What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.
I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though.
Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words.
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/fil...
Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it.
Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.
I'd take ownership in Apple all day over any coin, as I suspect more people out there value the Apple Stock over the ever-increasingly tough to exchange Bitcoin.
These events both seem very unlikely right now, but they provide a last-resort value for an ownership interest in Amazon.
(I don't mean to support other people in this thread who are criticizing cryptocurrencies for their lack of inherent value, but stocks do have a particular basis for their value that cryptocurrencies commonly don't.)
The point is - crypto-currencies are fairy dust. There is nothing real or tangible about them.
Most money in circulation is 0/1's on hard drives.
I'm bearish on cryptocurrencies because frankly the entire thing is hilarious but modern currencies aren't entirely dissimilar.
Being backed by demand from the entire economy of a stable polity is certainly better than being backed by sunk (energy) cost fallacy and speculator enthusiasm.
I think this thread started out with someone saying that crypto-currencies aren't very useful as currency, but as assets (like a gold bar) instead. And then it was argued that they're not very good as assets either.
I guess what I am trying to say is that there is a lot more that goes into value than utility. That's why I do not think that people always act rationally. Clearly there is something irrational about people's relationship with gold that makes it valuable. I don't see why crypto cannot have a similar irrational evaluation. Sure, it could go "poof" tomorrow, but I don't know if that will stop people from seeing it as valuable.
Not really. Pyrite has a vaguely similar color to gold and flakes of it can be easily be visually mistaken for gold in certain contexts, it doesn't generally closely resemble gold, even cosmetically.
In other words, owning a non-dust amount of Satoshis gives you some useful property. Anything scarce and useful will have value and market will price it. Anything with a price and good properties to become means of exchange, unit of account or store of value could under some circumstances become a form of money.
Similar as with gold. You can use it in electro-industry. That's its secondary value for people who see value in electronic devices. If you were to explain why gold is valuable in electro-industry to a member of native african tribe, he would not see that value, because electricity and electronic devices is something not considered in his mind. You are in the same boat with Bitcoin here :-)
Finally, you could also reduce it to the fact that possession and distribution of pretty objects can increase your likelihood of reproduction. From an evolutionary standpoint, access to reproduction is an inherently valuable thing.
If we see a widely traded and daily useful crypto-currency in use for general goods and services, we'll see a deleveraging of the banking system.
Right now how often do you exchange a real Dollar or Nickel for goods or services. Chances are your token of exchange is your credit or debit card, with a balance maintained by a bank.
Would be very interesting to imagine the world we will live in if the banks are no longer keeping the ledger for society.
Based on what? Cryptocurrency markets went from zero to doing practically every financial fraud, scam and deception in the book in a matter of months. Excessive leverage? See Tether. Ponzi scheme? See Bitconnect. Backroom dealing to help the well connected? See Ethereum.
Banks don't lever up, lie about the value of their holdings and borrow short to buy long because they're evil and destructive. They do it because there are massive monetary incentives to do those things. Those same incentives are present in cryptocurrencies. The only difference is the regulators haven't tuned in yet.
> banks are no longer keeping the ledger for society
Banking laws would be updated to regulate Coinbase, Bitfinex, et cetera.
I think the gold comparison is quite close.
Crypto has exactly zero real world utility or inherent value. You, Joe Schmoe, do not by yourself and your own desires dictate what does and does not have inherent value.
Maybe that's not put very well. Look at it like this.
Primitive civilizations (some of which still exist today) may store their wealth in something like cattle. Often exactly cattle in fact. Obvious real world utility. But cumbersome to trade, can't grow the economy fast, lots of drawbacks and it limit how complex the culture can become.
As civilization gets more complex it moves on to other mediums. Next might be useful metals (tin, bronze, iron). Less immediate use than cattle, slightly more abstracted. Then maybe precious metals or stones, less practical use then the previous stage, even more abstracted. But easier to move around, trade, store and calculate with. Then currency, even more abstracted and even less practical use. Then digital currency in the form IOUs and ledger balances which is essentially what we have now. 0 practical use. Essential for any modern economy.
