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Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

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Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#171

Post by intrasight »

tedeh wrote: post #52
intrasight wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Ask people in Italy or Greece whose banks made them take out mortgages in Euro.

What else would they denominate their mortgages in? Their respective national currencies were abolished after the introduction of the Euro. Although it could be argued that joining the EMU may not have been their best interest in the first place, but that is the fault of their politicians, rather than the banks.

There was a gap beween the Euro being created and the elimination of local currencies.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#172

Post by sudomake »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…

So how valuable would bitcoin be if it cant be used as a currency?

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#173

Post by dullgiulio »

ThomPete wrote: post #164
dullgiulio wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And also, the investment in ASICs etc is not the same as opening a gold-mine. An ASIC can mine Litecoin or Bitcoin whichever is profitable, a gold-mine cannot start extracting petrol when that is more profitable. That's the intrinsic value of gold.

Again. You can't open a bitcoin mine. You can mine bitcoin but any fork of the bitcoin is not bitcoin anymore.

I wrote cryptocurrency mine, not Bitcoin mine.

Cryptocurrencies as a whole are not scarce, unlike gold. Thus, they are not a substitute for gold.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#174

Post by sethgecko »

Nursie wrote: post #166
ThomPete wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I am saying that bitcoin is bitcoin with it's own unique history and that there only will be a set amount of those bitcoins. That makes it scarce. It's not just first mover advantage it's the advantage of the history and the money now put behind it that makes it valuable. What you and many other people seem to be confusing is that Bitcoin the protocol isn't what's valuable. It's the ability to turn it into a physi…

It has first mover advantage and a brand name. That's literally all the distinguishes it from clone coins. There being a set amount is only relevant in that context.

What distinguishes from the clone coins is its dev team.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#175

Post by sethgecko »

dsacco wrote: post #89
ThomPete wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has not intrinsic value either. Nothing has to be honest. What it's all based on is trust whether FIAT, Gold or Bitcoin.

> Gold has not intrinsic value either. Nothing has to be honest. Unless you mean something very different from the established consensus of economics when you use the term, “intrinsic value”, both of those statements are false.

Gold's intrinsic value is perhaps 10% of it's current value. You are not holding gold because you want to make jewelry, you are holding because of it's perceived value and it's scarcity.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#176

Post by anthonybsd »

lmm wrote: post #148
tananaev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe cor…

> If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. The whole blockchain is already "centralized" in that sense - almost all mining happens in a small number of large mining pools. 1GB every 10 minutes doesn't sound so bad. Ran…

That's 52 petabytes a year, half an exabyte after 10 years. We are talking about approaching Google datacenter scale on ...every...single....bitcoin node. No matter how optimistic your future storage capacity projections are this is simply not scalable.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#177

Post by FabHK »

ThomPete wrote: post #165
wallace_f wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true.

What's not true?

This:

> Either both bitcoin and gold has intrinsic value in economical terms or none of them have in philosophical terms

The argument is precisely that gold has, and bitcoin hasn't, intrinsic value (in the economic sense).

Gold can fulfil the functions of money, but also has other uses. Bitcoin can fulfil some functions of money (barely), but has no other uses.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#178

Post by FabHK »

bobwaycott wrote: post #110
wallace_f wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's consistent with what people mean when they say 'gold has intrinsic value.' All they are saying is it 'has some value that is not one of the three functions of money.' Does anyone know what the above logical fallacy would be named? I see this kind of argumentation a lot: where one refutes an argument which has not been made.

That it is consistent does not mean it is equivalent. Humans are pretty poor at avoiding conflating their terms and categories into messes of confusion. This fiction that gold (or any other thing) possesses intrinsic value is one of best examples of such confusion in economics. Things have value because people decide they do—and as soon as they decide otherwise, that value steadily declines to zero, despite how many…

Sure, you can argue that a house, a hamburger, and a car have no intrinsic value per se, but only in relation to humans and/or because we give them value.

But again, with that you're departing from the modern economic notion of intrinsic value in discussions of money.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#179

Post by FabHK »

intrasight wrote: post #171
tedeh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else would they denominate their mortgages in? Their respective national currencies were abolished after the introduction of the Euro. Although it could be argued that joining the EMU may not have been their best interest in the first place, but that is the fault of their politicians, rather than the banks.

There was a gap beween the Euro being created and the elimination of local currencies.

Yes, but during that time the exchange rate between Euro and legacy currencies was fixed.

Re: Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

#180

Post by BearGoesChirp »

EpicEng wrote: post #42
ThomPete wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western Union is up there I think. So at least for remittance it might make sense. Anyway I agree that Bitcoin probably won't be used as a currency but more like gold. Perhaps it will be used to back some way cheaper transaction method.

> more like gold But without that nifty property of intrinsic value.

Why are we so certain it does? It has certain properties that give it some value. Maybe that value is much much less than the current price and maybe there will be competition that is better in every way, but is there not some small intrinsic value in owning something electronic that I can transfer which has scarcity enforced by algorithms instead of a centralized system?

Then again, if the intrinsic value is worth less than the effort to use it, is there a difference from having no intrinsic value at all?

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