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Gold's shiny and has industrial applications. What's Bitcoin's inherent value floor?
Doing everything the majority of the economy of gold does (industrial uses can be ignored) better, except being shiny. If 'shiny' is your real argument then reconcile Pokemon Cards without ruining your argument.
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you know how to use google right?
Yep and I can't find any reference to the bitcoin core client ever having anything to do with poker.
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Gold is the world's best physical commodity to use as a store of value -- it doesn't degrade or tarnish, is easily molded into coins or other symbols, melts easily, has a highly fixed supply (synthesizing it is prohibitively expensive), and (now) increasingly is not tied to an industrial output so can weather GDP fluctuations. So in a battle Royale of all commodities, gold wins. That said, all commodities are affecte…
> a highly fixed supply (synthesizing it is prohibitively expensive) This is what gives Bitcoin much of its value as well. > Gold is conceptually very similar to bitcoin, except gold can't be forked or copied This touches on another thing that makes Bitcoin valuable - consensus. Enough people agree to use it that it becomes the defacto standard. Bitcoin (and Ether to a lesser extent) are the “rough consensus and runn…
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> The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. That is not true. The US isn't forcing anyone to use the dollar, e.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-acceptin...
With sanctions against Russia the US is actually doing the opposite. Forcing them not to use the USD.
> The world has never seen an economic phenomenon like crypto. There is no historical analogous technology trend or investment craze that comes close to capturing the sustained and frenzied momentum of crypto that has engulfed so many and that will continue to do. Never say never. Greed and speculation have a long and robust history. This crypto speculation and greed reminds of of the price of tulips. [1] During that…
Do bubbles, after popping, collect and reconstitute themselves in analogy or reality? Tulips certainly didn't. Bitcoin really is a slow motion multiplicitis analogy to your "muh Tulips."
There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…
there is so much soft-corruption pressure and old fashioned lobbying from Bitcoin kingpins to insinuate BTC into various nations' fiat pools. Why is this, when making bitcoin into fiat undermines the entire point of bitcoin. Well obviously, on the superficial level there's plain old greed. But on a more existential level, bitcoiners are acknowledging that proof of work will lose to proof of lead, in any kind of direc…
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Most people did not have a car in the early 1900s. Not everyone can go into space today, it doesn't scale. BTC may have a maximum number of transactions today but many are using bitcoin and the big advantage is it doesn't matter how much you move you pay the same transaction fee. It is not ready for micro payments but works great for larger payments.
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This is well said, I’m gonna borrow that - “crypto is like a 0 calorie apple.” This matters. Even gold, at least I can wear it and display my wealth. You can’t even display your crypto wealth like that. It is entirely lacking in any “real” value. Idea: luxury tshirt made out of a $5 white tee with a wallet QR code slapped on the front showing off the balance of the shirt. Or a ring. Crypto fine jewelry.
This is not deep. This is you getting confused about how money works. Nothing you are realizing applies specially to specific money like gold or Bitcoin - it applies to all money and frankly it makes little sense.
I understand cash has this same issue. Assets do not - they provide an actual value to the physical world - which is what my point was in the above statement. A crypto t shirt can still provide value as a t shirt, regardless of the value of the coins it holds. I’ll admit it’s a reach, but just to illustrate the point.
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Oh totally agree - someone can just pull a necklace right off you. I was just surfacing the point that at least gold does has some value on its own as a status symbol - there is a market for jewelry outside of gold as a transfer protocol. An bitcoin wallet without ability to transfer it is just some used up memory, it doesn’t have any value on its own. See coins going to 0 when exchanges close their doors. All the ba…
> someone can just pull a necklace right off you I wonder if there's an argument to be made that nothing is of any real value unless there's also some risk of losing it. e.g. you drop your apple in a gutter, or someone takes it from you, or it turns out to have a nice fat worm inside it
Life, for example, is extremely valuable. Everyone loses it, but there’s no getting it back. If you lose the apple, you can probably get another relatively easily, unless we’re talking a post-apocalypse situation…
I have a dumb question that's probably user error on my part, but I can't seem to find a simple answer for: shouldn't BitCoin transaction fees (and thereby price) eventually stabilize to the cost of electricity plus hardware? And if so, then why would price fluctuate? It seems like there are 2 options: 1) Cryptocurrency transactions cost less than the cost of electricity: a market will form farming the price discrepa…
I don't understand what mental model you're using for the relationship between price, fees, and mining costs. Bitcoin fees have nothing to do with the price or the cost of mining; fees are basically proportional to (transaction throughput demand) / (fixed transaction throughput supply). I've seen various reports saying the cost to mine 1 BTC is between $8,000 and $13,000 so miners are still profitable. Note that mini…
I think it is vaguely accurate to say that fees and mining costs are linked, *however*, currently the coinbase block reward is a bigger deal. Example: most recent block https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/743055 created 6.25 bitcoin out of thin air, plus 0.186 bitcoin from all its fees. In the future, when fees make up a larger share of this, miners will indeed start to get income from fees. Then, we will see an interesting dynamic where automatic difficulty adjustments and competition between miners entering and exiting the market will result in miners electricity costs aligning with bitcoin transaction fees. In other words, every unit of value that goes into a bitcoin transaction will result in that much value being spent by a miner on their electricity bill.