Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
Bitcoin is fiat money, too
201–210 of 355 posts
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#202Fundamentally, Bitcoin is software eating the Fed-Bank-Retail ecosystem. The Fed governance is replaced by code. The banking utility is replaced by miners. I think the march of bitcoin is actually a better example of how AI is taking over the world. People in AI are fascinated by AGI - but the bitcoin ecosystem is actually a real world example of how AI will take over the world. Specifically, the march of AI won't ha…
>"People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks." Bitcoin only has totally clear monetary policy because it's increase of the money supply is entirely predetermined: It is created at an ever decreasing rate approaching a limit. The result of this certainty in monetary policy is a…
That's like saying the decreasing price of hard disk space discourages people from purchasing it.
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#203Fundamentally, Bitcoin is software eating the Fed-Bank-Retail ecosystem. The Fed governance is replaced by code. The banking utility is replaced by miners. I think the march of bitcoin is actually a better example of how AI is taking over the world. People in AI are fascinated by AGI - but the bitcoin ecosystem is actually a real world example of how AI will take over the world. Specifically, the march of AI won't ha…
>"People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks." Bitcoin only has totally clear monetary policy because it's increase of the money supply is entirely predetermined: It is created at an ever decreasing rate approaching a limit. The result of this certainty in monetary policy is a…
I don't get why people are obsessed with inflation. It is not the only thing that is required to stimulate an economy. On the other hand for majority of developing nations, it is a sink hole that eats their earnings alive. You can still use a deflationary currency just like an inflationary one. Just use satoshis to track bitcoin increments. I'm sure if Zimbabwe was using bitcoin, they wouldn't have ended up in the shit hole they were a few years back.
Think about it: for every dollar you earn, the government can print its own one dollar to basically halve your earnings. Why would anyone want such a thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to invest in stocks/real estate and other inflation resistant things to beat inflation. You can hold your earnings in it and you are already beating inflation.
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
This actually happened to Ethereum. They ended up forking the blockchain to Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
its worth noting that the fork wasn't actually because of a bug in Ethereum, but because of a bug in a smart contract (the DAO). Ethereum itself worked perfectly. Bugs do exist in Ethereum and Bitcoin all the time, but they can almost always be fixed without changing the underlying protocol, so the clients just need updated. The fork happened because the community decided the smart contract in question was important…
Correct, with the exception of a few diehards who decided beating the 'blind adherence to contracts' drum was worth trying to stay on the initial fork and buy up the useless 'original' fork.
It's* also worth noting that currencies like Ethereum actually fork all the time. The only worthwhile ones are the forks with mass support, which in Eth's case is usually the latest one supported by the foundation/Vitalik and in Bitcoin's case are Core and Cash (the forks supported by Blockstream and the community fork centered around scaling the block limit, respectively)
Agree with the article title, but the 'fiat' in question is community fiat.
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't you be creating your own fork? A fork of one where peers would then reject every message from you? No man is an island, unless he wants to completely devalue his bitcoin.
They wouldn’t reject messages from you so long as they are valid on their nodes.
Right and thus consensus exists. And that consensus consolidates to a single set of rules (and any major deviations result in forks).
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#206Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
Same number of people watching netflix in 90's over the internet :)
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#207Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
Do you remember the multi-million dollar pizza? Today, nobody wants to be the thousand dollar toilet paper guy. I believe most people buy it as an investment, with no intention to every make an actual purchase with it. What gives it value then? What will happen with the price when there are no new people who wants to buy bitcoin?
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks." Bitcoin only has totally clear monetary policy because it's increase of the money supply is entirely predetermined: It is created at an ever decreasing rate approaching a limit. The result of this certainty in monetary policy is a…
I don't get why people are obsessed with inflation. It is not the only thing that is required to stimulate an economy. On the other hand for majority of developing nations, it is a sink hole that eats their earnings alive. You can still use a deflationary currency just like an inflationary one. Just use satoshis to track bitcoin increments. I'm sure if Zimbabwe was using bitcoin, they wouldn't have ended up in the sh…
Significant inflation is obviously a bad thing. Zimbabwe or Venezuela prime examples. But being deflationary where the currency increases in value obviously causes a disincentive for spending that currency. You are encouraged to buy and hold it because it will be worth more in the future relative to the cost of goods, services, and other fist currencies.
Even just minor deflation is disastrous for economies because if there is 3% deflation, you could get 100% of what was generally typical GDP growth for developed countries without spending any money to produce anything. This encourages everyone to be risk averse towards spending money on anything at all.
Thus, monetary policy over the past century has settled on a steady but small amount of inflation as the ideal policy for balancing economic growth and unemployment.
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if it's a trough or if it's a conclusion. It's been 8 years now and the use cases for Bitcoin / CC haven't changed. You can buy illegal things and an incredibly small number of real things you can also buy with real money. There is nothing you can do with Bitcoin / CC that you can't do with real money. Nothing you can do that you couldn't do 5 years ago. Nothing new on the horizon. The only reason Bitcoi…
Illegal things are real. Real money is in your control, money on an account not necessarily.
A bunch of numbers stored in your SSD are no more real than some other numbers stored in a bank's mainframe.
If I wanted a store of value that's really real and keep it under my control, I would much rather store up on gold, canned food, and bullets. Even among these three, only one (food) has any intrinsic value and everything else is social convention.
Re: Bitcoin is fiat money, too
#210Doesn't a decentralized ledger have intrinsic value though? The fact that Bitcoin's value is not based on trust in a third party (a government), but essentially on the laws of nature (mathematics) seems to give it actual value.