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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

No crypto asset is currency or will be currency. They're tradable assets, not unlike Beanie Babies.

And I don't see fiat that way because:

1. I use if every day. It's widely usable as currency, it's inflationary, and its value doesn't fluctuate wildly.

2. Fiat only ever promised to fix the problems with gold, and it did that (in the US and Europe at least). It didn't ride a wave of hype that it couldn't live up to.

3. No one's hobby is talking about fiat. They don't harass me when I say I don't think it's interesting. They don't talk about the world falling apart and fiat plucking us from the ashes.

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Also, ironically, crypto is at least as conjured up out of thin air as a properly operated "fiat" currency. A person decided - for whatever reason - that there should be up to 21 million of a new type of token in existence, and his software started printing them and dishing them out to random participants in the network. With a "fiat" currency the actual number in circulation goes up and down according to actual market demand for debt, and in a properly run "fiat" currency the active intervention in that market is taken by named individuals with set targets who publish minutes of the decisions they're going to take.

Crypto is fiat currency without even so much as the fiat. Meaning it floats completely at random based on the mood of the participants... which now is driven solely by wanting to sell that crypto to some Greater Fool.

What about company stocks, maybe Evergrande. Hold them while waiting for Greater Fool.

Do you genuinely not see a difference between Bitcoin and a stock?

Stock is ownership of a company and entitlement to its profits. If you gamble on an unprofitable company with no assets, then sure, your stock could be worth very little. But even then, the company likely has cashflow or something in its financials that's valuable.

Companies selling stock are also analyzed to death and publish their audited financials.

Sure, if the company becomes insolvent, then the stocks will be backed by as little as Bitcoin, and more fixed in supply. Perhaps HODLers of crappy stocks should just forget about the whole revenue-generating business that was supposed to be behind them, and insist that they're a store of value

"Currency" is still mostly not there, but there's things between that and tradable assets. A lot of people do, today, use crypto to e.g. send money back home.

There’s plenty of fiat criticism outside of crypto, maybe you are in a bubble of neoliberalism

I don't know what you're arguing against in my comment, but it's not something I actually said.

Fiat, The Fed, and active monetary policy are certainly criticized from all angles. I never said otherwise.

Not by anybody taken seriously.

I’ll take my discussions about money without the added gatekeeping, thank you.

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