Unlike the things you pointed out, Bitcoin will never give dividends or have any assets sold at an auction. Instead it's a pyramid scheme, easily replaceable by any other shitcoin out there, and the value of it should be close to $1 or less.
Crypto allowed me to transfer my wealth across border and helped me survive while Visa blocked my cards and local banks harassed me with their KYC/AML requirements and creative nonsense based out of fear of the US and EU sanctions. The utility of that is much higher than any dividends.
> Instead it's a pyramid scheme, easily replaceable by any other shitcoin out there, and the value of it should be close to $1 or less.
Wow, shitcoins sound so much worse than pieces of paper that are propped up by a legal decree, which legitimacy rests solely on the monopoly on violence. Wait, does it actually sound worse?
and a currency whose value approaches zero as time grows. if bitcoin is bad, how is that much better?
run businesses? to say nothing about whether those businesses are sustainable or actually generating wealth & human prosperity. if you look at all the worst aspects of the economy, they're based in expansionary monetary policy and high time preference
> inflation as the thing that keeps money in circulation
it keeps people spending money on usually wasteful things and incentivizes the consumption of cheap goods, if you want an economy built on prosperity and enduring goods, you need to actually incentivize saving (not wasteful consumerism)
surely people value things other than paying off liabilities?
why are you getting so defensive about the fact that fiat currency exponentially decreases in value
This is an attack on this whimsical philosophizing crypto-boosters use as a defense. No one cares about this "what is money" commentary. If you believe in your moon money so much why not just actually use it as money? Of course you'll have to lose those gainz but real money is just worthless paper right?
I don't buy stuff with it though it's being used to facilitate transactions for people. I route around $40k a month.
Whether it be war, tyranny and unjust sanctions, crashing economies, or just avoiding the arbitrary and often unjust fees, rules, seizures, and bannings imposed by private payment networks and services like paypal or visa, humanity will always need way to exchange cash. I for one am glad crypto (as a means to transfer funds) exists, glad it will continue to exist, and will continue to support it in any way I can.
To me, what it provides to humanity far outweighs the negatives.
Trillions of dollars are stolen from the people by money laundering and tax evasion every year, and cryptocurrencies are one of the ways this is accomplished.
Yes, some people live in countries where the law is hostile. However, your solution, "Let's evade all laws concerning money," is WORSE, not better.
If the argument is bad stuff possible then your argument is to abolish government.
We cannot presuppose that breaking the law is necessarily bad or that following the law is not bad.
I'm not going to pretend to be surprised - many American conservatives have expressed the same sentiments to me. However, I am surprised you post it in a public forum.
In my view, society is propped up by future expectations. This includes the value of government money.
No one else denies this or doesn't believe it's true, I hasten to add. For most of us, we think that this is a good thing, but also such an obvious thing that it doesn't need to be mentioned.
The people who keep mentioning it are people who think it's a bad, bad thing. They want everyone to have access to violence at all times.
The sane majority does not.
No. If your going to targrt political stratas, don't be narrow sighted.
The BLM and Antifa riots of "Defund the police" is exactly about the same concern, and supporters caused widespread violence to prove that point. There's a different reason, but many prominent Democrats urged those protests on, making it more broad than just some leftists commies.
The major difference is that BLM/antifa targeted local police with a national organization and got their way in many places, whereas conservatives are weary of the federal government are just some disorganized people that become easily targeted by the feds.
I have no idea where you came up with "Many is civil war". Quite the opposite. Civil war erupts when one entity has a monopoly on violence and enough people decide that they've had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
There are all sorts of sayings. Is this one true?
The United States is the most heavily armed country of any size in the world. It is also more heavily armed than any time in its past.
And yet politeness appears to be at an all-time low. Certainly, a lot of political figures say things that are just astonishingly rude and horrible and false, things that would have destroyed their careers even twenty years ago but seem to make them very popular today.
It seems that saying is wildly false.
> I have no idea where you came up with "Many is civil war".
Probably they are knowledgeable about history, as their statement is simply true.
> Civil war erupts when one entity has a monopoly on violence and enough people decide that they've had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
I'm baffled as to how this makes sense to you.
How exactly do these people "decide they have had enough of that" without abrogating the states monopoly on violence? Surely by the time you get to civil war, there are _two sides fighting_??
It's like you just cut and paste a lot of slogans and stop thinking critically there.
I really suggesting reading some history.
So you use crypto to break the law, and you believe you are justified in doing that. Thing is, most of the people using crypto for crime are simply using it to not pay taxes.
> Wow, shitcoins sound so much worse than pieces of paper that are propped up by a legal decree, which legitimacy rests solely on the monopoly on violence. Wait, does it actually sound worse?
Yes, it absolutely does sound worse.
On one side, we have the United States - the largest economy in the history of the world, backed by the government with the largest income of any government in history, a court system, the police and their "monopoly on violence".
On the other side, you have a cryptocurrency backed by nothing, created by anonymous individuals, with no form of conflict resolution whatsoever.
Cryptocurrencies have been around for almost as long as the smart phone. You would think one or two of you would have taken even a first year economics course during this time.
Using it for crime? That just makes crypto even more similar to traditional finance.
> Yes, it absolutely does sound worse.
So you think all countries should switch their currencies to the US dollar? Do you think it is just as good for countries to give up their financial sovereignty as it is for common people?
> Cryptocurrencies have been around for almost as long as the smart phone. You would think one or two of you would have taken even a first year economics course during this time.
I was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in macroeconomics in a top 50 department during my PhD. Arrow-Debreu and all that.
