Bloomberg Columnist: Bitcoin is Part of a Real Monetary Revolution (bnnbloomberg.ca) 152
In an eloquent essay, Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson argues that "We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent."
The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it...
Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin....
What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value. Not only high-net-worth individuals but also tech companies are investing. In July, Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, directed his company to hold part of its cash reserves in alternative assets. By September, MicroStrategy's corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million. Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month. PayPal just announced that American users can buy, hold and sell bitcoins in their PayPal wallets. This process of adoption has much further to run...
Some economists, such as my friend Ken Rogoff, welcome the demise of cash because it will make the management of monetary policy easier and organized crime harder. But it will be a fundamentally different world when all our payments are recorded, centrally stored, and scrutinized by artificial intelligence — regardless of whether it is Amazon's Jeff Bezos or China's Xi Jinping who can access our data... Rather than seeking to create a Chinese-style digital dollar, Joe Biden's nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system — which, after all, was originally designed to be less centralized and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less-free societies.
Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin....
What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value. Not only high-net-worth individuals but also tech companies are investing. In July, Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, directed his company to hold part of its cash reserves in alternative assets. By September, MicroStrategy's corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million. Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month. PayPal just announced that American users can buy, hold and sell bitcoins in their PayPal wallets. This process of adoption has much further to run...
Some economists, such as my friend Ken Rogoff, welcome the demise of cash because it will make the management of monetary policy easier and organized crime harder. But it will be a fundamentally different world when all our payments are recorded, centrally stored, and scrutinized by artificial intelligence — regardless of whether it is Amazon's Jeff Bezos or China's Xi Jinping who can access our data... Rather than seeking to create a Chinese-style digital dollar, Joe Biden's nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system — which, after all, was originally designed to be less centralized and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less-free societies.
Well then, if Bloomberg likes it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like Bitcoin has jumped the shark and it's time for smart money to cash out. The pump is upon us, time to get out before the massive dump.
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Looks like Bitcoin has jumped the shark and it's time for smart money to cash out. The pump is upon us, time to get out before the massive dump.
Shortly before the subprime loan bubble burst, I listened to a real live economist waxing rhapsodic about how people were never going to be out of debt, but it was a good thing. Need a new Escalade? Just use your ever increasing house value to buy it. Then just keep doing that forever. Mmmm, loves me them positive feedback loops.
This is more of the same - yet another bubble forming, and ready to burst.
Article says "pump and dump" is failing (Score:3)
At least, I read:
as "dear lord, the fools aren't lining up in droves. I hold a shit ton of botcoins. Bail me out!
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The real story is that while Internet based retail has boomed during COVID, and will have a long term increase, physical shops aren't going away forever. People still want to hold things in their hands and look them over before buying. That's never going away.
Re:Well then, if Bloomberg likes it... (Score:4, Insightful)
What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed.
Complete and absolute bullshit.
I make a lot of "online transactions" every month. Using conventional credit cards. Never once used bitcoin because it is a meaningless scam, being pumped by a few people who think they might be able to profit from it.
Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value.
And the "value" of your Bitcoin can drop substantially, in one day. Value my ass.
MicroStrategy's corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million ...
Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month ...
PayPal just announced ...
It's easy when you're spending someone else's money (and when you won't suffer any meaningful consequences when the money evaporates overnight)
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bitcoin or you know visa/master card/discover/amex etc.
Bitcoin is speculative game, I have posted many times why I still believe long term it goes to zero. I am not foolish enough to try to predict when or how high it can go first. Could be a while like even a decade and given the games being played with other currencies I'd say there is no real upper bound on how high. When the fall comes though it will be fast, unless you are one of the biggest player you will not have an opportunity to get out. You wil
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I think the real story is what happen when the bill comes due. A LOT of money has been spent on covid, direct payments to people in terms of unemployment, direct payments to business that had to shut down through various programs across western democracies, and major expenses for public institutions like schools, libraries etc to make adjustments to health requirements.
ALL of that was essentially paid for through credit and monetary expansion. What that does when this is over in terms of inflation, tax leve
Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Something that has a built in serverly limited supply that isn't nearly enough for all the people of a single town, never mind a country and requires ever more computing power to release each tranch is never going to be a viable currency. Its little more than a speculators instrument. The principle of crypto currency however has immense potential.
