> Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That's terrible.
You compared them, and your comparison was technically incorrect, so I pointed it out. Price discovery in new class of asset vs the premeditated inflation of a centrally managed fiat currency are different, but it was not I who nominated the two things to compare nor the two periods over which to compare them, nor made a technically incorrect statement about the result of such a comparison.
> Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that
A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. A simple observation that the inevitable fate of every flat currency that has ever existed has been demise would do so more strongly.
> You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works.
Giving me a source for a narrow singular slice of data on the bitcoin price does not negate or address the core point I made about the long term trend being dramatically upward, not allowing for cherry picked time window periods in which things did not align with that trend.
I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum.
Frankly I don't care if people like or dislike bitcoin, I'm simply sick of the lies, falsehoods, and other generally misleading junk that passes for information on it here. Perhaps I should attempt a technically correct assassination of the project simply so people who object on other grounds can at least avoid parroting flat abject falsehoods.
> If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead
In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.
>A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct.
Such as the tulip bulb? Or spices? There are very few things that have stored value in a long term fashion and that's because they are rare in nature (e.g. gold, silver). Bitcoin's value relies entirely on faith in the system that places arbitrary computational constraints on generating new units of currency. It is still a currency controlled by people.
>I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum.
It was not flatly wrong. You did not account for the fact that currency in a bank would have appreciated due to interest. It seems you lack a very basic understanding of how the current banking system works and have dedicated yourself to pump bitcoin rather than objectively compare it to the existing system.
>In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.
There has never been a case that wiped out all government currencies at once, which is what a 'massive sovereign debt bust' implies. Perhaps you meant something else and failed to convey it.
If you are referring to one currency collapsing, then usually what happens at this point is people just use currencies from other countries. Trading in commodities is a nightmare and would only be the result of massive global instability, in which case the bitcoin network would likely be taken down (or would fork several times) due to countries severing Internet connections.
> But the issue is that Bitcoin isn’t supposed to provide subjective value, it’s supposed to provide objective value; it’s literally supposed to be money.
Money's value is also subjective, I'm not sure what you think is objective about it.
Sounds like you're just trying to dodge the comparison.
> A currency has 3 objective functions: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It objectively fails the third test.
No. Value is subjective. I understand what you're saying, and for what ever its worth, I promise I don't sell old folks on crypto funds.
> Fine it's an investment, it's a bad one.
Good - we're on the same page. You have a value judgement. Don't pretend to be an authority on the subject beyond your _well heard_ opinion.
> The idea that you're buying into blockchain technology's future by owning bitcoin is like saying you're buying pets.com stock because you want to invest in TCP/IP
Yes, exactly. Money and industry turn out to be closely linked.
> What a pity that Bitcoin does not fit your criteria. Even bigger pity is that you refuse to consider your "valid" criteria as too shaped towards your wishes.
So the 'Bitcoin' token you've mentioned is fast and stable right? I should be able to pay for something in bitcoin in the grocery store on chain without the price fluctuating.
> Totally wrong! US Dollar seems to be perfect for your criteria of not being a Satoshi's designed currency.
OK? you've just proved my point exactly, then why these crypto tokens at all? All pointless.
> Bitcoin is not a viable currency. It's value is not anywhere near stable enough.
It can't go from zero to stable overnight. It has to start somewhere and gain stability over a long period of time.
> It's honestly incredible that you haven't even thought of the very first problem with using bitcoin as a currency.
You're behaving like a troll. There is an absolutely obvious objection to your prior sentence, but rather than see that, you pretend like it isn't the case, and attack me personally. You don't know me and you don't know my thinking.
You're also behaving as a troll because you've totally changed the topic instead of answering my direct objections to your prior comments.
I'm done talking to you. I assume your next comment will also be trollish, and I hope people see through it. But please just don't answer.
So? They can still be idiots. Idiocy does not have an age limit.
>> Inflation is measured in many ways, most often by looking at a basket of goods where the prices are relatively non-volatile.
Meaning you remove the items from the basket if it's price jump too much ? so if you tamper with the items in the basket you can project(pretend) that the inflation is not happening.?
>> using the USD/Bitcoin ratio as a yardstick for inflation seems very misguided, as Bitcoin is heavily speculated.
No it doesn't need to be a yardstick as Bitcoin is not yet in full circulation in the economy but it's growth indicates people are increasingly prioritising it over paper to store value.
Re: speculation, everything is a speculation, there are those who keep holding USD in cash and banks and keep speculating that the economic prophets will do the right thing to retain value in their chosen currency.
> Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand BTC.
I don’t think that’s true. I suspect it is more likely that you’ve given Bitcoin only a cursory study where you compared it to a very inefficient database, recognized that on-chain transactions are slow and expensive, energy-consumption is significant, and it isn’t as easy to spend as US dollars - and so you dismissed it as a fraud.
