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> even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair if most of the long-term supply get distributed in just the few years The number of early adopters with “diamond

by wyager 5y ago

> even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair if most of the long-term supply get distributed in just the few years The number of early adopters with “diamond hands”, as they say, who resisted the temptation to sell at $2, $10, $100, … is vanishingly small. History is littered with early adopters who bailed out. Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value, and if the gamble pays off then people can currently buy Bitcoin at a fraction of its presumptive future value. There’s no unfairness here. Everyone has had equal access the entire time, and Bitcoin people have been doing their best to get as many people onboarded as possible so they’re not left with “crumbs” after a monetary transition. Of course, it’s not totally unreasonable to have believed that Bitcoin wasn’t going to work out, but in that case people have no grounds to complain about unfairness - they simply made a wrong choice (by current appearances).

shkkmo 5y ago
> Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value Making money by buying and selling bitcoin is zero sum. People are only making money because other people are losing out. There is no possible way that everyone buys bitcoins and gets rich from it. Bitcoins depends on the existence of rubes and the continual expansion of the pyramid to make money for "investors".
- wyager 5y ago
  This is a very common misunderstanding of how monetization works. The actual value of Bitcoin comes from demonetizing other currently monetary assets (dollars, gold, real estate, etc.), plus some additional (partially externalized) value from increased efficiency as a monetary mechanism. People who are long those assets and not adequately hedged with Bitcoin are losing money to people who are long Bitcoin (assuming Bitcoin people are correct and it works out).
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Well it dramatically decreases the efficiency of the monetary system (requiring 60 days of electricity and 1 iPad of e-waste to scribble a few bytes into the ledger every 10 minutes), and only one of the other assets you pointed out create value, the others are unproductive. Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset - because people need a place to live and you can either live in a house yourself or you can rent it to others. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin. Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. While a large amount of its value is attributable to speculation it has myriad industrial uses, and jewelry use. Some of this demand may go away as there's a large overlap between goldbuggery and bitcoin maxis. Dollars have no intrinsic value, but instead their value is derived from demand which is created for them when they enter circulation. They're created via fractional reserve lending meaning that when a loan is issued, new dollars are created but also a debt is recorded - creating demand for those same dollars. That means dollars are 100% backed by demand for those dollars. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is nothing. It has no intrinsic value, it has no demand, it's simply a speculative number-go-up machine. It's not money, that's for sure. You could try and use it as money but that would be an utter disaster from a macroeconomic perspective. So yeah, parent is right, its roughly a pyramid shaped MLM with a negative-sum component - the $60,000,000 per day you have to pay to miners to keep the music playing. [edit] Also note that gold and real estate are not classically defined as "monetary assets" - those are for instance cash, bank deposits, investments in debt capital markets and lease investments. Monetary assets need to have a prescribed value in exact dollar terms.
    - wyager 5y ago
      This post is riddled with misconceptions, but I’m just going to focus on these because they’re probably the most productive places for you to start: > Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset… Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. When the primary medium of exchange is inflationary, people will use whatever non-inflationary value stores they can find with sufficient liquidity. Most of the value of gold, and much of the value of real estate, lie in their capacity as a wealth storage mechanism. They are monetized. Bitcoin does a better job of this and will likely subsume their monetization value. > It has no intrinsic value Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.
kingcharles 5y ago
I had dozens of Bitcoins in 2010 when you could mine them like they were nothing. I lost them all and didn't care, because.. worthless. RIGHT? I weep daily for my zombie coins.

by wyager 5y ago

shkkmo 5y ago

> Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value Making money by buying and selling bitcoin is zero sum. People are only making money because other people are losing out. There is no possible way that everyone buys bitcoins and gets rich from it. Bitcoins depends on the existence of rubes and the continual expansion of the pyramid to make money for "investors".

wyager 5y ago
This is a very common misunderstanding of how monetization works. The actual value of Bitcoin comes from demonetizing other currently monetary assets (dollars, gold, real estate, etc.), plus some additional (partially externalized) value from increased efficiency as a monetary mechanism. People who are long those assets and not adequately hedged with Bitcoin are losing money to people who are long Bitcoin (assuming Bitcoin people are correct and it works out).
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Well it dramatically decreases the efficiency of the monetary system (requiring 60 days of electricity and 1 iPad of e-waste to scribble a few bytes into the ledger every 10 minutes), and only one of the other assets you pointed out create value, the others are unproductive. Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset - because people need a place to live and you can either live in a house yourself or you can rent it to others. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin. Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. While a large amount of its value is attributable to speculation it has myriad industrial uses, and jewelry use. Some of this demand may go away as there's a large overlap between goldbuggery and bitcoin maxis. Dollars have no intrinsic value, but instead their value is derived from demand which is created for them when they enter circulation. They're created via fractional reserve lending meaning that when a loan is issued, new dollars are created but also a debt is recorded - creating demand for those same dollars. That means dollars are 100% backed by demand for those dollars. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is nothing. It has no intrinsic value, it has no demand, it's simply a speculative number-go-up machine. It's not money, that's for sure. You could try and use it as money but that would be an utter disaster from a macroeconomic perspective. So yeah, parent is right, its roughly a pyramid shaped MLM with a negative-sum component - the $60,000,000 per day you have to pay to miners to keep the music playing. [edit] Also note that gold and real estate are not classically defined as "monetary assets" - those are for instance cash, bank deposits, investments in debt capital markets and lease investments. Monetary assets need to have a prescribed value in exact dollar terms.
  - wyager 5y ago
    This post is riddled with misconceptions, but I’m just going to focus on these because they’re probably the most productive places for you to start: > Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset… Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. When the primary medium of exchange is inflationary, people will use whatever non-inflationary value stores they can find with sufficient liquidity. Most of the value of gold, and much of the value of real estate, lie in their capacity as a wealth storage mechanism. They are monetized. Bitcoin does a better job of this and will likely subsume their monetization value. > It has no intrinsic value Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.

kingcharles 5y ago

I had dozens of Bitcoins in 2010 when you could mine them like they were nothing. I lost them all and didn't care, because.. worthless. RIGHT? I weep daily for my zombie coins.