I agree about cash - if you want 100% privacy (and convenience in certain situations) it can't be beaten and the people who are calling for its disappearance are either financial/bank shills or naive kids.
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
But those are indeed bitcoin-specific issues, and plenty of more practical crypto coins exist that don't share these problems.
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget the instability.
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Don't forget the privacy. Every bitcoin transaction is published on a PUBLIC ledger. Bitcoin really ticks none of the boxes for a real, everyday currency. Corda, which is under consideration for some e-currencies, is very different from bitcoin. I haven't read more than the marketing material but it seems like they actually put some serious thought into what would be required from real e-cash. Digital currencies will probably be a big thing in the near future but I doubt bitcoin will be among them.
Also, ca
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
People who got in early have a massive advantage, sitting on Bitcoins worth billions of Euros that they got simply by speculating and throwing a small amount of compute power at it before everyone else had a chance.
We shouldn't reward that kind of thing. If crypto currencies are going to become common then we need one that is fair and equitable and doesn't reward people for wasting electricity or speculatively mining it early.
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I mean, you just assumed definition of capitalism. But capitalism is not incompatible with ideas like graduated wealth taxes. Nor is capitalism incompatible with "Standard X rewards the wrong people, we should use Standard Y" arguments. I'm happy to argue if you want to make an actual case.
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First of all, I said nothing about graduated wealth taxes, nor did anyone above that I responded to.
As for your strawman Standard X, please point out where anyone who invests would ever fall under that Standard.
And finally...Do you agree that investment in a successful endeavor should be rewarded under capitalism? And that is the only point I was attempting to make before you went into different directions, and exactly why I said "If you believe...", but clearly you have other plans.
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If you believe in capitalism, then you must also understand that much of the initial success of a business is the financing of it. The people who got in early took a risk, and as such should be rewarded for it. They could just as easily lost all of their investment. Investing isn't money for nothing. If you're smart about it, you do your homework...there are plenty of bad investments, and Bitcoin may still be one of them.
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't really take a risk, they just threw some CPU cycles at mining. It was only later that the mad rush for GPUs and then ASICs started, but by that point the gold rush was already over.
If you happened to be on the right mailing list at the right time you could have become a millionaire just by spending literally a few bucks on electricity. Aside from anything else why would the rest of us reward that by recognizing the value of that currency? We would be better off ignoring it and waiting for a fairer one to come along where we can enjoy some of the rewards too. There's nothing in it for us.
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From 2009 to 2017, what risks did someone take mining bitcoin? None, it was one big casino. Install some agents, let them work around the clock, and profit is had. The risk at this point was demonstrably low. They invested little to no capital of their own and need next to no infrastructure. Hell bitcoin at this point was so inconsequential that people were forgetting they even had any.
Right place, right time. Sheer dumb luck. Bully for them, but let's not trip over our own dicks calling it more than
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Oh shit, you got it too! Damn, this blindness seems to be more widespread than I thought.
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One of the main problems I've seen with crypto is that it's hard to stabilize a currency without some sort of central planning, which is, by design, what crypto tends to avoid.
Successful currencies are attractive as a store of value. Be it Euros, or USD, or any other major currency, for the most part, people can be pretty confident making agreements that use it as a placeholder f
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Also, everything can be traced to your wallet.
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What's the problem with the finite supply of bitcoin? In the long term, provided the value of BC continued to increase, couldn't we just subdivide it into smaller fractional quantities to engage in transactions? And perhaps reindex it if that would be useful?
Not that I think that's likely to happen, I just don't see the issue. I don't know enough about monetary systems to know why finite supply would be a fundamental problem.
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The Bitcoin people would tell you that that is the unique selling point of Bitcoin. One thing's for sure, there's never been anything like it.
As a payment method Bitcoin has already failed, unless, of course you would consider PayPal's adoption of Bitcoin as a value store to mean that PayPal has now become the payment layer on top of Bitcoin in which case it could be considered a resounding success.
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
When a currency is limited, this tends to put a deflationary pressure on an economy. Under these conditions, people tend to hold on to currency since it will get more valuable over time, since the price of goods and services will fall. Think of it like this, why would I buy something today when it will probably be cheaper in the future. In the short term this isn't bad, but has a cumulative effect. Generally people don't like working when they make less over time. Additionally, when a BC wallet is lost, those coins are lost forever. This further reduces the total number in circulation, and makes the problem worse.