Everyone I know who eventually embraced Bitcoin, initially rejected the idea - myself included. It is not easy to appreciate the brilliance of Bitcoin unless you first understand the problem it is trying to solve.
Unfortunately few of us really understand what fiat money is and how it is created - or at least that was true before Bitcoin forced us all to investigate. One of the funniest implications of Bitcoin is that now every time the talking heads on CNBC or CNN mention US dollars, they now refer to it as fiat.
Bitcoin proponents call it the hardest money ever created. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is virtually impossible to debase. The supply of Bitcoin is predictable for the next 10 minutes or the next thousand years. No other currency has a predictable inflation policy. No other currency is resilient to the desires of centralized actors to manipulate the money supply.
Here is an exercise I like to do on any complex topic I don’t fully understand. I ask myself what the proponents know that I don’t know? (and vice versa, what do I know about the subject that the proponents don’t get?)
Here is a list of mostly billionaires who all hold and advocate for Bitcoin. Ask yourself, what do they know about Bitcoin that you don’t? Also, what do you know that they don’t which makes you so confident it is a scam?
Bitcoin Proponents:
Elon Musk, Barry Silbert, Mark Cuban, Michael Saylor, Mike Novogratz, Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss, Paul Tudor Jones, Tim Draper, Bill Miller, Stanley Drunkenmiller, Anthony Scaramucci, Jack Dorsey, Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg
Creating money with no collateral and lending it out is equivalent. Whether the banknotes are actually printed on paper or just digitally added to a ledger makes no difference.
> you claim to know better
Why yes, yes I do know better than people who don't know better. I cited George Reisman, for instance, as someone who does know better.
> Who do you think increased the housing prices?
Supply and demand.
> bitcoin prices have gone up
Because people think bitcoin is the currency of the future.
Speculators don't cause assets to rise in value. They are betting that the assets will rise in value. Big difference.
> At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation
You are completely ignorant. I'm not saying that in a mean way, I mean it in the purest sense possible: You have no idea what you are talking about.
According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems."
Bitcoin is obviously a speculative asset whose value goes up when inflation is low and people have money to spend on speculative assets. The fact that we use 2.3% of our nation's electricity on it is unjustifiable.
> If Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, then fiat currencies are even worse.
Fiat wasn't mentioned here, unless you want to argue that I purposely specified US dollars - I did so because of easy numbers.
Just because one way of handling currency sucks, it doesn't mean it justifies crypto, which sucks but way worse (because it can be abused by entire population instead of several hundred governments).
> Bitcoin is one way to side-step this debasement.
It isn't. It's not being used for payments. People hold it (or, to be fully crypto-compatible - HODL).
Its network is slow, we all know it's 7 TPS.
It requires too much processing power.
And the list goes on.
It's being used as a Ponzi scheme, the difference between crypto and fiat is that regular mortals have access to scam too, not only the governments.
You didn't say a word about how the value is being added to BTC, but I guess that's what your fiat comparison was about. I'm sorry, but you sound like regular crypto-bro who doesn't actually grasp how things work but thinks they do.
> The same is true of the stock market, or regular “fiat” currency.
No, it's not. Stocks are priced at the present value of future cash flows generated by the underlying assets.
Fiat currency has no value in and of itself. Foreign exchange is essentially determined by the difference in interest rates between countries (and investors' beliefs as to which way those interest rates will go in the future). Those interest rates are (indirectly) related to what is produced by each country.
Bitcoin is just plain make-believe.
> The fact that people have been willing to pay so much for US dollars or British pounds or Japanese yen has meant a lot in this world.
People also gave Bernie Madoff ~$65 billion dollars and it was all make-believe as well.
> Isn’t it justified to awe at the power of a decentralized currency?
Decentralization for decentralization's sake isn't inherently valuable. Or at least I wouldn't argue that to be an axiomatic truth. The burden of proof is on the bitcoin bulls.
> but so far Bitcoin has been doing OK as a store of value
No, it hasn't. A store of value is supposed to be stable, it's about volatility. By that same reasoning you could argue that Apple or Tesla stock, or even the stock market in general, is a great store of value. But nobody would ever call it that, because it is far too volatile on a daily basis.
Trying to argue that a vague long-term uptrend in prices makes something a store of value is just more intellectually dishonest cope by cryptobros who are desperate to defend this useless technology.
> it argues that the entire technology field is worthless and cannot be used for any practical purpose
Which I concur with. Cryptocoins are worthless, the idea Bitcoin has a market cap of $5-6 hundred billion is absurd, and maybe the increasing fed funds rate etc. will pop this speculative bubble more than it already has (Bitcoin had the even more absurd market cap of $1 trillion toward the end of last year).
