i honestly dont understand your point
Discussion
I recently sold a guitar for coin. We agreed on the price, in sats, a couple days before we met up. There was no back and forth trying to triangulate the BTC:USD rate at the exact moment we made the trade 🤷♂️
if you do this purely, without ever looking at the USD valuation of those sats, then it's a true Bitcoin standard.
but if we're always dividing the USD valuation of a thing, by the USD valuation of those stats, then it's not really a Bitcoin standard.
its still a fiat standard.
I'm not saying don't do it. definitely, trade in sats as much as possible.
I'm just saying don't fool yourself into thinking that you're off a Fiat standard.
but we need is communities that can get self-sufficient to the point where they can price their needs directly in sats without looking US dollars.
*what we need
I think the point is that we all still think and measure in dollars and it is incredibly challenging to create a world where btc is the actual independent unit of account.
it appears to be another quantum leap in perspective for many.
the first step seems to just be telling bitcoiners "you dont magically get a 'hard money' price by dividing by (BTC/USD), you get the fiat-denominated opportunity cost."
the point is we are still measuring the relative amount of US dollars chasing different assets.
we do not magically get to a hard money standard by dividing two fiat prices.
when the underlying UoA is fiat, we inherit those fiat distortions.
the moral of the story is
"accurate pricing is impossible on a fiat unit of account"
this needs be taken into consideration by bitcoiners.
i know it LOOKS like semantics, its not.
its a fundamental distortion in prices that is invisible to most. a fish doesn't know the water etc...
i appreciate your point about the less liquid markets. those probably have more accurate pricing.
i think this is important point because it demonstrates exactly HOW challenging it is to break out of fiat evaluations and to truly use Bitcoin in a sovereign way.
ie, small communities, pricing their needs *directly in Bitcoin* without any relation to fiat UoA insanity.
But the usd value is completely canceled out in the equation.
in pure mathematics, sure. the denominators cancel out and you don't have to worry about it.
IRL you're still measuring based on *some consistent thing*
the point is that it matters WHAT THAT THING IS.
because you inherit the distortions of the thing itself.
this is waxwing illustrating my point beautifully.
its ridiculous to believe you somehow get rid of the UoA *by dividing two prices denominated in that unit of account*
the result is *proportional USD value*. the USD doesn't magically disappear because THATS WHAT YOU MEASURED WITH.
there's an argument to be made that the proportion would work out the same, no matter what UoA the market was using to denominate prices.
but that doesn't hold water IMO.
if we had any isolated markets that were denominating freely in something like gold or silver (free of USD market influence), i dont think the valuation of commodities would work out AT ALL like the USD denominated markets do.
what we use as the underlying unit of account *distorts pricing*
and don't even get me started about "are USD consistent across different markets and at different points in time"
because they're not. your "lets see where there charts are next year" means little.
what you will be measuring with will be a *different "USD"
this must be deeply appreciated.
Pretty good articulation (compared to past ones), even if it's still a bit impossible to argue against the math. I still like the xmr discount you get in some specific markets as a concrete example, iirc. In that instance the arbitrage may not be wanted, as "cleaning the trail" might be considered more costly to seller than the discount.
Thanks 🫡
although im not clear what "argue against the math" means? you mean they obviously cancel out?
like when I divide the USD price of a 2010 Toyota Camry by the USD price of Bitcoin, US dollars disappear and have nothing to do with the proportion I get?
Yeah, the canceling out thing is hard to ignore. UoA and deep liquidity (hence easy arbitrage) is a tough thing to break from.
Was thinking other day though, that if you stretch out the time between trades, then you can more clearly see how it's different trading pairs, since usd price for things fluctuates a good deal over even relatively short times. I think it's a gradually then suddenly thing in the end. Maybe we slowly chip away at USD UoA as markets freeze up here and there, and people use BTC (or xmr..sigh) increasingly.
Yeah, you're trying to squeeze into a short note what may be a short essay to articulate properly. Not that I could do it, nor that I even fully agree with your claim. But I know you've thought about it a good deal, so maybe have more of a point than comes across in shorter replies.
I don't know... I feel like the more words I use the more it sounds like a semantic jerk off.
that short example that I just posted is probably better at actually communicating it effectively.