Re:Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes Bitcoin deflationary. There's a fixed supply to go around, so once it's all distributed, for any new people to get some, somebody must give them theirs. The more competition there is for the existing amount of BTC, the more valuable a BTC becomes.
This makes it unsuitable for any real economy. There's a famous case of a pizza being sold for 10000 BTC. Today, that's worth $188M. So in retrospect, whoever bought that pizza made a horrible mistake. They should have just sat on their hoard like a dragon for a decade, and done absolutely nothing with it other than picking a good peak where to sell it to somebody else.
The end result of this process is that the only point to BTC is to play a global game of hot potato. You get some, wait for other people to get wind of this amazing thing and to increase the demand, try to guess when it will peak, and sell it to them. The optimal situation for the seller then is that Bitcoin never goes higher, and they extracted the maximum possible value from the transaction, while the buyer got completely screwed.
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This makes it unsuitable for any real economy.
It actually goes beyond that. People don't really seem to understand just how fickle any given economy is. Bitcoin's premise that it isn't under central control is what makes it horrible for an economy. Tweaking the supply and demand of money is one of only a few handles that governments have to keep an economy stable. Sure some governments go full mental with it and think that printing money is the solution, but that idea is not much different to the idea of having no control over currency at all.
There's a
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The pizza is only famous in retrospect. There's nothing special about it. It wasn't some sort of "Eureka!" moment somebody had, but somebody doing exactly what Bitcoin was made for. Had that person done nothing with their coins, somebody else would have done a similar transaction instead. After all what's there to do with your newly invented play money than to try to use it?
And sure, human beings aren't perfect rational actors, but incentives matter. If the incentive is to sit on your hoard, then that's wha
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It isn't that the pizza itself was important - it wasn't. The flow of commerce was important, and something was going to fill that role. But that first step was taken, and then all of the steps that followed happened too.
My point is that the present valuation wasn't a pronouncement from God - people made Bitcoin valuable by using it over and over again for years - first when it wasn't worth anything, and then when it was worth a little, and now when it is worth a lot.
Don't imagine that the present conditi
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First, your technical question. There's a finite limit to how subdivided bitcoins can be. It's 1e-8. That is currently about a two-tenths-of-a-cent. If you want to subdivide further than that, you'll need to redo the blockchain definition. Obviously, if bitcoin goes up to $1 million, the smallest
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I agree about cash - if you want 100% privacy (and convenience in certain situations) it can't be beaten and the people who are calling for its disappearance are either financial/bank shills or naive kids.
Speaking of naive, in the 21st Century (which is far more Orwellian than even he imagined), please describe for me a private transaction involving cash. From the initial communication to walking away from the transaction itself, I'd really like to know why you feel that medium, offers you "100% privacy" today.
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Who has access to the transactional record?
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Who has access to the transactional record?
How do you think Federal agencies abuse mass surveillance to run around the Constitution? Simple. Outsource it.
To answer your question, whomever pays to access it.
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Umm, do you actually understand what cash is? It doesn't have a transactional record after its been taken out of an ATM you clown. Perhaps when you're out of short trousers you might get a clue.
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Umm, do you actually understand what cash is? It doesn't have a transactional record after its been taken out of an ATM you clown. Perhaps when you're out of short trousers you might get a clue.
In total denial of the surveillance world around you? It's practically impressive to find that level of ignorance today. Almost child-like.
Go back and re-read my original statement and challenge. Any transaction requiring a physical exchange is far from anonymous in the 21st Century, and that argument is not even an ignorant one anymore. It's been reduced to a shitty one.
And no, not shilling for digital currency either. The "anonymous" delusions around that medium, are no better.
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"In total denial of the surveillance world around you?"
Oh right. So when I pay the pizza guy on my doorstep in cash The Man is watching? Perhaps its via surveillance satellite or a hovering drone? No wait, it must be the tree across the road, it'll have a hidden camera in it! That'll be it!
FFS, listen to yourself you paranoid imbecile. Yes, there's a lot of CCTV around, but we're not living in Orwells 1984 yet. Go polish your tin foil hat.