Point being, "real world use" has nothing to do with value as a currency, a store of wealth or an economic unit in this time and place. The worth is abstracted functionality. And it's entirely possible, in fact even likely in my opinion that blockchains are an evolution along these lines, a next step in abstracting units of trade and ledgers of wealth.
I agree with the observation that the difference is that gold is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. Bitcoin does.
There is a difference between simulated gold, and actual gold, that is. At least, under current conditions.
A gold bar has inherent use because there are (and, more importantly, will be) people who will buy it to smelt it and make jewelry.
The price of gold isn't really related to it's use in electronics however.
> The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
Scarcity is a factor. Admittedly not all things that are scarce are valuable but it's a necessary precondition.
There are other examples of items that lack inherent utility but have value and they too are often used to store wealth: art, antiques etc. spring to mind.
If everyone decided tomorrow that Ming Vases were rubbish they would cease to be valuable. That's surely as "sentimental" as Bitcoin - value based on scarcity and consensus.
Also, gold is not scarce by any means, just expensive to mine.
1. You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined 2. Same as bitcoin, Gold needs to be mined. This is basically "conjuring" gold. 3. Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. 4. Gold can be destroyed as well.
Bitcoin Cash did exactly that. New value was conjured up out of nowhere - Bitcoin didn't drop, and every owner of a Bitcoin suddenly had $2-3k worth of Bitcoin Cash.
> Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned.
... What? Are you sitting on a SHA-256 exploit we don't know about?
Let me break it up to you again:
1. Bitcoin (In it's current form) has a limited supply. If nothing changes, there will be a time when new Bitcoin cannot be mined anymore.
2. Forking Bitcoin does not mean new Bitcoin is created. You are confusing value and supply. Forking creates an alternative currency (which can be called anything you want) that uses the former ledger of Bitcoin to distribute its initial wealth.
3. It is not a guarantee that addresses with lost secrets will be lost forever. Like you said, SHA256 exploits, or maybe quantum computing would be able to recover them.
It's going to get really exciting at tax time, when people declare bankruptcy, go into a nursing home and need to prove they don't have assets for Medicaid, etc.
> Like you said, SHA256 exploits, or maybe quantum computing would be able to recover them.
That's an insane defense of the point. Sure, if that stuff happens, you'll be able to retrieve lost coins. And non-lost coins. So will everyone else. Bitcoin's value would be instantly zero.
Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy.
Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.
It's not clear how much demand for gold would increase at say 1/10th the price, but based on other commodities we would probably use more than 10x as much would would represent a solid price floor.
Bitcoin on the other hand has no price floor and can effectively go to zero. Though, in practice much like beanie baby's or other fads people are likely to hold on to good vs sell it for 1/1,000th the price hopping for a comeback. You would expect long term bitcoin sales below 1 cent per coin to be very rare until eventually the network collapses.
That's as tangible as anything else. Nobody would say that there's no demand for musical instruments, or baseballs, because they are optional parts of life that aren't food or shelter.
Gold has intrinsic value in part because people seem to intrinsically like it for what it actually is, not just it's utility in exchange. That's fundamentally different.
"intrinsic" seems to imply an innate persistence despite not being able to justify such innateness, just empirical persistence. It just implies things that are arguably not justifiable needlessly. gold has been persistently valuable. The universe doesn't give it an innate value.
Seeing as how cultures that considered gold a highly valued item developed independently in Europe and uncontacted pre-Columbian America, and the preference remains global today, there's clearly something durable about this concept.
you could say that the reasons for valuing gold probably aren't going to go away anytime soon as far as anyone can guess. though even then, the market value of gold has fluctuated by a factor of like 10 in recent history as the durable abstract reasons for wanting it have not apparently changed as much. did anything intrinsic about gold change from 1980-1981, when the price crashed 82%?
> Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.
I mean, in this respect the analogy to gold is not an awful fit.