I don't think _anyone_ is against using cryptocurrencies as a way of transferring money. It doesn't make sense to transfer wealth via something that rapidly changes its value, right? Because means of transferring wealth requires preserving the value of the wealth. Bitcoin today does not preserve its value, as evident by the rapid decline in value in the past few days.
2. So called, "Money" does not pay dividend... does Gold pays dividend? now on the other hand, I can lend you BTC or Gold and ask you to pay me back the principle + interest on it in BTC/Gold etc so that is that... Fiat money can yield as it can be created of thin air, no actual work required (i.e. mining for Gold or BTC)
3. Any currency, company also can be replaced by something else out there but won't why? network effect, trust and liquidity matters...
Hertz: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/01/business/hertz-bankruptcy-car...
2. Money does pay "dividend" - it's called "interest".
Only if you lend it.
Money sitting around under a mattress tends to lose value due to inflation.
Actual specie, dug out of the ground, tends to hold its value, relatively speaking. Sure, their may be shocks like discovering a whole continent made of gold but those are pretty rare.
Bitcoin, who knows? It simply hasn’t been around long enough for its place on the money pyramid to be found.
2.a. Gold is an asset and doesn't need to pay dividends as it has intrinsic market value.
2.b. Loans and interest are contractual agreements, i.e. financial instruments unto themselves that generate value. Just because you get suckered into agreeing to a hobby money loan doesn't mean the hobby money has any value.
2.c. Variable cost doesn't equal value either. You can burn a stack of $100 bills but that doesn't mean that brief fire has any value, but it sure as shit didn't help the planet either.
https://monoskop.org/images/c/cd/Lukic_Kristian_2013_Artific...
The very first paragraph of the page is helpful:
> The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, recorded music and films, and videogames, but now including clothing, cars, fine wine, and whisky, among other products. A limited edition is restricted in the number of copies produced, although in fact the number may be very low or very high. Suzuki (2008) defines limited edition products as those “sold in a state that makes them difficult to obtain because of companies limiting their availability to a certain period, quantity, region, or channel"
I am an art collector. None of it is rare or wildly expensive. Nor do I expect to resell any of it.
It might shock you to discover that I collect that art simply because I enjoyed looking at it and having it. I go to art galleries to see art that I do not own, not because of its financial value, but because I enjoyed looking at it.
The idea that art is exactly an precisely an investment vehicle is simply false to the fact. And honestly, I find it horrifying and empty.
Personally I love looking at a nice shiny piece of gold and artfully stacked pile of $20s.
> it's a pyramid scheme
That's your opinion.
> easily replaced by any other shitcoin
It's not.
But for example, Argentina has incredibly harsh currency controls, any freelancer or company that tries to export goods or services gets paid half the value per dollar and is forced to sell their dollars to the government
While companies can't really avoid it, most freelancers go around the control by using crypto and so can get the full value of their work
https://www.ccn.com/dutch-bitcoin-trader-suffers-brutal-tort...
This just seems apt: https://xkcd.com/538/
The IRS seized $3 billion worth about a year ago. https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/histor...
See for example the Canadian government freezing bank accounts[0] of anyone trying to contribute to the vaccine mandate protests.
- BTC was originally intended to support smart contracts
- but people pitched “digital gold” because they didn’t understand that vision
- then the capability was removed for “safety”
- and then later ETH came along (with a different model), but one that still is too costly for general compute trade and which is inflated by the gimped-BTC bubble
- we’re watching that fools gold bubble pop
- and new ideas about compute for sale emerge [1]
And in the near future:
- eventually, tokens will represent real things with the interop currency being the one for buying compute time
[1] - eg, https://github.com/lucasgleba/zkRiscV
Bitcoin's project is that it's a collectible with limited supply.
I wonder why that is...
Buying crypto because you believe in a given project is the same as buying a beanie baby because you happen to like the particular appearance of said beanie baby.
Value ( and by extension price ) of anything is what people are willing to pay for it. Some digital cards in a Blizzard game were purchased for thousands of dollars. There is some digital real estate that was purchased for millions. We can argue all day long whether it makes sense and what the value should be, but that is the wrong perspective to begin with.
<< will never give dividends
Even now I can easily point to stocks that never paid dividends.
<< it's a pyramid scheme
At this point, it is a pyramid scheme the same way US dollar is a pyramid scheme.
It was purchased for millions AT THE TIME OF PEAK MANIA . big difference
Also it was purchased for millions by the only guy in the world willing to pay millions for it…
Don’t extrapolate or you risk making an hypothesis of liquidity and price permanence which is just not there
A mansion in Naples or San Mateo was worth millions in the 1980s, 90s , 00s , 10s , 20s and there are millions of potential buyers globally who’d happily pay that price. That’s an asset which proved both liquidity and price permanence (matter of fact appreciation) but still it’s not a given that it will prove to be such going forward
If there is one thing that 2008 should have taught anyone, it is that nothing is permanent. I am not going to get philosophical here and say that possessions are fleeting, but to pretend that real estate is not propped up hard and effectively is guaranteed to "prove to be such going forward" is about the same faith that keeps ANY asset including bitcoin up.
Why are you so certain that this timeline will never see Naples mansion price go to zero? I can easily see several scenarios where that could happen.
Yeah the dollar is a pyramid scheme. It has the same construction flaws as Bitcoin. You can withdraw it from the markets and just hoard it which causes deflation. The central bank then allows commercial banks to increase the money supply instead of increasing the circulation velocity. The problem with newly created money: it can be hoarded too, resulting in an infinite doom loop.
Niter will Tesla shares, yet people still buy. Its purely for resale at later stage.