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Bitcoin Is Time

dergigi.com

261–270 of 1001 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#261
post #26
post #8

Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.

In the winter I ride my bike down streets lined with cars idling because their owners don't want to ride in the cold for a few minutes. In a way I appreciate bitcoin for its absurd and unambiguous wastefulness. It's sort of the perfect expression of consumerism, destroying the precious and irreplaceable earth for something immediately disposed of.

> It's sort of the perfect expression of consumerism

On the other hand, the finite supply/deflationary aspect of it is also the perfect antithesis of consumerism, in that it favors hoarding (spending less) instead of spending your paycheck as you get it.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money. Contrary to the Bitcoin crow I don't spend my days thinking about it so my argument may seem weak. You mention bitcoin being 'the best form of money'. Assuming there is a hierarchy of forms of money, from what I understand the main advantage of Bitcoin is that Government can not manipulate its quantity. I wonder if a…

I would say that it shouldn't be the role of a government to govern over money. The economy is very complicated. There are no models that can predict the output of changing its parameters. It wasn't possible before to have the properties in money that we have with bitcoin (a gold standard was easily removable by a powerful government). The current central banking system is an experiment as much as anything before it…

> (1 btc is always 1/21 million of the monetary base)

Why is that good? Why should I, if I have 1 bitcoin, always have ownership of a fixed proportion of the entire societal monetary base?

This seems like a great deal for someone who has a bitcoin, and a terrible situation for new workers and the economy as a whole. If the economy expands, your fixed proportion of the monetary base sees you profit off the backs of others for nothing more than sitting on currency. Not investing, not even speculating, just sitting on it.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#263

HN comments on articles like this remind me of a fun t-shirt quote: There are 10 kinds of people in the world. The ones who understand binary and the ones that do not. You can obviously replace binary with bitcoin :). The ones who do not get bitcoin, will continue to not get bitcoin.

Yes you can replace "binary" with "bitcoin", if you absolutely don't understand the joke, at all.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#264
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to share your Econo101 knowledge? I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money.

For Bitcoin specifically. You can use a different token backed up by Bitcoin, but the actual implementation has these issues. Transaction rates - Artificially kept low to profit miners. Privacy - Every Bitcoin transactions is on a public blockchain. Transaction fees - Using Bitcoin for even one transaction a day gets expensive. Online only - Unlike cash only works with network access. Conformation Time - Failing to w…

First off, thank you for making fair criticisms. Unfortunately some of your information is old.

You don’t need a bitcoin backed token, lightning does it.

Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. In fact most the vast majority of the time bitcoin has excess capacity.

Privacy- this is a legitimate concern but it is improving, slowly. Taoroot and Lightning are both privacy improvements.

So your daily transactions aren't meant for bitcoin. A distributed ledger that replicates all data globally for eternity is not an appropriate method for recording coffee purchases. Though I have done it. Bitcoin makes sense for settlement, and lightning is appropriate for coffee.

That said, I regularly clear bitcoin transactions for $1 or less in fees, and it is cheaper then every other form of payment in the world. You may think a SWIFT transaction is “free”, but its merely the cost is hidden. And don’t forget the inflation tax, that is a global wealth tax on any money held in an inflating currency. So compared to that, $1 to send $100 is cheap.

Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is.

Lightning allows speed without double spend problems. Personally when moving large (for me) amounts of money I font mind waiting an hour for the confirmations. I certainly won’t trust a payment without them.

But bitcoin is voluntary, it doesn't have to be perfect in every regard.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#265
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're freely giving away money (either in the form of null transactions or putting money into mining) just to secure value that you're holding, you've clearly mispriced the asset you're trying to secure!

If you put money in a savings account with interest below inflation, just to secure the value that you're holding, did you misprice the value? Or for example if you buy gold and then pay someone to watch it for you, does that mean you mispriced it?

Both of those examples (holding money in savings account, holding paper PMs) are ultimately about liquidity, I don't see how bitcoin relates.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#266
post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

From the article:

> they [the central banks] can expand the money supply to keep the system propped up.

They have to expand money supply to keep the value of the currencies stable as long as most money is not spent. The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money.

By which force do central banks have to keep increasing the money supply once people start spending? There is no reason to do so and thus no reason for fiat currencies to collapse.

It's more likely that they increase interest rates when people start spending again, and thus reduce supply and as a consequence, keep the value of money stable.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#268
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of gold is held for speculation. If that use case went away it'd be effectively worthless.

Wrong. It it fell 50%, many industrial uses of gold would resume. I'd have 4 gold fountain pens instead of 2.

Lol I stand corrected :)

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order. Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other…

> Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money. To be a money it somehow has to. What is the value of a dollar ? The set of goods you can buy with a dollar. As long as the value of a bitcoin is expressed in another currency that is weird to call it a money.

The value of every currency is expressed in other currencies. How else would you do it? Are you saying there is nothing in existence which can really be considered "money" except maybe the US dollar?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#270
post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone…

Why are you so excited about a really inefficient clearing house? We already have those.
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