Edit for less smug more content: sacrifice is an interesting lens through which to look at bitcoin. You could argue that burning "excess" compute power is the real point, not the tokens.
Still, is extremely valuable and has been extremely valuable for hundreds of years. It's got the added benefit of being something that people can show off to display their wealth. Even if it's arbitrary why we value gold in the first place (I think aliens looking at our society would find our gold obsession strange), it's probably not going anywhere as a store of wealth. If I buy gold today, unless Armageddon happens, it's very very likely that it will still be highly valuable in 10 years times.
Bitcoin might be valuable in ten years, but like many manias in the past (for example, tulips in 1637 Holland), its value will probably fade at some point unless it has some inherent usefulness as a medium of trade for other useful goods. Gold might eventually lose it's value as well, but it's been artificially inflated for millennia so I'm not betting on it collapsing anytime soon.
Most of the value is what we ascribe to it. Close on 80% is used in jewelry. It doesn't actually make you money, there's no universal law that makes it more valuable over time. It's just stuff we like, same as art or classic cars or Bitcoin. We've just liked it for longer than those things, so we trust it more. but that isn't guaranteed.
You can use non-greater fool assets to make money. A stock is a piece of a business that earned you money over time. A truck can be used to make money. Gold can be fashioned into more-valuable stuff but the real assets are the craftsmanship and tools. Gold is the commodity.
Well not exactly, the largest consumer of gold are Indians and they buy gold jewellery to show affluence. Most of the jewellery is passed down generations.
If you don't have enough dirt, then you can't grow food and everyone dies.
But why is dirt not valuable? Well, that's because the supply of dirt vastly outstrips demand.
The same could happen for gold.
Actually, if the price started trending that way, I imagine other factors would have a bigger effect on the economy before it reached that stage.
Bitcoin may change in value based on perception, it's supply will remain constant after it has all been mined, but it's existence and integrity relies on a large network continuing to exist.
To put it differently, in 50 years a gold bar is a gold bar, but in 50 years a Bitcoin may have no value because everyone stopped mining and the blockchain was destroyed by 51% attacks.
They've already noted that:
> people's perception of its value will change
But as they say, a gold bar will remain a gold bar, until and unless it is actively destroyed. Not so for bitcoins, which only remain so as long as they're actively maintained (not just individual coins but the mining networks which allows the creation of new transactions)
If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero price. Possibly low, but not actually zero.
During such times you need an asset whose value will be greater than 0.
It matters a lot of part of the reason to invest in them is as a hedge against general collapse of social institutions.
If you mean the former, then yes, gold is a good hedge. But if you mean the latter, then I would argue Bitcoin beats gold 100x.
The world economy has never collapsed, and if it did, it would be equivalent to the first option.
If you mean a short-term market downturn like the one that occurred with the ~2009 financial crisis, why would I even bother to hedge against that—and, if I did, why would I use an asset with high volatility to hedge against short-term market movement?
Or 2,000 years:
"the researchers look at pay for a Roman legionary, in the era of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), who was paid a salary equivalent to 2.31 ounces of gold. A centurion was paid a salary equivalent to 38.58 ounces of gold.
Compared to modern US Army salaries, a private is making 20% more than the legionary, and a captain is making 30% less than the centurion" [1].
A counterpoint can be found in silver, where unexpected Spanish silver production in the New World prompted inflation around the world [2][3].
TL; DR For historical reasons, gold is grandfathered into our collective consciousness.
[1] http://www.mining.com/what-a-roman-centurions-pay-says-about...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/21/story-of-citi...
This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
AFAIK there is no mechanism for the difficulty of new blocks to fall. And if the only use is creating transactions between yourself and yourself, well you can also collect gravel.
> This doesn’t sound super useful, but it sounds about as useful as a bar of gold in a world where nobody considers gold to be valuable.
Even in a sub-industrial context and ignoring pretty much all of human history and assuming your gold has lost all of its extrinsic worth, your bar of gold could be molded or cast into plenty of useful things (light reflectors, heat shields, baubles, weights). Bitcoins, not so much.
