Bitcoin is peak liquid modernity. It's intangible and flows easily and quickly across the digital realm.
Perhaps it's one of the best things to come out of liquid modernity, but that doesn't make it any less liquid or any less hyper-modern. True value this side of Heaven is in community and place.
No, its not intangible. No, it doesnt flow. You’re ascribing fictional attributes to code execution in order to sound “esoteric”.
And your anchoring it to a commonly accepted true statement in the last sentence to give your statement legitimacy.
In reality, you said nothing.
You know what, fair. I need to work on being more clear in my speech.
Nevertheless, I still don't grasp how Bitcoin is a tangible asset. We can't possibly encounter it except as numbers on a screen. The exchange of Bitcoin is nothing more than the moving of electrons in a computer circuit. That's not tangible in the same way as things we can touch and interact with in physical space, or people we can look at and communicate with.
To me, Bitcoin is at one end of some spectrum, and the other is the life you described in your original post. That life has real, concrete value to me in a way that money, be it physical or digital, does not.
I've been wrestling with what sort of reality digital space has, and Bitcoin definitely falls into digital space.
oh i see.
you actually legitimately think that way. i apologize. i too quickly presumed you were trying to sound smart, and therefore didn’t recognize you are smart. which i suppose means i need to check my cynicism levels…
buy to what you said, thats a good way to visualize it. across a spectrum. too rigid an ethos keeping us in one spectrum region, and we miss the value of certain things
Admittedly I was trying to sound smart a little. But also I've come to be familiar with terms like "liquid modernity" through reading and podcast listening, and I'm using them to describe a specific idea.
I'm not sure what sort of reality digital goods have, but they do have *some* reality, as far as I can tell. As such, digital goods can certainly be bought, sold, and exchanged. Hence Bitcoin.
I just don't think Bitcoin is tangible enough to serve as an end. It should be used to obtain things of more concrete value. Which, really, is what currency is. Bitcoin seems to me to be a currency well-suited for a digital economy, but I don't understand the HODLers. They seem to miss the forest for the trees. Your original post got me thinking along those lines.
ill avoid the elephant in the room, rabbit hole conversation about the long term linguistic and etymological effects of decentralized digital media (me trying so sound smart)
and stay on topic…
You have an understanding of the difference between physical and digital which strangely enough, im not sure is ubiquitous anymore, and therefore value proposition gets muddled. especially in the first world west.
but all it takes to fix this is a single sustained power outage.
just one.
I hope we never have to live through such a disaster, but you're right that it would really wake people up.
I certainly do find it odd that the physical/digital distinction is getting lost. Maybe younger generations who have a digital presence from a very young age blur that distinction too easily.
Perhaps the digital world is the realm of thought. In that way it would be similar to books. A writer can exert presence through a book just as an influencer can exert presence through a TikTok video. The reader or viewer who receives that receives ideas, which are without a doubt real in the mind. So, one can say that someone may have an online personality just like we say someone has an in-person personality.
The consequence, though, is that the more time we spend online in this realm of ideas, the less we associate the self with the physical body. The self feels extended across the digital world, present in some way wherever anyone is reading one's internet posts. So it would seem the loss of physical/digital distinction is associated with a loss of locus of self.
I think this explains much of the appetite for constant reinvention we see among young people today, manifested in tattoos or hairstyles or gender "transition." When your self is spread across the digital world, the body is just an avatar.
That's part of what I mean by "liquid modernity," and it definitely overlaps with some of the concepts of transhumanism.
By HODLers do you mean those who never exchange Bitcoin for anything? I.e., treat it as an end?
I’ve been under the impression HODL can mean “don’t exchange it for other currencies / don’t treat it like an investment” which doesn’t mean you can’t buy land, coffee, services, etc. with it.
I’m still figuring some things out, though.
Yeah that's what I mean. It seems some Bitcoiners are just hoarding it against the future in which Bitcoin becomes the default currency of the entire world. What if that never happens? Bitcoin may be a great means to an end, but it seems insufficient as an end in itself.
I think they’re a bit shortsighted. The time to develop this parallel system is now. You’re not going to get to that future if people are not familiar with using the money, even if all fiat tanks.
Not that I have a problem with saving. Maybe they’ll be laughing at me in future 😂 but if they are will it won’t be because of anything they did.
Yep it's worth getting involved and flexing the muscle of a Bitcoin-mediated economy. Part of that, though, is knowing when to let go of the medium on order to obtain a more permanent good.
Those people don't understand the economics of bitcoin:
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Lunar-Fallacy
> Production is the source of trade and therefore all economic activity results from investment.
Production can result in digital goods as well as physical goods. The value of the Software as a Service business model demonstrates that. HODLing seems to conflate holding money with production.
