241–250 of 350 posts
Honestly, this is just repulsive. Crypto has brought nearly zero benefits to society and has made income inequality even worse. Not to mention the environmental impact. I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.
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But how much of the price of gold is its intrinsic worth? A fake gold ring made of some alloy can look and feel almost exactly the same as a real one, but as soon as you find out that it isn't real gold it suddenly loses 99% of its value - maybe it's not magnetic or it is slightly the wrong shade, but the value of gold isn't assigned for not reacting to magnets. Only 11% of gold is for industrial purposes, so I think…
> its intrinsic worth There is no such thing as "instrinsic worth". There's only supply and demand. Why there is demand for a certain good is a many-colored and complicated affair.
I couldn’t care less about crypto, but just for fun I bought 1 BTC in 2016. Still own it, and likely will never sell, but boy I wish I bought a lot more instead of my index funds, skipping one monthly contribution in VTI back then would have mostly set me up for life instead of just having a nice but inconsequential $100k bonus in my portfolio :-) Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (m…
they said exactly that in 2018, 2021, and 2022 too
It’s way higher than I ever thought it’d be. I sold mine at $800 so maybe I’ve got some sour grapes here, but all this reminds me of the book “Devil Take The Hindmost.”
Is it really that intellectually honest to compare tulips, which can be grown everywhere, by anyone, with "something" that has been designed, on purpose, to have a diminishing issuance rate?
Satoshi made it very clear, in the very first Bitcoin block, that Bitcoin was a middle finger to politicians ever printing more money to bail out the banks.
I see Bitcoin has the "anti tulip".
From what I remember, the amount of BTC is finite, so eventually we will run out of new BTCs, and by then, most will be held by big institutions and some individuals who didn't want to sell, and it will become yet another luxury commodity like diamonds or gold. Hence, the entire premise of "Bitcoin is the future of money" is kind of stupid, unless it's money for the ultrarich/lucky, because it's not available to the common folks.
And even if it was available to the common folks, how do you expect to live in a world where your currency changes value drastically from day to day? Isn't that a characteristic of a defaulted state/currency?
But let's say it's not the money of the future, but rather a speculative investment that is "not tied to greedy institutions". How does one sell 10 BTC and cash it out, bypassing the "greedy banks"? Last time I checked, most reputable exchanges are somewhat regulated, and in any way, getting a sudden $1M won't go unnoticed by the government.
So yes, I am failing to understand the premise of bitcoin. It seems to fail on both as the currency of the future, as well as unregulated investment instrument.
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Bitcoin is actually just a bunch of numbers. Whatever value you think you're storing with it is always denominated in fiat which is very ironic.
All of our assets are denominated with depreciating dollars. It’s nice because our assets always look like they’re going up. Of course a big part of that is just the dollar going down.
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Fungibility is one of the important properties of money. So a non-fungible token has less ability to accrue monetary value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Properties
This is hysterical because four years ago everyone was clamoring on about how the non-fungability of NFTs was the secret sauce to why they’d accrue monetary value.
Some NFTs/art might appreciate in value, but most NFTs/"art" are worthless on the open market.
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There is a lot of utility in bypassing the credit card company cartel which have been abusing their position to create a pseudo government to shut down or kill the value of (maybe to make them easier to buy out?) targeted businesses. Or in some cases impose the christian ideology of the owners upon entire countries, most recently japan.
Ah yes, I remember when BTC was going to supplant Visa/Mastercard... 12 years ago.
It would be more ideal to just regulate the credit card companies properly but that appears to be beyond current government bodies.
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I'm not sure people care much about the debt repayment thing? If I rack up a bill at a bar, I can technically force them to accept a sack of pennies as repayment, but most people use digital payments like credit cards. At that point it doesn't really matter if my bank account holds USD, GBP, BTC or any other liquid asset, as long as the payment infrastructure can handle any necessary conversions.
There are no assets for digital currencies so the words you're using to describe it are ontologically nonsensical. It's numbers, binary sequences, in databases. The only thing that makes it all work is your belief and faith that the numbers mean something other than the electricity and infrastructure necessary to maintain the databases. The only real assets in the entire scheme are the computers and power plants with…
that is why Bitcoin is valuable. It’s valuable because it stores value with all the important properties I listed above. Those properties are intrinsic to Bitcoin. Say that for any other asset.
If you’re worried about civilization crashing and Bitcoin becoming worthless. Fair enough, you should diversify into guns and toilet paper.
I'm failing to understand the proposition behind bitcoin. From what I remember, the amount of BTC is finite, so eventually we will run out of new BTCs, and by then, most will be held by big institutions and some individuals who didn't want to sell, and it will become yet another luxury commodity like diamonds or gold. Hence, the entire premise of "Bitcoin is the future of money" is kind of stupid, unless it's money f…
It is "digital gold" at this point.