Nah, if civilization collapses then you'll still be able to use your bar of gold to bash in someone's skull and steal their canned beans (which, in the grim solar-flare induced darkness of 2020, will be worth their weight in bitcoins).
At least when you give a person a gold bar, you know that they now have the gold bar.
There are other ways though: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058150/
That said, yes, asteroids mining could certainly affect the price of gold, but not necessarily destroy all its value. There's a price floor set by the industrial applications for it.
With BitCoin, there is no floor. If no one wants to buy your BitCoins, you can't do anything else with them. They are just data representing proof of work, but no outside value.
Guess it's one of those things that seems impossible, until it isn't.
Personally, I think a better comparison is to the diamond trade. Through a series of machinations (price fixing, artificial supply constraint, marketing) diamonds are deeply overvalued if you consider just the fundamentals of them - aka they're in a bubble. However, due to those same expertly administered steps they've maintained a high retail value for decades.
It's kind of like art. Spend $5k on some locals work and you might get $50 at a garage sale later on if you're lucky. Spend $5mil on a big name and you'll likely make it back, maybe profit, when you move it. The high and low end are basically different products that function differently in the market.
It's only shmucks overpaying for mediocre diamonds that lose out.
And a "Ha, ha, just kidding, of course you're not a cop."
Crime dramas and action films tend to have an incredibly poor understanding of money, crime, policing, and Newton's laws of physics.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/platin...
Even this could change if the miners and thought-leaders decide that it should.
The scarcity of Bitcoins is entirely a cultural delusion.
BTC proper is scarce, regardless of how many times the chain is forked.
You're right though, cultural convention decides which blockchain is the "real" Bitcoin. Most people are using BTC at the moment, but Bitmain takes payment exclusively in BCH.
This might seem like a semantic quibble, but I think it's important. There will only ever be 21 million BTC, and only ever 21 million BCH. If Bitmain decided to charge 22 million BCH for their latest ASIC miner, nobody would ever be able to pay that bill regardless of how many forks there are.
For a blockchain fork to have any value whatsoever, people need to want to own it. Bitmain ASIC sales are driving demand for BCH. Every other Bitcoin fork is doing rather poorly.
Forks aren't diluting the value of BTC, because people know that BTC is the real asset. Everything else is like fool's gold.
You can clone the technology, but you can't clone societal acceptance.
"the relative abundance of asteroidal ore gives asteroid mining the potential to provide nearly unlimited resources, which would essentially eliminate scarcity for those materials"
Apparently with the lack of a strong gravity like Earth's to sink down heavy metals, they are way more accessible in smaller bodies like asteroids (Ceres and Vesta maybe?)
The properties that make gold a good value holding asset is:
1. It's rare and supply is limited (holds value in low physical volume) 2. It doesn't decay or rust 3. It's easy to split into smaller pieces or combine into a larger one.
Bitcoin is good at all three plus added benefit of easy, fast, cheap global transaction (compared to gold at least).
For gold to retain value, you need to maintain human civilization, so that gold can be used in trade. For Bitcoin, you have to maintain it too, plus you need to keep paying an unbounded, ever-increasing, absurdly high price in energy use. This is IMO why cryptocurrencies are a serious problem, and also why they're unsustainable in the long run.
I'd love to hear how they think they can justify that.
In my opinion, the intimations of a "bad breakup" and of festering resentment, are grounded more in the cryptocurrency-community's insecurities than anything specific to Stripe.
Bitcoin is no longer the kind of coins you trade for a sandwich. It’s a house that you sit on as an assset and take forever to sell.
Probably wise considering Bitcoin's strange cultish following.
Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.
Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying.
Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice?
Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.
> The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions
If enabling small casual transactions was one of the goals, then they've failed terribly on that point.
Again, people don't like Satoshi's endgame vision. This is working as designed. Bitcoin was designed to evolve into this. It was not intended to stay static; it's in the whitepaper.
