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This is full of misunderstandings about monetary policy and money creation. Currencies that are not designed to lose value over time can not be stable. Intrins
by BenoitEssiambre 9y ago
This is full of misunderstandings about monetary policy and money creation.
Currencies that are not designed to lose value over time can not be stable.
Intrinsically worthless tokens engineered to have better than market risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted, real returns compared to real productive investment will always be unstable and fluctuate increasingly wildly as they get more popular. This is a result of physical limits of production. As people hoard worthless tokens, their price increases which causes more people to hoard them instead of investing in real businesses with real production capacity.
This eventually causes production capacity to drop. That's right, when enough people do it, token hoarding displaces investment in businesses and factories and lowers global production capacity. This means token hoarding causes a future drop in things available to buy with these tokens.
Eventually there will be people who want to buy real things with their stock of tokens. The tokens will be chasing fewer goods which means prices for stuff will rise (tokens will lose value). This might happen suddenly when people with large stockpiles of tokens notice that value is dropping and that there are tons of other tokens waiting on the sideline to make it drop even further. Hoarders might rush to get rid of their stockpile all at the same time before they're worthless which will cause their fall to worthlessness. This drop will bring the tokens closer to their natural intrinsic value of zero. The cycle can then start again, such is aggregate economics.
The 1920s and 1930s suffered from this type of cycle but with gold tied currencies instead of cryptocoins. It happened to a lesser extent in 2007 when western world central banks failed to keep inflation rates high enough. It's important for the world's sake to not let deflationary currencies become too popular.
When savings or financial promises are insufficiently tied to future production or to accumulation of real goods, there will be disappointment when many people try to exchange them for real stuff. That is true for crypto currencies as well as government currencies (that is why the system is designed to make banks invest people's money in real businesses and minimize the proportion of money that is stockpiled idly).
It's true that crypto currencies are currently not sufficiently widely held to significantly affect the macroeconomy but speculation already keeps them rather volatile and the knowledge that as they get more popular you get additional volatility pressures, will keep the speculation wild and the deflationary cryptocoins unstable.
- revmoo 9y agoThis is just a theory btw, just like any other economic theory.
- eridius 9y agoThis is basically what happened to Bitcoin itself in the early days, isn't it? People hoarding them, then the value crashing as a scare causes people to try and dump their stash.
- simonhughes22 9y agoWhile I agree with that person's comments, I am not sure i'd aggree that is what happened in the first Bitcoin bubble. The main event was that Mt Gox got hacked, and a number of other things happened around that time (for instance the IRS recognized bitcoin as an asset so they could tax it) that culminated in a big crash for the market as confidence was lost all of a sudden, after a big spike in prices.
- eridius 9y agoThere have been multiple crashes though.
- simonhughes22 9y agoI think it's important to differentiate between the potential of crypto-currencies as currency, and the technology that powers them - the blockchain. I think the blockchain has a huge potential to revolutionize many industries. Whether crypto-currencies like Bitcoin actual take off as real currencies is less certain and may have some negative effects. But whatever happens, the blockchain itself (and presumably ether that powers the smart contracts) will be around for a long time.
- simonhughes22 9y agoSo to summarize your points, if Bitcoin, or what crypto-currency comes to dominate, becomes a serious global currency to rival that of the dollar, if it's horded and not used to transact or invest in the economy, which is a danger due to its deflationary nature, then that will have dire consequences. But so long as its used as a currency and not primarily as a value store, then it's not a problem. Which is concerning. What concerns me about bitcoin currently is that it's not used a currency, AFAICT most people use it as an investment vehicle. It is worth pointing out that not all crypto-currencies are deflationary. Ethereum for instance, has no limit on the number of tokens.