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"In total denial of the surveillance world around you?"
Oh right. So when I pay the pizza guy on my doorstep in cash The Man is watching? Perhaps its via surveillance satellite or a hovering drone? No wait, it must be the tree across the road, it'll have a hidden camera in it! That'll be it!
If you consider the prevalence of Ring doorbells and other like hardware then the answer is yes, you fucking moron.
FFS, listen to yourself you paranoid imbecile. Yes, there's a lot of CCTV around, but we're not living in Orwells 1984 yet. Go polish your tin foil hat.
Yeah, tell me again how I'm being paranoid. Funny thing we eventually realized about lemmings...they're not near as stupid as humans.
https://www.wired.com/story/ce... [wired.com]
Re: Crypto currency maybe, bitcoin? Not a chance (Score:2)
Video doorbells?? Is that the fucking best you can come up with? LOL. We dont all live in San Francisco, I dont know anyone who has one of those POS. Perhaps get out of you parents basement now and then and re enter the real world instead of the one you live in your head.
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Video doorbells?? Is that the fucking best you can come up with? LOL. We dont all live in San Francisco, I dont know anyone who has one of those POS. Perhaps get out of you parents basement now and then and re enter the real world instead of the one you live in your head.
You own a smartphone that is easily capable of spying on you. I can say that with an overabundance of confidence based on nothing more than societal pressure and addiction.
And before the delivery guy (who also owns a smartphone) ever left the pizza store to complete your "anonymous" cash order at your doorstep, your entire transaction was likely being tracked via the phone app you ordered it from.
Your ignorance is more predictable than a Hallmark Christmas movie. Maybe you should listen to people like E
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Thank you :)
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Something that has a built in serverly limited supply that isn't nearly enough for all the people of a single town
Well not really. The supply isn't large enough but no where near as small as you claim. Remember the design of bitcoin is for 21million possible bitcoins with the slowest denomination being 1/1000000th of a bitcoin. If we denominate it the same as cents to the dollar then you'd have a supply of $210 trillion more than enough for several small countries.
Not enough for the largest economy of the world though, but the supply is hardly a limiting factor.
That said I'm in full support of abolishing this stupid wa
Bitcoin for all (Score:5, Interesting)
Joe Biden's nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system
Somebody needs to tell him that Bitcoin can only handle five transactions per second.
Not five transactions per-wallet, five transactions for the entire Bitcoin system.
How will that work out if everybody starts wanting to buy stuff with it?
Re:Bitcoin for all (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, let's not put the transactions in the bitcoin ledger. Let's see how that works out when lightning exchanges mysteriously start to "disappear" from the grid.
Re:Bitcoin for all (Score:5, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Due to the nature of the Lightning Network's dispute mechanism, which requires all users to watch the blockchain constantly for fraud...."
If it ain't on the main Blockchain, it can be faked.
Re: Bitcoin for all (Score:2)
Lightning is run on charity ... at commercial scale the cost of sacrificing liquidity still causes large transaction cost.
It's been tried (Score:3)
The USA has tried having a currency that was intrinsically valuable and in short supply.
The Gold Standard. The predecessor silver standards, the bimetallic standards, etc.
It didn't work out well. Bitcoin wouldn't work out well either.
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The USA has tried having a currency that was intrinsically valuable and in short supply.
The Gold Standard. The predecessor silver standards, the bimetallic standards, etc.
It didn't work out well. Bitcoin wouldn't work out well either.
Bimetallic was a failure because the supply of silver and gold is not fixed, nor is the demand.
Gold failed because the US spent 10 years in a futile war in Vietnam and spent all its money, so there wasn't enough gold to cover its promises.
Neither of those are specifically issues with a currency based on short supply and "intrinsically valuable" is a stretch for gold which derives very little of its market value from its uses in electronics. The real positive of gold compared to paper is that it's very hard
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Gold failed because the US spent 10 years in a futile war in Vietnam and spent all its money, so there wasn't enough gold to cover its promises.
The Gold Standard ended in the US well over three decades before the war in Vietnam began. Eisenhower hadn't even warned the United States about the growing threat of the Military Industrial Complex yet. Care to explain why you're tying these two events together?
Re:It's been tried (Score:5, Interesting)
Gold failed because the US spent 10 years in a futile war in Vietnam and spent all its money, so there wasn't enough gold to cover its promises.
