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In order to fully attain this status, they merely need everyone to agree on their status as such, which is circular but nonetheless appears to have happened. I
by javert 15y ago
In order to fully attain this status, they merely need everyone to agree on their status as such, which is circular but nonetheless appears to have happened.
I'm not so sure that works.
With gold, it was not the case that everyone just "agreed to agree" that it was valuable.
Rather, gold was valued independently of its "investment value" due to its use as a status symbol/decoration/jewelry.
Likewise, because of that, there's no risk of everyone suddenly "disagreeing" that it's valuable, causing a huge collapse.
With bitcoin, it's unclear to me that there is a way to either bootstrap this "agreement" in the first place, or to sustain it.
- kyrsey 15y agoGlass also has decorative value. There's no easily imaginable risk of everyone suddenly deciding that it has NO decorative value. So what? That's not the relevant risk. The relevant risk is that whatever you are using as a currency will DECREASE in value. Say, from the level of something highly valued as a medium of exchange accepted everywhere, to the level of a mere decoration. Or from a peak value where you bought in big during a speculative bubble, to a lower value where (yes) it's still worth something, but worth less than if you had kept it in treasury bonds or an index fund or a farm.