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The notion of "money" is quite well defined. You need 3 properties: 1) Store of value. Much easier to store gold/USD/Bitcoins than the food you will need in
by jcampbell1 14y ago
The notion of "money" is quite well defined. You need 3 properties:
1) Store of value. Much easier to store gold/USD/Bitcoins than the food you will need in the future.
2) Medium of Exchange. Can be used to exchange for real goods, thus avoiding the headache of barter.
3) Unit of Account. e.g. is easily divisible.
Bitcoins aren't great at #2, but gold is terrible at #3. If bitcoins prove to be a lasting store of value, then it will almost certainly be more "money" like than gold.
- grovulent 14y agoBitcoin hasn't yet proved it can do either 1 or 2 yet. If it succeeds in either it will do better than gold is currently doing as currency. But I wasn't trying to measure currency dick size. I was just making the point that not being good at 2 doesn't necessarily hurt its ability at 1.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoA person who bought ~1600 USD worth of bitcoin last year instead of an OZT of gold would be quite pleased with the performance of bitcoin in category #1.
- leishulang 14y agoThe other way, 99.999999% or more of human population disagree with him.
- jcampbell1 14y agoI wasn't disagreeing with anything you said. I was trying to tighten up the language around "what is a currency". From a conceptual level, BitCoin is much more currency friendly than gold due to both divisibility and ability to process electronic transactions.