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Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

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Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#191

Post by throwaway81523 »

Closi wrote: post #60
throwaway81523 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use bitcoin but one attraction I see is that it lets you spend your money without anyone else's permission. If you buy something with it, the seller gets the money without your having to worry about automated fraud checks causing your credit card to be declined, check to be put on hold, etc. It's like cash that way. Wire transfers might be an alternative, but they are only practical for fairly large transacti…

Spending money without automated fraud checking, dispute resolution and the ability to do chargeback sounds like a great idea until you think for more than 2 seconds about why those things exist. And I’m not sure why I would want to maintain two currencies anyway, one for small payments where for some reason I don’t want protection, and another when I do want protection. Having to hold multiple currencies dependent o…

> Spending money without automated fraud checking, dispute resolution and the ability to do chargeback sounds like a great idea until you think for more than 2 seconds about why those things exist.

Sure, those things exist, and cash also exists, and in physical real-life transactions you get to decide for yourself which one you want to use. With online transactions and without crypto, for the most part you currently don't have a choice, and that's not good.

Example: if I'm storing important archive data in AWS Glacier that has to be retained for years and I have to pay monthly, I'd be much more worried about data loss due to something going wrong with one of the monthly automatic card payments than with AWS defrauding me or with Glacier itself failing. So I'd rather pay with crypto (or ideally, pay years in advance up front and not worry about monthly payments at all), than leave it up to the whims and vagaries of some damn card company's flaky software.

Yes stuff like that has happened to me more than once in real life (not with amazon but with some other hosting providers).

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#192

Post by bb88 »

herbst wrote: post #155
fny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a question: how many people do you know that buy crypto intend to spend it? You know, use it like currency? Or are they all just HODLing in the hopes that some other buyer will come along who believes it will become a medium of exchange? In my view, it's not a currency until people stop speculating and start using it like a currency. So yes, it's a collectible with ridiculously high transaction costs that make…

Spending Bitcoin & Crypto is incredible easy in Switzerland. Our main Amazon alternative as well as the biggest food delivery network both accept crypto. You can even pay your taxes in some places. I know only few people who own crypto as pure speculation. Most are using too (at least from time to time)

Given the price of bitcoin skyrocketing, why would anyone spend it on anything. If you have 1BTC, and you think it's going to go up 100x still, then why would you ever spend it?

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#193

Post by DubiousPusher »

heckerhut wrote: post #190
DubiousPusher wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Older coins pay less fees than newer coins. And some circulated currency becomes more valuable because of its collectability or changes in its composite metals. But we do not say the system of currency itself has been rendered I fungible. I have ceded the technical point here several times. But for most practical purposes it is fungible because most users of bitcoin do not care which coin they get when they recieve…

The point everyone is trying to make is that because the bitcoins are technically not fungible they will, over time, also become practically not fungible due to, eg government intervention (AML, CO2, whatever). That is pretty much set in stone.

I doubt it. I would bet most people will not care.

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#194

Post by brbsix »

thesausageking wrote: post #183
brbsix wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure why I have been downvoted for this, as I haven't exactly said anything revelatory. However I just want to give an obligatory caution that this is a very contrived answer. In the real world it can be difficult, there are typically many inputs and outputs to a transaction (and we are rarely able to associate names with addresses). There exists an entire field devoted to this called blockch…

Your link contradicts what you're arguing for. Note that the block explorer only shows "total sent", "total received", and "final balance", not which specific coins. If your wallet has 10 BTC in it and you send someone 1 BTC, there is no way to know which one of the 10 Bitcoins was sent. It is literally not part of the implementation of Bitcoin.

I have Electrum open, with the "Coins" tab visible. I see a lengthy list of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) which I am referring to as coins. These are coins that I have received. I can very easily craft a transaction with specific coins. I can select the coins that my friend Bob sent me last year and send those specific coins to my friend Dylan. https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-spend-specific-utxos-in-e...

Admittedly that link was a terrible example. Block Explorer only shows the address associated with the transaction input but if you want to see the origin of specific coins regardless of whether an address is being reused, you can get the information from the "list of inputs" field in the raw transaction.

