I mean the traits you describe are not wrong, it's just that crypto is not useful as a payment method due to transaction volume, value / exchange rate volatility, acceptance, etc.
For a laugh, people bought pizzas and the like with bitcoin. Nowadays they hold onto it because it might be worth fiat money. Why spend something as money if it could be worth 20% more tomorrow?
It's an unregulated trading product, it's not practical as electronic money. I mean it might become that, but it would need a lot more oversight, which will cost the traits you mentioned (peer to peer, censorship resistant, etc).
Hmm, we need to tell every Central Bank in the world that the gold bars they're holding aren't money.
Fort Knox must be a cover for government experimentation on aliens.
So its just some sort of very expensive commodity asset, which is used to store value, which we can expect to use to trade with other people, which USED to be money but somehow isn't anymore.
No they don't refer to it as money because words have meaning.
Sorry, gold is not money. You do know that right? It's a commodity. I think you and I talked about this - recently. Money is:
a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively.
inconvertible paper money made legal tender by a government decree.I didn't know that the silver and gold minted coins traded by Roman merchants were in fact not money, but commodities. There's just so much utility in carrying around sacks of metal shards.
It was money in Roman times. Luckily we have moved on. It is no longer money, unless you're planning on trading with Marcus Aurelius. Gold was demonetized in the 30s.
Its interesting because you were even brave enough to includ "coin" in your definition. Coins are made of rare earth metal blends, like silver, copper, nickel, and gold.
So metals are only money when its in a small circular token form factor, but not when its melted together into a heavier bar. Got it.
> Coins are made of rare earth metal blends, like silver, copper, nickel, and gold.
Those are not rare earth metals. They are metals, but not rare earth metals. Those are "any of a group of chemically similar metallic elements comprising the lanthanide series and (usually) scandium and yttrium. They are not especially rare, but they tend to occur together in nature and are difficult to separate from one another."
Also, nickel isn't rare by any definition. Nickel is the fifth most abundant element on Earth.
> So metals are only money when its in a small circular token form factor, but not when its melted together into a heavier bar. Got it.
No, that's also wrong. "The characteristics of money are durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability."
Gold fails the acceptability test because to be money, something must be broadly accepted as a medium of exchange. It is not accepted by anyone. Walk into a Walmart with a brick of gold and they'll tell you to get stuffed. You'll get the same response at Home Depot or if you try and email Amazon. That's why it's not money.
> Oh, so only the government definition of money is whats relevant here, and only of the last ~100 years. Historical and physical contexts of money are irrelevant.
They're relevant in antiquity. Not so relevant today. Like a hitching post. What matters isn't even the government definition but rather the social definition.
So while it seems strange to refer to ramen noodles as money in some contexts, and especially from the outside, the economic behavioural context allows us to attribute monetary function to this commodity, and allows us to say it is being used as a money.
When I'm talking about crypto/bitcoin/money, I am using a global trade and historical context, the macro concept of money outside of any single government, currency, or system. I am using money in an economic behavioural concept; something people use to trade and save with.
I understand you're not willing to accept or trade with Bitcoin, which is why it is not money to you.
But there are those that do accept it, and every year the numbers grow. Thus it is already money, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes de facto "money"
If you need long term value storage, use Bitcoin.
Price volatility is a result of trading volume and short term human behaviour. If you have enough imagination, predict what happens to volatility if mass adoption occurs.
Which is kind of the definition of a deflationary currency.
We've been through all of this already with the gold standard: it was useful for a time, but the pros and cons have generally been weighed and the consensus seems to be not to use it.
What if Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be digital cash but with a limited supply like gold?
From the bitcoin whitepaper:
The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation.
Before Bitcoin there was no ‘cash’ on the internet. Only electronic corporate (controlled) money.
Bitcoin is an attack on the core foundations of our society and is trying to actively undermine democracy. Thankfully it's pretty ineffective so far.
What "democracy" is this? Is that the word you're using for a "choice" between Biden and Trump? Good grief.
Without an attached justification I can't tell whether this is serious or not.
I'm a big beginner believer in Kreiskyan deficit spending for example. Good luck trying to do that once you can no longer print your own money.
Deficit spending is stealing from the future. Bitcoin is sound money, hard money. You can’t steal from your children to pay your bills today.
If you look at what Bruno Kreisky did, you'll see that he didn't "steal from" the future, he invested for it. He basically built the modern Austria I know and love.
I also think the whole "stealing from the future" talking point is BS - to paraphrase Keynes, in the future we'll all be dead :-).
But it's okay for us to disagree here. In a democracy, we can just vote for somebody that represents our views. If either of us can convince the majority to see things our way, we'll get our way.
Now if we had an inflexible monetary system like the one you're proposing, even if the vast majority voted to do things my way, we couldn't anymore, because we robbed the democratically elected state of its power.
This is what I mean when I say Bitcoin is antidemocratic. It entrenches your ideology on a technological level and removes all democratic control.
You don’t want people messing with the money. You can’t trust people and you certainly can’t trust the Keynesians. Taking this power away from the abusers gives power BACK to the people.
You might not agree with my view, but to try to suppress it is antidemocratic.
> You don’t want people messing with the money.
You don’t want people messing with the money. I do. You're trying to remove my democratic right to elect somebody who will do what I want.
I don't care what Satoshi said - he's not some all-knowing saintlike figure. I want the central bank to be able to debase currency. I don't believe in the same things as you and you are attacking my democratic right to see my values reflected in society.
> Taking this power away from the abusers gives power BACK to the people
If you define "the people" as "everyone that agrees with you", sure. But that's an awfully authoritarian thing to do, isn't it?
The good thing about the parallel economies is we can both have it. You can have your rapidly inflating made up Euro, manipulated by your elected and unelected politicians and Bitcoiners can divide everything of value on the planet by 21M BTC. Thing is, as the fiat gets worse and worse, more people will choose to save in things like Bitcoin. Are you familiar with Gresham’s Law?
You are trying to word this like folks are pushing this on you. Nothing is further from the case. Opt-in.
I’m not defining the people as anything. Everyone is free to believe whatever they wish.
Your opt-in is actively harmful to democratic society.
You're saying "don't worry, you don't need to break the social contract, but we will and we'll make it easy for others to do so, too. And if our sabotage makes everything collapse, well I guess that proves we were right all along. wink"
Who’s pushing their authoritarian agenda now.
The only worse thing than having people that might practice bad monetary policy having power over the currency is having bad monetary policy immutably baked into the structure of the currency.
Totally agreed. Lucky it’s opt-in and voluntary! You are welcome to earn and spend money in whatever currency you wish.
The environmental effects are not opt-in, they're externalized to everyone else living on the planet:
If a few terrorists voluntarily fly a plane into a building, they're still taking countless innocents with them.