The Gold Standard ended in the US well over three decades before the war in Vietnam began. Eisenhower hadn't even warned the United States about the growing threat of the Military Industrial Complex yet. Care to explain why you're tying these two events together?
The US left the gold standard in 33.
The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement set the exchange value for all currencies in terms of gold -effectively putting everyone including the US back on the gold standard. Since the US held more gold than anyone else, most countries set their exchange rates in terms of dollars as the dollar and gold were practically synonymous and dollars were held in national central banks on that assumption. The US acted accordingly and allowed anyone to exchange dollars for gold from the US gold reserves.
In 1971 (not '72 as I said), the French govt worked out that the US had printed too many dollars - largely trying to pay for Vietnam - to be covered by this system and, worried that there would be a run on the dollar which would leave their dollar holdings worthless decided to be first in the queue. They stuck $2Bn in cash onto a destroyer, sailed it into New York(?) harbour and said "Give us the gold".
At that point the gold standard collapsed for real because the US simply had to refuse to honour the agreement or see all the gold in the country sent overseas to replace foreign nation's dollar-holdings.
Basically, the gold standard broke down because the US had printed too much money.
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Thank you for the informative comment! France's and Vietnam's roles in this are quite interesting. I found some links that go into more detail:
https://blockchain.news/wiki/a... [blockchain.news]
https://www.huffpost.com/entry... [huffpost.com]
As for your comment regarding BTC dying, seems to be the opposite is happening if anything. As a store of value, it's the best thing going and is currently on track to achieve the S2F and S2FX predictions. As a currency, it will be no more of a failure than gold was or is. Of course only time will
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Thanks for your interesting and informative comment. But the gold standard failed the economy many times before it was abandoned. The cycles of boom and bust were much worse under currency backed by limited-supply metals than they have been with the so-called fiat currency.
Do you think so? 2007/8 seems to have been on a par with anything that went before it and we're still living under its cloud. Every few months interest rates are lowered and more QE issued - clearly signalling that the underlying problem wasn't solved by the previous round, or the previous one to that, or the previous one to that, or the previous one to that, or the previous one to that, or the previous one to that, etc.
Economics is hard because it's really a branch of politics and, far from being a science
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Maybe it has something to do with Nixon closing the gold window in 1971.
It's tulip mania (Score:3)
So all the "investors" are doing is giving free money to those who already have bitcoins, in the hope that someone will give more free money to them. But they are so low on the totem pole, that is not going to happen.
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Re:It's tulip mania (Score:5, Informative)
No currencies have intrinsic value. It's a defining characteristic of currency.
5 defining. Tax-paying value is new (Score:3)
The DEFINING characteristics of currency are acceptability, durability, portability, and divisibility.
It's the generally accepted medium of exchange. You can walk into any store and buy stuff with it, items in the store are priced in dollars/pesos/yen. That's called "acceptability".
It's the store of value. You can get your $1,000 paycheck today and use it to pay your $1,000 rent two weeks from now. That's also called "durability". Oysters are not an effective currency for that reason.
Those are the top two.
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A common characteristic of the NEW money is it gets its initial value from the fact it's what you need to pay taxes.
That's not actually the primary source of the value of fiat currency, though it is an important element. The primary source of value is actually identical to the primary source of the money: debt. Money is created by inventing $1000 to give to someone who in turn hands over a promissory note for $1000 plus interest. To put it another way, the creation of a dollar is balanced by the creation of a debt to repay that dollar. Repayment of that debt requires application of some mixture of labor, knowledge and re
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While you accurately describe a method for putting money into the money supply, imagine this:
I print up 1,000 Slashdollars. I hand then to you. You agree to give them back to me later. What is the value of the Slashdollars? Will anybody want those Slashdollars?
Creating and loaning the Slashdollars doesn't give them value.
Nobody needs Slashdollars, so nobody will pay for for them - they have no value.
On the other hand, suppose I have a gift card. An IRS gift card. Using this gift card, you can pay your
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The chicken currency has intrinsic value. While you do have to feed it, it can return eggs and at worse, become a chicken dinner.
It does mean carrying around chickens to do business though.
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No currencies have intrinsic value. It's a defining characteristic of currency.
