Preface: Bitcoin is a neat idea (decentralized currency), but it’s not practical at scale.
Reply: To be fair, the US’ currency has no intrinsic value either. Prior to the removal of the gold standard, your $20 bill was backed by exactly $20 worth of gold in some vault. Mid-1970s, the gold standard was stopped and the US’ currency became “fiat”; it only has value because the US says it does. Should the US’ economy collapse, the bills become literally worthless.
It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison.
It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison.
Absolutely not. There's nothing "fiat" about Bitcoin. Fiat means by decree—there's no Bitcoin nation or organization that decreed that Bitcoin is valuable.
There's no authority that says what a Bitcoin is worth; the market decides.
Nowhere did I say Bitcoin was fiat. I said it’s like fiat in that there’s no store of physical value behind it like the gold standard had. Bitcoin has a value of $x because the market says it has a value of $x. And the USD has a value of $y because the government says it has a value of $y. But on the gold standard, a $20 bill corresponded to a literal $20 of gold - a backing currency.
Despite what Bitcoin proponents want to believe, there is no intrinsic value in Bitcoin - hence why its “exchange rate” fluctuates so much. When a new block is mined, ~$20k of gold don’t magically get added to a vault - because there’s no backing currency.
The fact that Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value and that it’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally is valuable.
It can't be inflated and it can't be counterfeited. It's not subject to political pressure or the whims of a government.
To the extent that anything has intrinsic value, since value is subjective at the end of the day, Bitcoin certainly does, especially now as we have Great Depression levels of unemployment during a global pandemic. The more the global reserve currency is inflated—that would be the trillions and trillions of dollars that have been printed in the past year—the more valuable Bitcoin becomes.
Reply: To be fair, the US’ currency has no intrinsic value either. Prior to the removal of the gold standard, your $20 bill was backed by exactly $20 worth of gold in some vault. Mid-1970s, the gold standard was stopped and the US’ currency became “fiat”; it only has value because the US says it does. Should the US’ economy collapse, the bills become literally worthless.
It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison.
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