buying precisely all of the goods in an economy precisely once."

Indeed, but if you can divide your money infinitely (using multiple layers of bitcoin), then you have a money that can actually match precisely what you want to buy (or sell), however small or huge your transaction has to be.

It's also true that nothing prevents someone to ask, say for a marvelous piece of art: "21 millions Bitcoin + The sole ownership of the state of Texas"... however that's not a money problem but rather a tell sign about the actual willingness (or craziness) of the seller.

- "You and I value everything very differently."

We all do, and we're all speculators here, as are all human beings.

That's why I'm not trying to convince you to give up your salad, nor anything else for one BTC.

I'll argue that you'll find no one on earth who sell you his BTC for your salad, or even for less than roughly it's market price (maybe 20/40% less at worst, if coins are coming from "criminal UTXOs", but still very far from a salad.)

You couldn't buy a BTC from me at current market price, and I couldn't sell you a BTC at current market price:

That's what make a market, and in the end, Bitcoin will either be worth infinitely more than today, or zero.

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Discussion

Lysander Spooner 2y ago

You arbitrarily selected 1 sale of all the goods in the world, once, and 1 spend of all the Bitcoin, once. It doesn't seem arbitrary because 1 is such an upstanding character, but it is because so many goods and all money can be spent repeatedly. This is why there's no hidden hand matching up all the money to all the goods. Once.

"I disagree. Because, transactions have to be settled."

I was trying to be polite, but you can't actually settle buying everyone even once at 7 transactions per second lol. How many aeons do we have to wait? It would take half a minute just to settle for everything on my properties alone.

"You couldn't buy a BTC from me at current market price, and I couldn't sell you a BTC at current market price: That's what make a market".

Really, that's the opposite of what makes a market. You don't have a market until you have something I want more than something I have which you want, and vice versa. We're just passing each other like ships in the night. Bitcoin has other tricks up its sleeve to discourage exchange, like the expectation to be worth more tomorrow. As I just spelled out in my response to someone else here, the implication of the Austrian understanding that prosperity itself comes from voluntary exchanges, is that every exchange that never happened because you chose to hodl Bitcoin means Bitcoin made everyone poorer on net.