Hacker News Reader

Comment by toenail | Hacker News Reader

> Why are you obsessed with holding currency?

I don't know about parent, but I don't want to be forced to gamble on the stock market or to become a landlord simply to save the fruits of my labor. In an ideal world I could have used gold for savings, but gold already lost against fiat and people are looking for something better.

> but why should society care about you by creating a synthetic store of value for you?

That's the beauty of bitcoin, society doesn't have to care about it, bitcoin just does everything on its own and grows naturally.

View on HN

I think you need to think about society as something that can only "buffer" a few months of productivity, or a few years at most. It doesn't matter what monetary system you use to value things. Prices will adjust to reflect supply and demand. It makes no sense for you to be able to save for X decades and then declare you have a right to Y decades worth of other people's productivity later in exchange.

The only way to get what you want is to physically save the goods and services you want to buy in the future, but obviously that is impractical. Hence, society, markets, money, and inflation or deflation to balance the supply and demand of goods and services.

Imagine a world where everyone is your age. You and everyone around you works and is productive. You're saving money. Then, you all retire around the same time. What value does that money have? You all have money, but there's nothing to buy with it. This is obviously an extreme example. But what you want is also extreme: that population and productivity are constant over time.

> It makes no sense for you to be able to save for X decades

Aristotle would have disagreed with you, and today's market seems to disagree as well.

This is the best explanation so far. If you want to store value in non-inflationary asset you can purchase gold. But there is no guarantee that the value of gold against the fruit of other people’s labor will remain constant or increase over time. It doesn’t matter that the total amount of gold remains constant. If the world consists of gold hoarders who want to buy food but all they can offer is gold and one farmer who has food for sale then that one farmer can demand as much gold as the market is willing to pay for the scarce good food.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com