4 ms·

Only the best numbers... I hear you, one must back their best issued numbers with actual software to ensure their value ;) BSV has handcash, honestly that seeme

by yebyen 8y ago

Only the best numbers... I hear you, one must back their best issued numbers with actual software to ensure their value ;) BSV has handcash, honestly that seemed like a great wallet until I realized it wasn't supported by any of my held coins!

bb88 8y ago
My point is that one way to look at bitcoin is that it's nothing more than a marketing scheme. And the "scarcity" in bitcoin is just artificial at best. Yes BTC has scarcity, but cryptocurrency itself has no scarcity, proven by the fact that there are over 1,000 alt coins. And all of those coins are just number generators. Here's another way to illustrate the issue: I have two numbers. 1. The first takes your user id "yebyen" and appends a number to it so that the SHA-256 hash is exactly 0x0. It will take 20 years of processing power on the NSA computers, so it should be worth something to you. 2. The second number is an encrypted location somewhere in the US where I've buried $1000. It will cost you $1010 to acquire it from me. I'll decrypt it for free but it will be worth exactly $0 afterwards. But until then it's worth $1000 and you can give the number to whoever you want to. Which number has a bigger intrinsic value?
- yebyen 8y ago
  Ok, now do traditional fiat money... This is a good metaphor, but it's not perfect. You haven't explained how or why you'll be burying $1000 exactly 21 million times, every 10 minutes until 2140. Or why it becomes worthless immediately upon decryption... nobody can unbury the cash value of an individual Bitcoin, rendering it worthless, but they can be transferred instantly from party to party, which partially funds the ongoing operations of the network. Even Satoshi himself cannot end Bitcoin at this point. Even if he still lives, and has the keys to the large stash of Bitcoin he mined in the beginning, it could be a major market-altering event if he dumped them all at once, but it would likely not be the end of Bitcoin. Sure, it's great marketing, with an extremely long con...
  - bb88 8y ago
    > This is a good metaphor, but it's not perfect. You haven't explained how or why you'll be burying $1000 exactly 21 million times, every 10 minutes until 2140. That's an engineering problem. ;) And it's also beside the point. One has intrinsic value, one doesn't. > Or why it becomes worthless immediately upon decryption... The reason the number is worth something is because there's real money tied to it. Once the guarantee of value disappears, the value of the number also does.
    - yebyen 8y ago
      > The reason the number is worth something is because there's real money tied to it. That's the reason why Tether and stablecoins like it ostensibly have value. Bitcoin and friends have value because they are fungible and because people assign a value to it. (Much like fiat money.) There was never any guaranteed value, but many people saw Bitcoin transacting at $0.05 and put it through the paces, understood what they were observing, and saw that it was massively undervalued as a new technology. Since then it's been proven to work on a repeatable basis, with some caveats like the issues that come with increasing popularity scaling up the volume and value per coin, like $50 transaction fees, but that's another engineering problem. If you told me for some reason that you thought Bitcoin and every cryptocurrency will simultaneously become worth less than that $0.05, overnight, I would assume that you are either a kook, or again, perhaps, that you've discovered another engineering problem... demands further explanation. We're not talking about Tether though, we're talking about fungible instruments. You wouldn't say that a stock is valueless because its value fluctuates.
      - bb88 8y ago
        > Bitcoin and friends have value because they are fungible and because people assign a value to it. (Much like fiat money.) The dollar is the official currency of the US, and all transactions the government makes is required to be in the US dollar. Bitcoin is an optional currency, made fashionable by the likes of Aston Kutchner, and appears to be more akin to a polyester leisure suit of the 1970's than the US Dollar. Both Bitcoin and a polyester leisure suit at one point had value, and they both got their value based upon fashion and celebrity. > We're not talking about Tether though, we're talking about fungible instruments. I can make 1 fashionable number worth $1M. Or, I can also make 1 million fashionable numbers worth $1 each. It doesn't matter that the price is fixed, if I have infinite supply. From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) Tether claims that it intends to hold all United States dollars in reserve so that it can meet customer withdrawals upon demand, though it was unable to meet all withdrawal requests in 2017.[33] Tether purports to make reserve account holdings transparent via external audit; however, no such audits exist.[8] In January 2018 Tether announced that they no longer had a relationship with their auditor.[34]

