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Nothing of value to you, but thankfully nobody made you the global arbiter of what people value.
by logicchains 5y ago
Nothing of value to you, but thankfully nobody made you the global arbiter of what people value.
- kubb 5y agoRight, otherwise people couldn't speculate on crypto prices, the horror.
- rafael09ed 5y agoMight as well make it so people can't speculate on stocks or commodities.
- minikites 5y agoPork bellies have inherent value, cryptocurrency has no inherent value.
- LadyCailin 5y agoNeither does cash, then?
- minikites 5y agoWhat percentage of merchants accept cryptocurrency and what percentage of merchants accept cash? "Fiat currency" may not have inherent value in the same way as gold or pork bellies, but stable currencies (e.g. Euro, US dollar) are backed by governments which have incentives to be good stewards of their responsibility and if those currencies collapsed, I don't think the world would be in a state where cryptocurrency would retain any value.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoGold, and Silver, can be made into jewelry.
- lupire 5y agoSo can bitcoins.
- geofft 5y agoThankfully? The problem is that we did make rich people the global arbiter of what people value, by giving them more units which can be used to value things. This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. Ten billionaires have way more ability to decide on something's value than ten people making minimum wage. (This is also the fallacy in "If you don't like it, why not short it and make money instead of complaining?" I don't like it, and I know my short positions aren't going to influence the market as much as some rich guy's much larger long positions.)
- exo762 5y ago> This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. All modern democracies are representative. People themselves don't decide about things, their representatives do. This is the price we are willing to pay to get effective governance.
- geofft 5y agoSure, but not all representative systems are democracies. A king may represent his subjects (in foreign policy and war, for instance, and even sometimes in rituals) and generally has way more leverage to be effective at however he chooses to govern than a president or prime minister does, but it's not a democracy. One of the usual goals of a democracy is equal representation ("one person, one vote"). You can transfer your representation to someone else - either directly, in the sense of proxy voting, or indirectly, in the sense of voting for a representative - but you don't give it up permanently. When elections next happen (and if elections don't regularly happen, it's not a democracy), you get your vote back and can freely choose what to do with it, again. If your representative isn't doing what you want, you can choose another one. That's not true of the system of money. Even if it were theoretically been true at some point, once you transfer money to someone else, the associated power of that money stays with them or whoever they choose to transfer it to. If you bought Windows 95 for $209.95 a quarter century ago, that fraction of your ability to "vote" on how society values things left you a quarter century ago, after spending it exactly once on valuing Windows 95, and it probably never returned to you (unless you became a Microsoft employee or supplier). So, someone who makes something that is (rightly or wrongly) highly valued thereby accumulates the ability to value things in the future, and have disproportionate influence on what is then going to be highly valued. This process repeats continuously and has repeated for centuries.