In this overly contrived example with single input transactions, if Dylan wants to recurse up tx inputs to the tx between Bob and me in order to verify that he received some of the same coins, he can do the following:

    uptx(){
        curl -sS "https://api.blockcypher.com/v1/btc/main/txs/$1" | jq -r .inputs[0].prev_hash
    }

    uptx "$(uptx f57cd4acc4b67d819f78d6cd7f17d1dded436735a6c7765afe40269581d2098a)"
    > 32c8f56bbee2b79f71b285697f3b41990091ddc37b667aeb4cb83c1d7be2a847

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#195

Post by skohan »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #182
skohan wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit different. Yes it's true that, for instance, if a pallet of USD with sequential serial numbers went missing, the FBI would probably knock on your door if you tried to put some of them in the bank. But as far as I know, if those dollars made it into circulation and you obtained them by legal means, it doesn't become illegal for you to spend them.

It's not that different though. At times there are dollars which have become not fungible. We don't say this makes the whole system not fungible. Because in most transactions, most of the time, people don't distinguish between the units of exchange. In some highly technical way, is the medium not fungible? Sure. Just as in prison exchange of cigarettes there might be someone who won't take Parliaments and someone els…

Fungibility is not a binary, it's on a continuum. A dollar bill is almost 100% fungible, with some exceptions as you have mentioned. A dollar token (i.e. the number in your bank account) is basically 100% fungible.

Bitcoins are far less fungible. If you can look at all the transactions which have occurred in the past on a given token, and retroactively decide it is unfit for exchange, this is categorically different than saying you can put a dollar bill through the washer and make it unusable.

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#196

Post by herbst »

Closi wrote: post #181
herbst wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not at all. No limits, actually only spending the exact amount with no way of spending more. Yes there are modern banking solutions like this (we have instant transfers between banks with a comfortable QR scanning app just like google pay here in Switzerland) but this only works in Switzerland. For any international transfers we have to fall back to Swift transfers (slow) or credit cards (mentioned issue).

> No not at all. No limits, actually only spending the exact amount with no way of spending more. Yeah you can do that exactly with a debit card - just ask your bank to remove the spend limit and give you zero overdraft. Once you realise effectively you are describing a debit card with less options then suddenly it doesn't look like such a good feature.

What kind of payment gateway are we even talking about? Are you describing "Sofort/Klarna"? I am not aware of any europe wide/international payment providers based on your bank account that does what you describe without basing on SWIFT and therefore being everything but realtime.

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#197

Post by herbst »

bb88 wrote: post #192
herbst wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending Bitcoin & Crypto is incredible easy in Switzerland. Our main Amazon alternative as well as the biggest food delivery network both accept crypto. You can even pay your taxes in some places. I know only few people who own crypto as pure speculation. Most are using too (at least from time to time)

Given the price of bitcoin skyrocketing, why would anyone spend it on anything. If you have 1BTC, and you think it's going to go up 100x still, then why would you ever spend it?

If USD is only decreasing in value compared to CHF why would you not keep everything in CHF? Because you need money to live from and you likely need USD to spend.

I only partially care if it goes /2 or x100. Its still money

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#199

Post by bb88 »

herbst wrote: post #197
bb88 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the price of bitcoin skyrocketing, why would anyone spend it on anything. If you have 1BTC, and you think it's going to go up 100x still, then why would you ever spend it?

If USD is only decreasing in value compared to CHF why would you not keep everything in CHF? Because you need money to live from and you likely need USD to spend. I only partially care if it goes /2 or x100. Its still money

What if it goes to /100? /1000?

Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible

#200

Post by herbst »

bb88 wrote: post #199
herbst wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If USD is only decreasing in value compared to CHF why would you not keep everything in CHF? Because you need money to live from and you likely need USD to spend. I only partially care if it goes /2 or x100. Its still money

What if it goes to /100? /1000?

A little far fetched IMO, but meh. That could happen with any investment and bad luck.
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