451–455 of 455 posts
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Gold pays for that step. No one sensible would prefer the gold UX compared to Bitcoin. It beats it in every way other than 'shiny!'
Gold works when the internet is down :)
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…
Who says BTC isn't used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they're keeping the lights on somehow. It's being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It's being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There's far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold. It a…
In some niches, BTC is used a lot.
The value if BTC is primarily driven by day-trader hype, IMHO.
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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
If you're looking for a commodity to have trade or exchange value, then it must be tradeable or exchangeable. That's the notion of "inalienable" as used in the US Declaration of Independence: rights which cannot be alienated (separated) from the individual posessing them. Life, liberty, happiness being the three used in that document.
This doesn't mean undeniable, and there might be some value which can be extracted through threats of denial: "your money or your life".
And there are aspects of value which can be exchanged though the good itself doesn't move: title, copyright, and patent rights might be three such of these. If I transer you land title, the land itself doesn't move, but the claim to usefruct from it does.
A hypothetically nontransferable, non-appropriable technical asset is still subject to claims if a superior right or denial of access to that asset may still be claimed.
And in general, a currency which is used to facilitate trade should in general be portable, readily recognisable, divisible, durable, and homogeneous, all attributes William Stanley Jevons proposed in 1875:
https://archive.org/details/moneyexchange00jevorich/page/30/...
(He also claimed money required intrinsic value, which appears to be an error. Rather, intrinsic value exchanges for trust within the financial system.)
That said, an interesting suggestion.
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Taxes aren't why money generally works (money emerges naturally in human societies), but taxes are what makes national currencies work. If you don't pay your taxes, you don't get to participate in the local economy for very long. Men with guns will eventually come to your home and take your stuff and/or take your freedom. You can't even do direct barter without cash without incurring a tax obligation in the US, https…
> The simple truth is that every government is at its core the biggest, baddest gang in the land. Were. I don't know if you subscribe to the political analysis of Adam Curtis but in the past two decades governments have been passing their power to private banks, corporations, QANGOs and "non majoritarian" think-tanks like it's a hot potato. The new breed of politicians are not statesmen but revolving-door temporary m…
Based on this statement, the currency need not be physical. It sounds like all that’s really necessary is to moderate the money supply (something that is already done in a federal reserve banking system).
What am I missing? Is there some other aspect of physical currency that makes it advantageous?
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> The simple truth is that every government is at its core the biggest, baddest gang in the land. Were. I don't know if you subscribe to the political analysis of Adam Curtis but in the past two decades governments have been passing their power to private banks, corporations, QANGOs and "non majoritarian" think-tanks like it's a hot potato. The new breed of politicians are not statesmen but revolving-door temporary m…
> Physical currency is an absolutely vital component of a stable economy. Its very lack of instantaneous fluidity (it relative inconvenience) means it acts like a capacitor to stabilise markets if you can manage circulation and interest. Moreover, governments have a strict monopoly on that, and physical currencies can take on many new guises with modern cash technology. Abandoning that would be suicide. Governments a…