Break out of the groupthink. It's worth realizing when everyone around you is being irrational.
Try to find a quote and paste it. It's a useful exercise, because it forces you to constrain your thinking. Either from the whitepaper or from http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/
I don't think Satoshi said this, but I'll be happy to admit to being wrong.
In fact, here is Satoshi's clear and complete vision from the very beginning:
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/16/
Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years.
first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc...
When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.
Satoshi Nakamoto
You can also find copies of an email Satoshi wrote to Mike Hearn where he said essentially the same thing.
Is your argument that Stripe is acting as a financial institution or that their exit as a middle man is inches us closer to a peer-to-peer system?
People are hoarding, so there are fewer transactions. Miners still need to pay the bills somehow, so transaction fees are likely to increase.
With fewer transactions the price discovery mechanisms, i.e. exchanges, are now somewhat illusory due to thin trading volume (not like BTC exchanges were the paragon of transparency before). Unlike NYSE or Nasdaq, which support trading lithium or platinum ETFs but also make money from other sources (just in case precious metals themselves don't bring in much revenue today), Bitcoin exchanges are heavily concentrated on Bitcoin, and even the ones that support expansive lists of cryptocurrencies generally peg it to BTC, not USD.
So now that exchanges are not such a swell business, this will lead to a wave of consolidation, reduced price discovery and higher fees/commissions to transact.
Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly?
The payment system part. One of the main reasons why Satoshi created Bitcoin in the first place. As someone who got into Bitcoin in early 2011 (but left when things got crazy around 2014), it's utterly laughable to me that Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system. And that the fees per transaction are roughly the same as international wire transfer fees.
The Bitcoin dev team well and good shot itself in the foot by refusing the raise the block size limit. The only good thing to come out of Bitcoin recently is the Bitcoin Cash fork, who showed that the sky doesn't fall when you raise the limit to a reasonable size, and that this does take care of the current scaling and fees issues (Bitcoin Cash transfers are both reasonably quick and affordable, like Bitcoin of old).
I'm still incredulous that Bitcoin has resisted changing to block size limit for so long, given that it was only a security measured Satoshi implemented a year into Bitcoin's life, not only kind of fundamental design feature. I rarely use Internet acronyms, but, smh....
> Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system
What about the part where the blocks are full of tons of payments?
The fork drama proved the most important part of Bitcoin: it's immutability even in the face of great pressure to change.
If the Bitcoin Cash blocks get full, then we'll see how things go. Until then, there is no comparison.
Yeah, then they'll raise the limit from 8MB to 16MB. With 10 terabyte hard drives at $300-$400, that's not a big deal for anyone running a full node.
Lots of assets have value without people buying things with them. Gold, houses, stocks, etc.
The more interesting question is how long Bitcoin will remain top dog merely as a store of value if other cryptocurrencies solve this on-chain / off-chain scaling problem better / faster. There's definitely some amount of value in the name alone, and some more in the security of the mining, but neither of those are unassailable.
With a caveat that houses and stocks can provide cashflow in terms of rent payments and dividends / option income.
The only things that I can think of that are somewhat similar to cryptocurrency as a "store of value" are things like baseball cards.
With the cryptocurrency NEO, because it's algorithm is Proof-of-Stake, merely holding some amount of NEO means you can sign transactions, and signing transactions earns you GAS, which has value.
However, other assets have value because they are useful. Per your examples a house is shelter and a stock is a virtual representation of the physical assets and receivables of a corporation which I should add has extreme market liquidity. Other assets like vehicles provide transportation and heavy machinery make products. I like Bitcoin and it may become/stay an asset class like gold; very illiquid and a store of wealth, but if that fails to materialize or continue after this speculation Bitcoin will be a lot more the AltaVista/Yahoo/Dogpile to Google search than the Gold to Cash analogy.
That value is predicated on the notion that they're worth something to the holder apart from their market price.
Gold can be used for jewelry and electronics manufacturing. In that sense it is a natural resource.
