You made 2 points, I addressed the first and will clarify here. Your 2nd point was a non-issue, we buy *despite* deflation of money relative to a good like a TV, and that's also what I said: Deflation discourages spending - not prevents it.

Wanting to reduce voluntary exchanges makes you flatly anti-human. Terms like "rampant overspending" put oneself in the place of God to tell other people how rich they shouldn't be. It' s completely interchangeable with "rampant overearning" since you prefer what you get to what you spend.

Did you even notice what I said? Every time someone spends, not only someone else earns, but THEY earn more than they spent - in their own estimation!

You want people to earn less. To spend less is to earn less, because every voluntary exchange, by definition, is at least expected to give all parties something they prefer to what they gave up.

It's never a positive, unless you're a primitivist who idealizes and romanticizes poverty.

"I actually find the incentive to reduce voluntary exchanges to be a positive."

Doh. What you're really saying is a lot clearer worded this way.

Spending is not just spending, it's also earning. Every time you spend, someone else earns. But also, every time you spend, you earn more than you spent, in your own estimation - or you wouldn't have spent!

Maximizing voluntary exchanges is an unbridled good.

You value selling the Dogecoin, the Dogecoin as a means, not the Dogecoin as an end. Which is exactly the right way to think about any exchange currency.

People here talk about stacking and hodling Bitcoin as if digital fiat on a grand unified surveillance chain should be valued as a good in itself, not a mere facilitator of exchange to give away immediately, like your Dogecoin.

Oh, that's because they believe it is centrally planned to be deflationary, all of reality be damned? Their end, then, is accruing wealth, and the means is buying Bitcoin low and selling Bitcoin high. But if the price of Bitcoin is expected to rise, that actively discourages the use case as a medium of exchange. You're less likely to hire Johnny to mow your lawn, more likely to do it yourself - and thus make the whole economy poorer, one exchange that never happened at a time (the Austrian school teaches us prosperity itself excretes from the felt improvement in standard of living from both parties to a voluntary exchange). By discouraging voluntary exchanges, Bitcoin makes everyone poorer in real terms - regardless what happens to it's index price.

Any large fluctuation in any direction retards the function of an exchange currency and renders economic calculation in terms of anything else in advance impossible. And with a centrally planned, artificially fixed rate of supply, there's no market-determined rate of supply that can ramp up or down to counterbalance swings in demand, to stabilize the price, like there is with most goods. Bitcoin is thus engineered to swing wildly in response to any changes in apparent demand, enabling whales to game it by wash trading and generally just guaranteeing volatility into the future.

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.

a) No force of nature ensures there be enough of one good to buy everything.

However, if "everyone" would sell "everything" at once, then the double coincidence of wants ensure that "everything" would be priced in money, and Bitcoin is arguably the best money.

b) Goods aren't fiat per se, even though some use "fiat goods" as a term to classify "bad goods" as a joke.

I don't expect any limit on regular goods, except imposed by their producer or by physical constraints.

Any good that requires work isn't fiat, only money is fiat in my eyes.

And that's why Bitcoin is not fiat: It is anchored in the real word by Proof-of-Work, which renders impossible to create Bitcoin out of nothing, unlike fiat.

You have to spend actual energy to create Bitcoin, and no amount of decrees could create more bitcoin.

The arbitrary amount that fixed the final supply of Bitcoin could have been any number known to man.

You'll find different explanations, both technical or philosophical, for why it's 21M and not another number, but what matters isn't the finite supply, but rather the infinite divisibility of the supply.

I see that you pretend that one code commit or one dev could change bitcoin in a few keystrokes, and that's entirely true. You could even do it yourself, and it has been done several times in the past already.

But this just create something else, which is not Bitcoin... and today market forces have priced these "something else" at a fraction of the price of Bitcoin.

21M / everything in the solar system 'becomes real' lol.

What's the thought process here?

Money, the Austrian school teaches us, 'is a good like any other'. Why must any specie of any good be valued the same as everything else? What rule of nature dictates this?

Bitcoin can never somehow be the only thing traded. Traded for what? See. Everything beyond that question mark is also being traded, obviously, and can be traded for other things beyond that question mark without using your grand unified surveillance chain. Ta-da.

Value, the Austrian school teaches us, is subjective. You are heavily mistaken to think value can be imbued into a thing objectively with math. Have you even noticed guaranteed deflation through a centrally planned rate of supply didn't work, at all?

Oh: 21M doesnt appear in the whitepaper, its not holy script. It can be changed by 1 of 5 guys and you can fork off all you want. - how you feel about it is the strength others felt about their reasons to fork off. Nobody ever considers a fork of Bitcoin Core or WordPress Core (both centralized open source projects, unlike Nostr) to be the real Bitcoin or WordPress, and no one ever will.

WordPress Core at least has decentralized databases - Bitcoin hasn't, its all the same database distributed over a CDN; distributed, not decentralized.

Hello 👋

Didn’t work.

Thank you for doing the math for us ! I think it falls on the same category as quantum computers , it is so far on the future it's not something to worry about that now , and would make more economic sense to use this supercomputer to help you mine Bitcoin than to try to crack keys .

Silicon also has a max potential that we are close to reaching it , the exponential growth won't be at the same pace as it is now .

They say quantum is the next step , but I doubt it , and quantum computers are not good at simple functions but helping with complex functions, and gusseting a key is a simple function.

Nice note and interesting thought experiment.

Seems that given enough time a future supercomputer will crack anything.

Appreciate this rough math though.

I did a fun one on calculating the rough approximation of Bitcoins *actual* inflation rate.

I think it was about 1.5-2.4%... depending on which valves and screw you wanted to turn.

I later read a much more detailed math breakdown and it was almost the same which was validating. Lol

Fun stuff.

Would it make sense for that supercomputer to waste years just to crack a Bitcoin key ? What about the waste in capital allocation?

Multisig, passphrase, 24 words fix this