Bitcoin as a Game

> Stocks represent actual ownership in the company, potentially voting control of the boards decisions.

A company is an abstract concept around a group of people, framed inside a legal entity. But yes, if you own many stocks you can sit at the table with some big boys. Most companies come with less risk than Bitcoin. But I rather buy Bitcoin than WeWork shares (assuming they list).

> Government bonds are backed by the full force and trust of the government they represent, and repay the face value plus yield promised at the time they were bought. They represent the most reliable yield you can get.

Until a government defaults. This doesn't happy every week, but ruling out that it doesn't is not the best investment strategy.

---

I'm not denying Bitcoin is speculation, but so is everything else. Sure Bitcoin might be more speculative under your frame of reference. But it's not black and white.

How do you know that gold coin isn't filled with tungsten? With Bitcoin, it takes a handful of milliseconds to verify a transaction.

Your whole new network wouldn't be Bitcoin then. Therefore there is no cloning. Bitcoin scarcity remains in tact.

Bitcoin's initial distribution was as preferable as it can really get. It was announced to a mailing list of people most likely to pay attention to it. Anyone with a computer could join the network and be rewarded with bitcoins. You didn't even need to have a fast computer. The software was free and open source. There isn't much you can improve upon without introducing trust or maligned identification schemes.

>Stocks? Remember dividends? Not so much these days.

This one I have real issue with, ignores the much scorned buyback or any facet of capital investment. Your issue trades at a certain eps multiple, you take earned cash, buy shares with it. Sort of in a vacuum, it's the same business, why should the earnings change? But now you have less shares outstanding, so now your shares are in a more empirical sense worth more. If you want to consider it, the capital return can come from the company buying your shares. It can be harder with a company like amazon when they had a X00 eps, but it's still all about valuation. Amazon circa 2019 /= Amazon 1997.

>Government bonds? Do do negative interest rates sound? You buy one of these because either you have to or you think others will have to.

Yeah, some truth here. Alternatively, you do it because you think rates might go lower still, and their returns aren't highly correlated to equities. There's also a theory I'm partial to where in the pockets of the world that have a crazy high amount of savings, even past encouraging entities to find better returns, negative interest rates make no bones about making the the cost of savings clear.

>Real estate? Please. Take away price appreciation driven by easy money and few would bother "owning."

In a personal sense, real estate you own is rent you don't have to pay. In an external sense, real estate you own/operate is cash flows you can bring in. The elevated markets admittedly tend not to look so great in cash flow metrics.

I agree that there's a bit of hippocracy around the way crypto communities claim that they're trustless until something goes terribly wrong, at which point various key people in those comminutes are trusted to author a hard fork that will undo the damage.

But hippocracy aside, I still think it's a better system than the one you find in fiat currencies. At least in the crypto case the people in the trusted position have something to lose--if they behave badly, people will lose faith in the currency and go elsewhere. It doesn't take much to move your assets between cryptos. If you control enough hashpower (assuming POW) or coin (assuming POS) you could easily lose it all overnight if you support a malicious fork.

In a fiat currency there's way more friction keeping people entrenched. This means that the banks can behave badly and still bet on a majority of their users sticking with their platform.

Besides, Bitcoin just proved the concept. If you don't accept that its fork mechanism has merit as is then I hope you can at least admit that there could be a system that is more effective than our current bureaucratic mess. And whatever that system is, it seems likely that one of the fledgling next-gen cryptos will find a way to make it happen.

I was reading about decred the other day, for instance. Voting on potential forks and then healing the partial schism caused by the vote is baked into their protocol. Apart from the necessary bit about trusting other stakeholders to vote reasonably, I think that in a scenario like that the trust placed directly in the protocol is not insignificant.