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You can't just make wild claims like that without providing a coherent argument and expect people to blindly believe you. I actually had to re-read your comment

by simias 8y ago

You can't just make wild claims like that without providing a coherent argument and expect people to blindly believe you. I actually had to re-read your comment a few times to figure out if it was some kind of satire of cryptozealotry. In your comment you state, without any source or reasoning behind your claims, that: - Finite supply of currency is good - Inflation is bad - Bitcoin is "best money" - Everything else is bad money What about the fact that deflation means that people are incentivized to stash money instead of spending it (something you admit doing yourself)? What about the fact that it means that the rich becomes richer while doing nothing while the poor can't make money because nobody wants to spend it? Don't let greed blind you. How does society work if your main form of currency is meant to be "hodled" and people who spend it are ridiculed as suckers? Bitcoin is currently near-useless as a currency because it's mostly an asset for speculation. How is that going to change in the value of bitcoins keeps increasing by virtue of being artificially capped? That's what kills cryptocurrencies: you need the deflation to reward early adopters but in the end it means that your currency is effectively unusable as a currency.

sparkie 8y ago
> In your comment you state, without any source or reasoning behind your claims, that: > - Finite supply of currency is good > - Inflation is bad > - Bitcoin is "best money" > - Everything else is bad money My arguments aren't based on feels about what one might think as "good" or "bad", but just based on the undeniable fact that people are self interested. If it's a choice between holding my assets in a currency where they won't be devalued, and holding them in another where they will lose 1% or 2% annually, which am I going to chose? The people who care about the rich getting richer are really complaining that they aren't getting richer by the same ratio. They obviously won't if they think that the second option was a better choice. The rich already get richer. If they have money, they will invest it into other assets which offer them various levels of return, some more risky than others. People without money are traditionally excluded from these kinds of investment, and thus, their only for saving for the future is to put money into a bank account and let it have less purchasing power than the labour they put in to earn it in the first place. Bitcoin changes that completely. Anyone, even low-income earners, can put small amounts into Bitcoin and it will retain value in the longer term. They can completely shift their mental mode from high time preference into low time preference and begin investing in their own future. The idea that everyone needs to spend spend spend is not grounded in reality. It's necessary for governments to continue their bad policy making which only enriches the elite who print the money. High time preference is the source of inefficiencies, cutting corners and high debt. People should save rather than spend. People should spend more wisely in ways that are an investment into their own, and their descendants future, rather than borrowing from their children's labour through debt.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > Anyone, even low-income earners, can put small amounts into Bitcoin and it will retain value in the longer term. Will it? The one thing that Bitcoin has not been noted for is keeping a stable value. Even that's fine, as long as the value doesn't go down - nobody complains that the value isn't stable if the value keeps going up. And, Bitcoin has... um... had been doing fine on that front. Now it's not. And I don't see evidence that it will be a good store of value in the future. I hear argument, but the available evidence is not for Bitcoin being a stable store of value.
  - sparkie 8y ago
    Take any point in Bitcoin's history and compare its value then to three years earlier. There is no case where it was worth more three years before. Sure, you can't predict the day to day price swings because the demand is not going to be predictable like the supply. The question is, will demand go up in the long term? But look at it another way. 1 Bitcoin is still 1 Bitcoin even after 100 years, and still 1/20999999 of the total number of Bitcoins ever created. It's an extremely stable store of value. Stability which was previously unheard of. The problem is that you are valuing it in terms of an asset that is far more likely to fail, given its current trajectory. You can't keep printing and borrowing forever.
    - CJefferson 8y ago
      Saying 1 Bitcoin is 1 Bitcoin isn't sensible. 1 dogecoin is 1 dogecoin. Hey, I have a currency, chrisbucks. There will only ever be 6 chrisbucks. Want one?
      - sparkie 8y ago
        Dogecoin is priced in Bitcoin though. Everything will eventually be priced in Bitcoin. And Chrisbucks are the reason why altcoins have no long-term value. If anyone can create coins then there's an infinite supply and their value will go to zero. Bitcoin is the only system which has not attempted to inflate the supply beyond the originally programmed supply. The original supply was necessary because it was the first asset of its kind. Everything else misses the point.
zimablue 8y ago
It's a bit much to say that being deflationary kills a currency, metals were used as currency for a long time and they were deflationary mostly.
- simias 8y ago
  As far as I know in developed societies trade hasn't been conducted using precious metals directly in quite a long time and at a scale completely different from the modern globalized economy. The closest we had was the gold standard (and other precious metal pegs) but those routinely broke in case of crisis. As far as I know the only serious economists advocating for the gold standard nowadays are the "Austrian school" which are generally seen as pretty controversial. I'm not sure how Bitcoin relates to the gold standard exactly though. On its own it can't be debased, but on the other hand it's not tied to anything physical so what happens if a government decides to "fork" it into a new currency (which increased supply for instance) and use that to pay public workers and raise taxes? Wouldn't that effectively do the same thing as debasing the currency? After all bitcoin is effectively a pure concept. Those are interesting questions but I lack the economic knowledge to answer them.