No it's not. There were plenty of currencies in history which had intrinsic value as they were tied to physical things. That they have no intrinsic value in themselves is a concept that is universally less than 150 years old, whereas we've been using currency for thousands of years.
The defining characteristic of any currency is that it is an accepted medium of exchange. Bitcoin is not a currency for its pisspoor acceptability.
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Gold and silver have intrinsic values not related to their value as money, so I'd put the origin of money without significant intrinsic value a lot earlier than that. Gold was like a fiat currency, in that its value depended primarily on what you could buy with it.
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The same could be said of any item. The key here is having people's trust which is enforced with properties that inherently keep that trust. (eg: gold's scarcity, difficulty in reproducing, etc.)
The real question is which will hold more value in the future. Bitcoin or USD? Given BTC's decentralized fixed supply and the US controlled dollar printing/inflation mania, people and institutions are starting to bet on the BTC en masse. And given the world history of state controlled currencies, there's good
Ye shall know them by their friends (Score:2)
"my friend Ken Rogoff"
Ken Rogoff is a complete fuckwit looper who wants to ban cash so that banks (i.e., private companies) can charge everyone else for daring to save money.
*IS* Bitcoin is Part of a Real Monetary Revolution (Score:2)
I just love these great pronounces. X is TRUE! (because I think so.) Just saying it doesn't make it true though.
But there's no penalty for being wrong, so the Oracles all babble on and on, and like Miss Cleo, occasionally have a hit, thus improving and inflating their importance.
Cryptocurrencties are a failure (Score:5, Insightful)
We're now at a point where several hundred cryptocurrencties have been launched (i.e. more than there are national monetary systems). Most of these are not backed by anything more tangible than calculations done to 'mine' them, and in practice their value is due only to speculation, and their promise of anonymity.
The result is wild swings in perceived value. The value of even the largest cryptocurrencies can be easily influenced by a few investors, so the market is full of pump-and-dump schemes. Another result is fragmentation: Worldcoinindex tracks more than 1000 cryptocurrencies [worldcoinindex.com], half of which have a daily trading volume of less than $100k.
In short, the current cryptocurrency market is most similar to the penny stock market: volatile, easily manipulated and mostly used for transactions you don't want to be traceable (i.e. illegal transactions).
anonymity (Score:2)
The fact that you mention crypto and anonymity in the same sentence shows your ignorance. Sure there are some privacy based coins but the whole point of the blockchain is traceability.
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Re: Sound money vs Fool's Gold (Score:2)
Bitcoin matters to criminals and gamblers, the only thing it does to the real economy is damage. Not even in a broken windows way.
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Bitcoin is never gonna work. On principle. (Score:2)
* The only reason fiat money doesn't have the same problems as bitcoin, is because of a regulatory body that keeps it stable (well, sorta) and has the final say on who has how much of it.
* This cannot be done in a decentralized way, as there will always be contradicting parties (same reason Wikipedia is so troubled and not "anyone can edit" anymore) unless somebody gets to have the last say.
* Such a central authority will always by definition be able to track everything and impose rules.
* The entire point
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And this is different than Bitcoin how?
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I think it's because Bitcoin, like all other currency systems, divorces the creation of money from the activities for which you want to have money.
What would be better in my opinion is a system that ties creation (and destruction) of currency to actual economic activity directly. That is, when you build a chair and want to sell it, you wouldn't need your potential buyer to go to some other party (a central bank, a distributed computer network to generate a token) to create a debt token to be able to make a
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Bartering is not what I described - bartering involves no creation of debt currency, it is only trading directly.
Bartering does have the advantage of requiring no third party, but it has significant disadvantages related to scaling and transactions that require many steps because generally you don't have the things wanted by the people who have things you want.
The current monetary system, aside from banks, generally works this way: if two parties want to make a transaction that doesn't involve barter, one p
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I propose a new system: a transaction can now be made one of three ways: buyer creates money in the seller's account, buyer deletes money from their own account, or buyer moves money from buyer's account to seller's account.
So in your system, as a buyer choosing the first option I give up nothing in exchange for the goods I "purchased" by creating money in the seller's account. Why would that money be worth anything to the seller? They can just create their own in the same way if they want to buy something; they don't need mine. They have no reason to trade me the goods in exchange for useless play money. You seem to be assuming that the purchasing power of a unit of currency is fixed and independent of supply and demand, whic
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That's exactly Bitcoin's problem though - it requires an extra activity (mining) to generate currency, when really you just want to have currency created by the main economic activity.
