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I'd put myself in the "very intrigued by the idea of crypto but extremely skeptical in practice" camp. I do agree with him that it's largely a Ponzi scheme that

I'd put myself in the "very intrigued by the idea of crypto but extremely skeptical in practice" camp. I do agree with him that it's largely a Ponzi scheme that will absolutely continue its cycle of boom and bust, but his "money" argument feels exceedingly weak. I very rarely hear the bitcoin crowd claiming anything around bitcoin as money, but more like gold; a store of value that is admittedly difficult to move around. You can't pay your taxes in any asset that isn't money. The government isn't going to take a bar of gold (or if they will, I certainly don't know how to give it to them), and they definitely won't take your Micky Mantle baseball card or Rembrandt painting unless you've gotten so far down the hole that they've got people liquidating those things to wring the money out of them to pay your debt. There are a lot of things that represent monetary value that definitively aren't money and can't be used as such, but that doesn't negate their value.

dgellow 6y ago
Doesn’t any Ponzi scheme a “store of value”? Until it isn’t.
rednerrus 6y ago
The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value. Gold is a value store because people can use it to make things, and historically it's been one of the assets that women could own.
- scubbo 6y ago
  > The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value That's an interesting claim, especially since you don't specify _stable_ store of value. Do you believe that trading cards are not a store of value? Or shares? The only inherent value of a trading card is that you can wipe your ass with it or set it on fire to stay warm, and yet people often pay hundreds of dollars (or more!) for them.
- bhupy 6y ago
  One could argue that the "intrinsic value" of crypto is that it enables censorship resistant point-to-point data transfer (transactions). As long as some subset of people are using it for that purpose, it has value, even if it's a tiny minority. I imagine that of all the gold in the world, the vast majority of it is the "store of value" kind, and not the "computer chip ingredient" or "jewelry" kind.

dgellow 6y ago

Doesn’t any Ponzi scheme a “store of value”? Until it isn’t.

rednerrus 6y ago

The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value. Gold is a value store because people can use it to make things, and historically it's been one of the assets that women could own.

scubbo 6y ago
> The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value That's an interesting claim, especially since you don't specify _stable_ store of value. Do you believe that trading cards are not a store of value? Or shares? The only inherent value of a trading card is that you can wipe your ass with it or set it on fire to stay warm, and yet people often pay hundreds of dollars (or more!) for them.
bhupy 6y ago
One could argue that the "intrinsic value" of crypto is that it enables censorship resistant point-to-point data transfer (transactions). As long as some subset of people are using it for that purpose, it has value, even if it's a tiny minority. I imagine that of all the gold in the world, the vast majority of it is the "store of value" kind, and not the "computer chip ingredient" or "jewelry" kind.