by yebyen 8y ago

bb88 8y ago

My point is that one way to look at bitcoin is that it's nothing more than a marketing scheme. And the "scarcity" in bitcoin is just artificial at best. Yes BTC has scarcity, but cryptocurrency itself has no scarcity, proven by the fact that there are over 1,000 alt coins. And all of those coins are just number generators. Here's another way to illustrate the issue: I have two numbers. 1. The first takes your user id "yebyen" and appends a number to it so that the SHA-256 hash is exactly 0x0. It will take 20 years of processing power on the NSA computers, so it should be worth something to you. 2. The second number is an encrypted location somewhere in the US where I've buried $1000. It will cost you $1010 to acquire it from me. I'll decrypt it for free but it will be worth exactly $0 afterwards. But until then it's worth $1000 and you can give the number to whoever you want to. Which number has a bigger intrinsic value?

yebyen 8y ago
Ok, now do traditional fiat money... This is a good metaphor, but it's not perfect. You haven't explained how or why you'll be burying $1000 exactly 21 million times, every 10 minutes until 2140. Or why it becomes worthless immediately upon decryption... nobody can unbury the cash value of an individual Bitcoin, rendering it worthless, but they can be transferred instantly from party to party, which partially funds the ongoing operations of the network. Even Satoshi himself cannot end Bitcoin at this point. Even if he still lives, and has the keys to the large stash of Bitcoin he mined in the beginning, it could be a major market-altering event if he dumped them all at once, but it would likely not be the end of Bitcoin. Sure, it's great marketing, with an extremely long con...
- bb88 8y ago
  > This is a good metaphor, but it's not perfect. You haven't explained how or why you'll be burying $1000 exactly 21 million times, every 10 minutes until 2140. That's an engineering problem. ;) And it's also beside the point. One has intrinsic value, one doesn't. > Or why it becomes worthless immediately upon decryption... The reason the number is worth something is because there's real money tied to it. Once the guarantee of value disappears, the value of the number also does.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    > The reason the number is worth something is because there's real money tied to it. That's the reason why Tether and stablecoins like it ostensibly have value. Bitcoin and friends have value because they are fungible and because people assign a value to it. (Much like fiat money.) There was never any guaranteed value, but many people saw Bitcoin transacting at $0.05 and put it through the paces, understood what they were observing, and saw that it was massively undervalued as a new technology. Since then it's been proven to work on a repeatable basis, with some caveats like the issues that come with increasing popularity scaling up the volume and value per coin, like $50 transaction fees, but that's another engineering problem. If you told me for some reason that you thought Bitcoin and every cryptocurrency will simultaneously become worth less than that $0.05, overnight, I would assume that you are either a kook, or again, perhaps, that you've discovered another engineering problem... demands further explanation. We're not talking about Tether though, we're talking about fungible instruments. You wouldn't say that a stock is valueless because its value fluctuates.
    - bb88 8y ago
      > Bitcoin and friends have value because they are fungible and because people assign a value to it. (Much like fiat money.) The dollar is the official currency of the US, and all transactions the government makes is required to be in the US dollar. Bitcoin is an optional currency, made fashionable by the likes of Aston Kutchner, and appears to be more akin to a polyester leisure suit of the 1970's than the US Dollar. Both Bitcoin and a polyester leisure suit at one point had value, and they both got their value based upon fashion and celebrity. > We're not talking about Tether though, we're talking about fungible instruments. I can make 1 fashionable number worth $1M. Or, I can also make 1 million fashionable numbers worth $1 each. It doesn't matter that the price is fixed, if I have infinite supply. From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) Tether claims that it intends to hold all United States dollars in reserve so that it can meet customer withdrawals upon demand, though it was unable to meet all withdrawal requests in 2017.[33] Tether purports to make reserve account holdings transparent via external audit; however, no such audits exist.[8] In January 2018 Tether announced that they no longer had a relationship with their auditor.[34]