Why is a Bitcoin worth anything? I know why my M1 Mac is worth something, I know why a box of raisins is worth something, I know why a bar of gold is worth something. I see no worth in a Bitcoin. I ask why it has any worth and the bag holders cast around looking for an equivalent, and only seem to find that dollars have been unmoored from value for half a century and the response is it's like the dollar (of course the dollar is implicitly, not explicitly like before 1971, backed by tens of thousands of tons of bullion gold among other things, but that's another tangent...)
> Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.
I think you should spend some time reading https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf before making factually incorrect statements. Bitcoin is only viewed as a store of value today because it no longer can be utilized for its original purpose. It's a complete failure in that regard.
> You seem pretty accustomed to economics. Can you explain how exactly or why would anyone buy any items (that's what currencies are for after all) using a deflationary currency?
This is identical to arguing: Why would anyone buy computers when they are getting cheaper every year. At some point you make a choice where your preference for owning a computer is greater than your preference to save money.
> So actually, in my view, BTC as a currency is already failed. No one will be eager to buy online (perform an actual exchange) when he can buy the same items using USD, because BTC will possibly have a higher value tomorrow. While the USD almost certainly will not.
Gold is deflationary. When gold was the primary currency for the world commerce was very vibrant. Gold not being currency is a fairly recent development.
People currently purchase things online with bitcoins when they could use dollars but choose to use bitcoins. I think it's very early to write off bitcoins as a failed currency.
> Why should anyone care about your opinion on btc? You don’t even seem to understand why a currency should be scarce (in the economic sense).
And why should anyone care about yours? You seem to be operating under the extreme naiveté of someone who believes that the massive presence of bandwagoning speculators, would-be manipulators like the Elon Musk/Winklevoss billionaire cheerleaders, Chinese miners buying massive amount of asics, various schemes such as Tether, are irrelevant to Bitcoin. A currency is subject to real world conditions and influence by real-world actors. It's not a system that can exist only perfectly in a vacuum.
> This would be a good opportunity for you to reflect on why USD are decreasing in value while BTC are increasing.
You can say the same of $TSLA, $GME, or any other meme of the moment. Why did BTC increase in value in 2018- until it didn't?
> No. The market does that. I'm not sure why you think this is different than how the value of, say, a dollar represents.
Well most markets aren’t made up of 95% fictional trades, according to an ETF that attempted to list two years ago.
> You misunderstand. Its not that direct. Central banks print money used to fund things like government loans (ie bonds), among other things.
You misunderstand. Central banks don’t print money, they set reserve rates, interest rates and they occasionally purchase and sell bonds. Nothing more.
> You're misinformed. Show me one way that bitcoin has lead to new kinds of corruption. I would be very surprised if you could name a single thing and have some credible information about it.
Ransomware and tether (unless you count the liberty reserve and even that was nowhere close).
>What would have to happen for you to change your mind ?
It's not about changing minds - it's about evidence. There's ample evidence BTC is simply repeating the flaws of discarded money systems, and they were discarded because they are terrible. Unless BTC addresses these flaws there is little sense in painting a pig.
Mankind has learned that a money system that cannot adjust to shocks is a terrible idea. So first BTC needs this ability, which would make it not BTC. If it cannot at least meet minimum requirements, then it fails. You might as well argue we should trade tulip bulbs as currency if you're going to ignore modern evidence.
The real question is why do you clutch BTC given centuries of evidence and widespread professional opinion that it fails at the things a money system needs to be modern? Why do you insist on repeating flaws that have been conclusively demonstrated to fail?
I gave you ample phrases to google and learn from. If you still claim BTC is somehow immune from all its flaws that is your choice.
You compared them, and your comparison was technically incorrect, so I pointed it out. Price discovery in new class of asset vs the premeditated inflation of a centrally managed fiat currency are different, but it was not I who nominated the two things to compare nor the two periods over which to compare them, nor made a technically incorrect statement about the result of such a comparison.
> Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that
A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. A simple observation that the inevitable fate of every flat currency that has ever existed has been demise would do so more strongly.
> You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works.
Giving me a source for a narrow singular slice of data on the bitcoin price does not negate or address the core point I made about the long term trend being dramatically upward, not allowing for cherry picked time window periods in which things did not align with that trend.
I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum.
Frankly I don't care if people like or dislike bitcoin, I'm simply sick of the lies, falsehoods, and other generally misleading junk that passes for information on it here. Perhaps I should attempt a technically correct assassination of the project simply so people who object on other grounds can at least avoid parroting flat abject falsehoods.
> If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead
In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.
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