Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by Closi » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 12:48 PM UTC

herbst wrote: post #196

Closi wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well from the consumer side it seems to work pretty well, my bank (Monzo) has wise.com integration and it all works seamlessly.

But now we are specifically just talking about international payments where you explicitly don’t want any currency conversion or buyers protection, and the use case is just getting farcically narrow.

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

#202

Post by Nevermark » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #195

DubiousPusher wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not whether people could start judging every satoshi differently, it is whether they do.

Generally, to a percentage very close to 100%, people are not doing that.

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

#203

Post by Nevermark » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #30

trimbo wrote: post #14

Bitcoin is not a collectible any more than individual gold bars are collectibles. A collectible can be compared in value to another collectible of the same type. I might want a 1979 Dave Kingman card because I'm nostalgic for Dave "Kong" Kingman. Others will buy the Dave Kingman card to sell it to people like me, but we all give the card value based on its condition, the player, the year, etc. But a Steve Macko card…

You are equating different cards to different bitcoins. That's not the point of the article. In the context of the article there are a limited number of say babe Ruth cards. They are all the same. Bitcoin is the babe Ruth card. Other cards represent other coins. Arguing if bitcoin is money is like arguing if a ferrari testarosa is a car. It clearly is,but at the same time it's not a terribly useful car. Sure bitcoin…

Ah thanks for clearing that up for me. But comparing all the Babe Ruth cards to Bitcoin makes even less sense.

2,100 trillion satoshis is qualitatively different than something with only tens, hundreds or thousands of units.

Not to mention that every Babe Ruth card is still judged individually on its relative value to other Babe Ruth cards. Differentiated by its condition for instance.

I just don't see that comparison making any sense.