by simias 8y ago

sparkie 8y ago

> In your comment you state, without any source or reasoning behind your claims, that: > - Finite supply of currency is good > - Inflation is bad > - Bitcoin is "best money" > - Everything else is bad money My arguments aren't based on feels about what one might think as "good" or "bad", but just based on the undeniable fact that people are self interested. If it's a choice between holding my assets in a currency where they won't be devalued, and holding them in another where they will lose 1% or 2% annually, which am I going to chose? The people who care about the rich getting richer are really complaining that they aren't getting richer by the same ratio. They obviously won't if they think that the second option was a better choice. The rich already get richer. If they have money, they will invest it into other assets which offer them various levels of return, some more risky than others. People without money are traditionally excluded from these kinds of investment, and thus, their only for saving for the future is to put money into a bank account and let it have less purchasing power than the labour they put in to earn it in the first place. Bitcoin changes that completely. Anyone, even low-income earners, can put small amounts into Bitcoin and it will retain value in the longer term. They can completely shift their mental mode from high time preference into low time preference and begin investing in their own future. The idea that everyone needs to spend spend spend is not grounded in reality. It's necessary for governments to continue their bad policy making which only enriches the elite who print the money. High time preference is the source of inefficiencies, cutting corners and high debt. People should save rather than spend. People should spend more wisely in ways that are an investment into their own, and their descendants future, rather than borrowing from their children's labour through debt.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> Anyone, even low-income earners, can put small amounts into Bitcoin and it will retain value in the longer term. Will it? The one thing that Bitcoin has not been noted for is keeping a stable value. Even that's fine, as long as the value doesn't go down - nobody complains that the value isn't stable if the value keeps going up. And, Bitcoin has... um... had been doing fine on that front. Now it's not. And I don't see evidence that it will be a good store of value in the future. I hear argument, but the available evidence is not for Bitcoin being a stable store of value.
- sparkie 8y ago
  Take any point in Bitcoin's history and compare its value then to three years earlier. There is no case where it was worth more three years before. Sure, you can't predict the day to day price swings because the demand is not going to be predictable like the supply. The question is, will demand go up in the long term? But look at it another way. 1 Bitcoin is still 1 Bitcoin even after 100 years, and still 1/20999999 of the total number of Bitcoins ever created. It's an extremely stable store of value. Stability which was previously unheard of. The problem is that you are valuing it in terms of an asset that is far more likely to fail, given its current trajectory. You can't keep printing and borrowing forever.
  - CJefferson 8y ago
    Saying 1 Bitcoin is 1 Bitcoin isn't sensible. 1 dogecoin is 1 dogecoin. Hey, I have a currency, chrisbucks. There will only ever be 6 chrisbucks. Want one?
    - sparkie 8y ago
      Dogecoin is priced in Bitcoin though. Everything will eventually be priced in Bitcoin. And Chrisbucks are the reason why altcoins have no long-term value. If anyone can create coins then there's an infinite supply and their value will go to zero. Bitcoin is the only system which has not attempted to inflate the supply beyond the originally programmed supply. The original supply was necessary because it was the first asset of its kind. Everything else misses the point.

zimablue 8y ago

It's a bit much to say that being deflationary kills a currency, metals were used as currency for a long time and they were deflationary mostly.

simias 8y ago
As far as I know in developed societies trade hasn't been conducted using precious metals directly in quite a long time and at a scale completely different from the modern globalized economy. The closest we had was the gold standard (and other precious metal pegs) but those routinely broke in case of crisis. As far as I know the only serious economists advocating for the gold standard nowadays are the "Austrian school" which are generally seen as pretty controversial. I'm not sure how Bitcoin relates to the gold standard exactly though. On its own it can't be debased, but on the other hand it's not tied to anything physical so what happens if a government decides to "fork" it into a new currency (which increased supply for instance) and use that to pay public workers and raise taxes? Wouldn't that effectively do the same thing as debasing the currency? After all bitcoin is effectively a pure concept. Those are interesting questions but I lack the economic knowledge to answer them.