Hacker News Reader

Comment by trowway21 | Hacker News Reader

Lol. So back crypto $ with trillions of $ of debt going back to the Louisiana purchase; kept alive by a pyramid scheme dependant on a certain and limitless supply of debt free immigrants, after they continue to prove they don't require anything concrete to generate demand & subsequently value?

Aka: how interested are people in a cryptocurrency worth market value minus 20 trillion $?

View on HN

The banks are in debt to trillions of dollars to people who are 'in credit'. That's what 'in credit' means. It is the accounting term for a liability.

Does that keep you awake at night too?

For every asset there is a liability - even with cryptocurrencies.

What you are missing with government 'debt' is that it creates safe private assets that keep the pension system going.

> For every asset there is a liability - even with cryptocurrencies.

I would think that bitcoin is no-ones liability? I mean, there are a bunch of bitcoins that you may or may not be able to sell someone with a price, but there is no-one who has any kind of legal or even moral obligation to give you anything in exchange of a bitcoin.

Liability will start once you start loaning them out to others and package the loans to other investors who them show them as assets to borrow something from someone else :).

Sure. But it is not the bitcoin that is the liability, it is the loan contract.

If I understand your argument, you're saying that I'm a 'creditor' to my bank when I deposit money there that they are obliged to return on demand. Fair enough, but the reason I deal with banks is that it's cheaper than protecting my assets personally. Cryptocurrency is cheaper than dealing with the banks.

So if I find a dollar on the beach and pick it up, what liability has been created by my having a new asset? Are you saying that the potential to find the dollar was some sort of collective asset that I've turned into a liability? That seems like an unnecessarily complicated way of looking at things.

The only thing that can keep the pension system going is a growing population paying into it. Pensions are the ultimate pyramid scheme, the idea that bonds are a safe private asset... safe compared to what, and how safe on an absolute basis?

> So if I find a dollar on the beach and pick it up, what liability has been created by my having a new asset?

That dollar bill is a title of government debit.

Alternate framing: let's back crypto with payment obligations tied to the economic output of the world's richest economy rather than backing it by optimism.

Ultimately I'd have much more confidence in a cryptocurrency backed by enforceable [probably private IRL] debt obligations than one which wasn't.

US GDP is $18.5 trillion so yeah it has some debt but also some decent revenue. Yeah, I'd be interested.

You know, if Tom owes Sally, and Sally owes Jes, and Jes owes Tom, it's really not clean and cut to say "all debt" or "all revenue" because it depends on which node is the focal point.

Your sentiment about fiat is appreciated and understood, but it's inaccurate to claim that USD's total value is equivalent to the current national deficit.

He's referring to the debt, not deficit. They aren't the same thing.

Stand corrected, thanks, meant the "national debt".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com