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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

I can understand peoples' frustration with the artificial scarcity, but would like to see this same energy over the artificial scarcity of housing and free time. The oligopoly of national money systems is currently failing to provide people with basic access to capital. There's nothing intrinsic about cryptocurrency that will necessarily help this or exacerbate it, but the fact that I can get better interest on US dollars by depositing stablecoins on some defi platform, with no gatekeeping, is an indictment of conventional financial institutions more than it is of blockchain tech.

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"the fact that I can get better interest on US dollars by depositing stablecoins on some defi platform"..

There was this guy called Madoff. He was able to get better interest than the markets for quite a while too. Those stablecoins are not contributing to the productive economy. They're not being invested in machines that make new cars, clear carbon from the air, produce cheaper food. Nothing about cryptocurrency will solve housing or free time, because those are political problems which require humans to come together with a common aim - not, in the complete opposite example, people just wanting more for themselves by "depositing stablecoins on some defi platform".

If i’m correct you can get upwards of like 5-10% interest on those platforms?

Can you simply explain to me where that money comes from? That just seems like an absurd amount of interest. Considering the crypto/inflation hawk intersection, i’d presume people would be skeptical of all this “free” money?

If I'm not wrong, the average yearly ROI of something like S&P 500 has been around 7-8% over the last 70 years.

Since you're French as well, I can tell you that here it gives about 4-5% in yearly returns.

So it's not unheard of returns with traditional asset classes. As far as I'm aware, the money in that specific case comes from interests paid by those taking loans (from the funds that's you're putting out) or from staking rewards (in the case of staking cryptocurrencies using proof of stake).

EDIT : For France I meant real estate gives 4-5%, don't know why I skipped that.

That's just an overly simplistic summary of the whole thread. Pinboard isn't angry about artificial scarcity, but how cryptocurrency fails to fulfill its promises: it fails to decentralize, it fails to reach performance levels of existing financial institutions, it wastes huge amounts of energy, and it provides zero value other than being a ransomware enabler. (Disclaimer: I own cryptocurrency)

And he is wrong. Plenty of cryptocurrencies are fast, with low fees, and with minimal energy consumption.

Yes but not the overwhelmingly popular ones.

I think it depends on how you want to rank popularity, but I’d say the most popular coins in the field are

Tons of other risky assets have high "interest rates". Sell puts on high volatility stocks for example.

It’s not artificial scarcity, it’s outright fake scarcity.

The total supply of Bitcoin is 21,000,000 coins. However, every single coin is 100,000,000 individual assets.

21,000,000 sounds pretty finite. But 21,000,000,000,000,000 sounds a tad less finite. The price of Bitcoin relies on the fundamental false premise that it’s scarce.

1 = x

1/100,000,000 = x/100,000,000

"stacking sats" is a common phrase so it's not really a secret that a bitcoin can be subdivided. In fact, a lot of bitcoin supports would support people learning this fact.

There is nothing special or important about a single entire Bitcoin. It’s completely arbitrary. The question is whether Bitcoin is scarce. If there are millions of trillions of tradeable assets, it’s not scarce.

If most of it is locked in someone else’s account and they won’t sell it to you: it is scarce. If nobody wants to buy it: it’s not scarce. Scarcity is based on supply and demand, not on a single number.

That's like saying pizza isnt scarce because you can cut one into 1000 tiny slices. Or gold isnt scarce because you can cut 1 bar into 1 tiny million pieces. Pretty hilarious misconception

Except pizza and gold both have fundemental value as you decrease the size. Bitcoin has exactly the same techinical functionality regardless of the size.

Yes money is fungible, doesn’t make your point valid.

Does a 1 cent coin have the same value as a $100 note?

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