5 ms·

Gold is a very good comparison (especially since it is inherently pretty worthless much like bitcoins) but I think the core currency quality it has is the limit

by munk-a 6y ago

Gold is a very good comparison (especially since it is inherently pretty worthless much like bitcoins) but I think the core currency quality it has is the limit of supply. One of the more amusing qualities of the fallout world to me was always the usage of bottle caps as a currency. Oh sure we have a pretty much infinite supply now but in a post-war setting it's a relatively common material (we don't use rhodium for currency because it's rare in absolute terms and also very hard to come by) that isn't going to increase in volume - that said more recent games have under cut that with the sheer commonality of nuka cola, and it also seems like a rather easy currency to forge per the volume it takes to transact an exchange. The other points you mentioned are what's really interesting to me, the verifiable property is one that physical currency has struggled with for a long term and the ledger aspect has no equivalence in physical currency exchange[1] - it's really neat! 1. Except, of course, for my most favorite currency ever the Rai stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones which are essentially a built-in fiat currency that no one ever actually counts or carries but instead the ownership was/is tracked entirely by oral history which is amazing.

seibelj 6y ago
The fixed supply is the most interesting aspect. There could be an extremely huge gold deposit, or someone could figure out how to extract it from the ocean efficiently, or an asteroid / planet made of gold discovered and mined. But there will never be more bitcoin. More bitcoin would just fork the chain, and it wouldn't be bitcoin anymore.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Forks are so easy in practice though that it seems magic/wishful thinking to assume there's anything particularly special about one branch's artificial scarcity. It seems axiomatic that in using a tree-based structure branches should be the natural and expected state and pretending the other branches don't exist is a fascinating strategy that I just have a rough time thinking holds over the long term, especially when trying to maintain something like artificial scarcity.
  - keymone 6y ago
    Fork of bitcoin is not bitcoin. Only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether that 21 million bitcoin branch will remain the dominant in terms of use and hashpower is under question, but there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      My exact point is that this is a fun "semantic" game. From a technical standpoint, the entire merkle tree is bitcoin, because that is the root data structure, however you want to "brand" individual forks/branches they are always going to be inter-related. The fact that forks already exist today seems to clearly undermine the idea that there are "only ever 21 million bitcoin" because even just taking "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Cash" into account alone represent an "additional" 42 million possible bitcoin. (That's before you take in the dozens of other bitcoin forks, and the larger picture of how generally non-scarce cryptocoins are in the general forest beyond the bitcoin tree.) It doesn't really matter which fork is "dominant", the artificial scarcity seems extremely artificial in a most brittle way and not that scarce from a respectable technical viewpoint. You can certainly try to build a definition of "dominant" based on mining "hashpower", but that's a social/economic/political/geopolitical minefield much more than it is a technical factor inherent to bitcoin's underlying data structure, because the underlying data structure is forks ("dominance" is a lucky/expedient edge case).
      - keymone 6y ago
        You are confused. If you try spending bitcoin cash on bitcoin network you will fail, because bitcoin cash utxos are not bitcoin utxos and bitcoin cash is not bitcoin. There are no additional 42 mil bitcoin, there are additional 42 mil of some other tokens spendable on some other networks.
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        I don't think I am confused. I told you I have a different viewpoint on this. You are claiming different branches of the same tree are magically distinct from each other because they have different names and magic runes sketched into them with a pencil, and all I see is a single tree in a huge forest full of trees. I don't think I'm going to convince you of my viewpoint, but my viewpoint is not confused. You aren't likely to convince me that one branch is more scarce than the others because I can see how big the whole tree is, and especially because I can see how many other trees are in the forest already. (ETA: To make it clearer, you especially aren't going to convince me because I think Proof of Work is a waste of processing power. The real scarcity is processing power, and again, that's a political/economic game, that only props up artificial scarcity so far. Certainly not far enough that I trust the bitcoin tree to remain scarce in the long run. Not a question of if, but a question of when.)

by munk-a 6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

The fixed supply is the most interesting aspect. There could be an extremely huge gold deposit, or someone could figure out how to extract it from the ocean efficiently, or an asteroid / planet made of gold discovered and mined. But there will never be more bitcoin. More bitcoin would just fork the chain, and it wouldn't be bitcoin anymore.

WorldMaker 6y ago
Forks are so easy in practice though that it seems magic/wishful thinking to assume there's anything particularly special about one branch's artificial scarcity. It seems axiomatic that in using a tree-based structure branches should be the natural and expected state and pretending the other branches don't exist is a fascinating strategy that I just have a rough time thinking holds over the long term, especially when trying to maintain something like artificial scarcity.
- keymone 6y ago
  Fork of bitcoin is not bitcoin. Only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether that 21 million bitcoin branch will remain the dominant in terms of use and hashpower is under question, but there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    My exact point is that this is a fun "semantic" game. From a technical standpoint, the entire merkle tree is bitcoin, because that is the root data structure, however you want to "brand" individual forks/branches they are always going to be inter-related. The fact that forks already exist today seems to clearly undermine the idea that there are "only ever 21 million bitcoin" because even just taking "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Cash" into account alone represent an "additional" 42 million possible bitcoin. (That's before you take in the dozens of other bitcoin forks, and the larger picture of how generally non-scarce cryptocoins are in the general forest beyond the bitcoin tree.) It doesn't really matter which fork is "dominant", the artificial scarcity seems extremely artificial in a most brittle way and not that scarce from a respectable technical viewpoint. You can certainly try to build a definition of "dominant" based on mining "hashpower", but that's a social/economic/political/geopolitical minefield much more than it is a technical factor inherent to bitcoin's underlying data structure, because the underlying data structure is forks ("dominance" is a lucky/expedient edge case).
    - keymone 6y ago
      You are confused. If you try spending bitcoin cash on bitcoin network you will fail, because bitcoin cash utxos are not bitcoin utxos and bitcoin cash is not bitcoin. There are no additional 42 mil bitcoin, there are additional 42 mil of some other tokens spendable on some other networks.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        I don't think I am confused. I told you I have a different viewpoint on this. You are claiming different branches of the same tree are magically distinct from each other because they have different names and magic runes sketched into them with a pencil, and all I see is a single tree in a huge forest full of trees. I don't think I'm going to convince you of my viewpoint, but my viewpoint is not confused. You aren't likely to convince me that one branch is more scarce than the others because I can see how big the whole tree is, and especially because I can see how many other trees are in the forest already. (ETA: To make it clearer, you especially aren't going to convince me because I think Proof of Work is a waste of processing power. The real scarcity is processing power, and again, that's a political/economic game, that only props up artificial scarcity so far. Certainly not far enough that I trust the bitcoin tree to remain scarce in the long run. Not a question of if, but a question of when.)