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The role of mining in Bitcoin is not to generate currency, but rather to limit the rate of production of new currency while also distributing it in a reasonably fair manner, and—most importantly—to secure the distributed consensus system against cheap Sybil attacks.
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Economic cycles were worse when we were on the gold standard than they have been since.
Re: Bitcoin is never gonna work. On principle. (Score:2)
Bitcoin is coasting on institutional investor lobbyists protecting them from the US government. Otherwise all the crime would long have turned it into E-gold v2.
The US government has the power to make every exchange on the planet have as much access to electronic banking as Iran. Which would kill cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin is not decentralized, fails security model (Score:2)
This cannot be done in a decentralized way, as there will always be contradicting parties (same reason Wikipedia is so troubled and not "anyone can edit" anymore) unless somebody gets to have the last say.
Bitcoin is not decentralized. 70% of mining hardware is located in a single country, dependent upon that government's cheap electricity.
Which leads to the fact that Bitcoin fails its own security model. Such centralization would allow a government to force a 51% attack. That is supposed to be impossible. Not unlikely, not "the gov't would never choose to do that", rather it is supposed to be impossible for a government to do that.
ch, jp yen coins in the works (Score:2)
tldr but bitcoin is low txns/second, volatile, manipulable, has a history of scams, and would cost more electricity than the world can produce to be viable. (i think it rrequires 1 power plant's worth now). So I guess "bitcoin" is just a placeholder for digital currency (waves jazz hands).
china and japan yen coins in the works but unclear as to anonymity.
There was a plan shot down days ago to link the japanese social security number (my number) to your bank accounts so japan's plan will be scrutinized from
"make . . .organized crime harder"???? (Score:2)
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At present, Bitcoin is what makes ransomware possible.
I've seen that from the beginning, you've seen it, some others have seen it -- but you say it out loud and you get shouted down. The question is, is it criminals, foreign nationals spreading propaganda, corporations, or governments, who are promoting something that's been used primarily for criminal activities from the beginning?
Re: A censorable money is not a money! (Score:2)
I'm looking for cohesive in-group controlled money where my trustworthy big brother has the ability to punish criminal scum who would victimize me.
Bank and Swift exchange transacted currencies will suffice, it's not ideal ... but I somewhat trust the EU and US as my big brother.
Bitcoin adds nothing but crime and gambling.
Liar (Score:3)
Giving control (Score:2)
Ok let's say that all our mone disappears from our pockets , who's pockets is it lining ? Banks that make billions daily while giving us no interezt whatsoever on the money we lend thdm. This is insane. WHy leave and give money to banks that will line the pockets of a few instead of profiting to us ? .. theyy lready own
That's what it's really about. A grab of all our money so it profits the ukltra rich and leaves us to pay fees and pay and pay and pay. If you like to be a slave , leave them all your cash
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You're not wrong, not at all. I have noticed a movement in the last 20 years to convince people to not only give up their privacy, citing it as something that only 'people who have something to hide' want, but since the global economic collapse of 2008, the younger generation is too scared of being caught in another such collapse, that they're averse to owning anything that won't fit in a single backpack -- and the corporate world encourages that. They would like
A Revolution that makes money have no value. (Score:2)
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Fraud. (Score:2)
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The funny thing is that this stuff is a complete failure as currency, except for criminal uses where things like stability matter less.
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'Cryptocurrency' is poison to privacy (Score:2)
Bitcoin fails its own security design (Score:2)
The block chain is created by miners. Miners are supposed to be distributed, geographically, to keep any one government from exerting influence. Today 70% of miners are located in a single country, dependent upon that government's cheap electricity.
Now bitcoin evangelists may counter that this government would never force its local miners into performing a 51% attack to
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OK Communist. "The Free Market is Criminal"
Bitcoin is so far from untraceable I have to laugh at your ignorance, the whole thing is a PUBLIC digitally signed ledger.
Re: Bitcoin is fantasy (Score:2)
Payment is in Bitcoin, laundering is in Monero ... cashing out is done in proper money.