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I've yet to have success explaining that very ex nihilo problem to crypto people* - even if you build out all of the last 100 years worth of financial system in
by pxmpxm 4y ago
I've yet to have success explaining that very ex nihilo problem to crypto people* - even if you build out all of the last 100 years worth of financial system innovation, at the very bottom all it's doing is very efficient price discovery of people's Pogs collection. It will all fold as such.
* anecdotal, but there seems to a strong inverse correlation between crypto enthusiasm and education in economics or finance. Mostly libertarian leaning tech bros in my sample set.
- tim333 4y agoUS dollars are bits of paper you can exchange for stuff based on people's perception of their value. Cryptocurrency is virtual bits of paper that you can exchange for stuff based on people's perception of their value. There are some similarities there.
- pxmpxm 4y agoActually not quite - dollars themselves are worth nothing, same way meters, or liters are worth nothing. They purely a convenience unit of measurement, so that a baker selling bread to a plumber doesn't first have to find flour mill that needs plumbing services to make the transaction. Crypto is by design made artificially scarce, largely because people don't understand the first point. This is also why no one besides dark web ehm "shoppers" actually transacts with crypto.
- whatisweb3 4y agoAll currency is worth nothing until it is worth something, and even that will change over human history. Crypto is as artificially scarce as any currency, except the scarcity is baked into clear rules in the protocol that cannot be arbitrarily changed by a single centralized actor. Some people actually like this model.