Not sure why you think you're being trolled. Have a good one.
449 karma · joined December 3, 2021
Consume:
- eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink).
- buy (goods or services).
- use up (a resource).
- (especially of a fire) completely destroy.
- (of a feeling) absorb all of the attention and energy of (someone).
So you consume bitcoin the same way a central bank consumes gold: by sitting on it, selling it when you need to, or buying more in times of expected turmoil.
Bitcoin is far younger than gold (12 years vs thousands), so its obviously more volatile.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
What I think you're missing the understanding of what money is, and the history of money. This is why gold gets brought up.
In the last some thousand years gold evolved as a world standard for trade. Why? It had some good properties; physically tough and lasting, common enough for people to find / rare enough to be difficult to debase (holds value), you can melt it and shape it (divisible), etc. Gold permeated all societies because it was the "winner" of precious metal monies, and good technology tends to spread, giving it network effects.
Your US dollars were originally just paper notes promising redemption for gold at your bank. We traded those notes around because we had enough trust in a system now for it to be convenient for us.
At some point, governments decided it wanted to they wanted more control over money/economy, and essentially forced a fiat standard on the population. This is the great monetary experiment we are living now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
If you can contextualize what money is, the history of money dating back thousands of years, then you can start to see how crypto has a lot of advantages over metal money, as well as fiat money.
Why do governments hoard billions of dollars of gold bars in military protected bunkers?
Does it have something to do with store of value, and difficulty in debasing gold?
I know that you could have always just hired an Eminem impersonator and have them lay down tracks...but this technology lets you achieve speed and scale. At least the Eminem impersonator was a real person. This is just a model learned off an artists voice.
And then your network will compete with all the other open networks and protocols. And may the better ones win.
Being decentralized means no single party controls it, and thusly no single party can debase it or prevent its distribution. You need to understand why gold is still used as a store of value, and the role of government bonds as safe havens in the modern economy.
You have trust in a system because it works (for you) now, but you're not looking far enough into the future, and you're not weighting risk appropriately.
Crypto isn't just about sending money or making money. This is a completely new "thing", and part of the way its used is redefining what money actually is, based on programmatic protocols, consensus algorithms, etc.
"Sophisticated investors" never had access to an asset whose supply was predictable (resistant to debasement), but also decentralized and permissionless to participate in. "Sophisticated investors" should probably know their monetary history, including why gold evolved as a world standard until Bretton Woods. And the types of money societies used before that.
> It is equally ridiculous that crypto people think that having a fixed supply of something makes it valuable. Oceanfront property in Miami is also limited, but crypto people are not pumping that because they are not invested in Miami oceanfront property.
Not sure what you mean, the lead up to 2008 was a pretty interesting time for real estate developers, why would crypto people be talking about condos?
Your payment pipelines become less valuable when nobody wants those Liras, Bolivars, Argentine Pesos, etc. transmitted over them.
And if you don't think that the US dollar is at risk of debasing itself, you should qualify why.
Media surfaces to the top any subject which draws attention.
We know they'll be motivated, but can they actually compete is the question.
I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal.
Buffett isn't exactly playing the same game as the rest of us. He's one the few people the government calls and asks for assistance in bailing out private banks, or assuring the public by investing in them.
https://www.livemint.com/news/world/how-warren-buffett-rescu...
"I own lots of bank stocks. Don't screw this up for me."
I would argue an infinite money supply is the thing that is insane and destructive. Infinitely growing rollover debt is somehow is a feature of this system, not a bug.
Having money based on a scarcity is how our human economies functioned over the last thousands of years since the creation of money.
Sounds like his problem is lack of demand, not currency liquidity.
> But if the island became connected to a trading route he could trade excess fish for gold or another non perishable asset, he could store up those assets. But he would only do that if he believed that those assets had liquidity.
Ok, but that kind of breaks the island economy experiment, given that he was already trading fish in a closed system for some other good or currency.
What's this statement based on?
As a thought experiment, say a load of survivors wash upon a deserted island, eventually settling into economic roles. I don't think their economy or productivity grinds to a halt because there isn't enough liquid currency. They are constrained by their access and production of real world resources.
The deflationary model favors savers over consumers, giving benefit back to people who are willing be patient by forgoing immediate consumption.
You seem concerned that early adopters stand to gain disproportionately from mass adoption. Well, what outcome would you prefer and how would we get there?
If you buy "stuff", you participate in the exploitation of nature.
So nobody is ever concerned about debt; you just say screw it let someone else worry about it, usually future generations. The value has to come from somewhere, and in this case its from the debasement of the dollar.
I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it.
In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?