Stocks are shares in a company that runs a business or multiple businesses that could be profitable. Companies have financial obligations to their shareholders.
People live in houses.
Bitcoin's only function is to be exchanged. If no one is willing to give you anything for your bitcoin, it is completely worthless-- maybe even less than worthless when you factor transaction costs. The idea that it is a "store of value" is still predicated on bitcoin being a viable and accepted medium of exchange.
This is different from a house, which you can still use even if no one will buy it.
This is different from gold, as it is very hard to imagine a scenario where absolutely no one would buy your gold for at least for manufacturing.
This is different from stocks, where the financial obligations to you can only be cleared by legal proceedings such as Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Bitcoin has not even 10 years of history as a currency, and most of that time the system was propped up by an inflation mechanism that will soon cease to exist (and is already mostly ineffective), and the rest has been fueled by speculative mania. Compared to gold, it is utterly unproven for the role.
There is no reason to think that Bitcoin is in any real position to replace gold in its role as a "store of value."
Kim kardashian is famous for being famous. It’s clear the world is not utilitarian.
Artwork is also used to decorate or define your living space or working space. It can manipulate your emotional state, serve as a conversation piece at parties, or signal some other trait about you. Artwork is also used to express ideas. Is really high-end collectable artwork from famous dead artists priced far higher than its utility should warrant? Most likely this is because they're used as a store of value. The reasons why artwork became a convenient store of value are probably interesting and might be worth comparing on a detailed level with bitcoin-- but the simple fact that fine art exists as a store of value does not mean that just any arbitrary exchangeable item is likely to fill a similar role.
Kim Kardashian's story is a lot more nuanced than you give it credit for. Many famous socialites quickly fade back into relative obscurity. Kardashian (in full club get-up, anyway) was strikingly beautiful, had a bold but impeccable sense of style, and a willingness to repeatedly expose her personal life to the public. She proved to have a better-than-average ability to entertain audiences on her reality TV show, even if that ability wouldn't fit into any traditional definition of an entertainer.
Fiat currency has no value beyond its utility as a medium of exchange (or store of value). But then, my whole point is to distinguish currency from other types of assets.
Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold.
Also, the Bitcoin blocks are full. Somebody is using it for something.
As an asset or hedge against inflation. Not as a currency.
Transactions are not always buying goods. If I transfer 1btc to somebody and then send me $10,000 there will be a transaction. But btc was not used as a currency to purchase a good here.
People don't buy stuff with gold, but it's been a viable store of value for a long time.
That being said, the burden of proof to show that Bitcoin is going to be a viable store of value is simply enormous. Further, gold has a number of characteristics that make it fairly unique; nobody is running around saying "gold is great, but have you considered tantalum?". If you want to put a bunch of precious metal in a vault, gold is clearly a good default choice. Whereas Bitcoin is anything but unique now, and is not an obvious default choice.
Real estate is an asset and you can't 'buy stuff' with it (other than a 1031 exchange in the US of course).
It's an asset if there is a reasonable chance that someone else will buy it from you in the future for money which you can buy things with.
Not sure what you're getting at here? There are loads of assets that people don't buy stuff with e.g. gold, stocks, bonds, property, etc. Aside from cash I'd guess that the norm is for assets to be converted to cash before anything.
The same as gold does?
Bitcoin is an asset that’s neither productive (stocks, bonds, land) nor useful (oil, wheat, lead). That’s quite unusual.
*Rewrite in past tense or read circa 2015.
There is no reason that same pair of transactions could not have occurred with British bonds.
Bitcoin is (hopefully soon-to-be) dead, long live cryptocurrency!
Semantic judo at its finest.
That's a hell of a line to use when breaking up with someone
You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment.
You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.
Ok, so the Fork will have the same/similar technology behind it, and will be distributed to the same people at the beginning. But, it's not like it's being supplanted. Bitcoin will still be Bitcoin.
I suppose the real world example would be to send an amount of copper to people with gold, it wouldn't change the value of the gold much. Bitcoin has many issues, but I don't see this as one.