Hacker News Reader

Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

He doesn't even see that the value in gold is what we assign to it. Almost no different to the value of cryptocoins. He doesn't notice the contradiction:

> Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)

Gold is worth so much in dollars because everyone thinks everyone else also wants it. Sure you can process it for some industrial use, but most of the worth is because "Someone else will also find this worthy").

I have a 100 trillion dollar note (Zimbabwean) in my wallet, is it worth anything? Just the novelty value. Is the $100 (US) note worth anything? Well I can buy $100 worth of groceries, which at the moment is probably 20 cartons of eggs, but the way Musk is doge-ing the nation, it could be only 4 cartons in the near future...

View on HN

Gold has a limited supply and it's a precious metal, so it has nice properties, can't be easily destroyed and lasts forever.

To be fair, you can't just manufacture more gold. I mean you can dig more up or buy more but you're limited to how much gold there is. That's the argument used. There seems to be over 200,000 metric tons of it ever mined.

What many gold bugs and crypto bros don't seem to understand is that:

1. The US dollar was never 100% backed by silver (originally) or gold;

2. What really backs the US dollar is the US military. This was true with the gold standard and it's true now;

3. The ability to manufacture more dollars and thus control the money supply is a feature not a bug;

4. Fractional reserve banking is so stunningly successful, it's impossible to ignore; and

5. A lot of the problems detractors point to are really symptomatic of unfettered neoliberalism, not abandoning the gold standard.

Of course the same can be said for BTC: finite supply, needs to be mined.

Unlike gold, the "finite supply" of BTC is socially constructed.

That's my whole argument for gold. The finite supply isn't socially constructed, and getting more requires building real infrastructure.

1. The supply is nonetheless constrained and immutably fixed; what is the relevance of whether it is by contract or law of nature?

2. What do you mean by "real" infrastructure? Crypto-mining rigs are no less real than actual mines.

My argument would be that gold's value is as much a social construct as that of crypto; value is just a function of supply and demand.

I'm guessing you might post that there is a third input: utility. "Currency" is one use for gold, but can certainly serve many purposes, whereas crypto coins are strictly used as currency. That fact is presumably taken into account by a coin's price; nonetheless, it still has whatever value the market says it has at any time.

Except none of the crypto "currency" is used as currency at all, and never will. It's used as a crypto asset. For speculation. Or even worse, straight up fraud. The only time I heard crypto was used as currency, is the infamous pizza a decade ago

Computer programs and algorithms are the last thing that I would call "socially constructed".

The meaning behind them are, though. When car alarms was a big thing, it might wail, and the idea was people would have a look to see if somebody was trying to steal your car, but at the end it was mostly false alarms. So the wailing got the reaction of "Not that shit again!".

Meanwhile a TSA scanner's beep get treated as "this person is bringing a problem.".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com