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I oppose Bitcoin for the same reason I oppose money not based on gold or other valuable physical resource. It lets one entity to produce money out of nowhere, a
by b0rsuk 14y ago
I oppose Bitcoin for the same reason I oppose money not based on gold or other valuable physical resource. It lets one entity to produce money out of nowhere, at the drop of a hat.
There used to be a video in higher quality, but this will have to do. Hans Hermann Hoppe gives a concise, high-level explanation of money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gizetn5VuA0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gizetn5VuA0
- josephagoss 14y agoThere is a hard limit to the amount of Bitcoins however.
- ashray 14y agoI don't get this. If there are 21 million bitcoins but they're infinitely divisible - you can send 0.0000001 BTC to someone.. Then how is there a hard limit? Countries have done this many times by dropping zeros when their currencies devalue, etc. The whole 'there are a fixed number of bitcoins' makes no sense if you can just divide the currency unit by 1 million and call the new currency micro bit coin.
- jlgreco 14y agoThey are not infinitely divisible, merely very divisible. Kind of like elemental gold...
- nicpottier 14y agoUhm..last I checked gold was infinitely divisible too? your argument makes no sense. Divisibility is not the issue, dilution is.
- NowhereMan 14y agoThey are not infinitely divisible. Bitcoins are divisible to 8 decimal places. This means that there are 21 quadrillion unitary elements.
- zanny 14y agoThe problem with fixed bitcoins (and while I like btc, I think it is a real problem) is that when you eventually hit 21 million BTC, you only lose bitcoins from lost wallets from that point forward, so the money supply shrinks over time and the currency deflates with no way to get back lost coins. Deflation is bad because then you can sit on btc (like people are now) and the exchange rate goes up because they gain in scarcity. They aren't really useful as a unit of exchange then, there was a story a day or two ago about how btc (while improving) still has 1/3 the turnover rate of fiat market currencies because most people are holding them as an investment. A part of that is that btc isn't widely circulated for exchange yet, and sitting on it instead of a savings account makes sense when the speculative market is going through the roof. So even if you wanted to spend it, you still have to translate it back into fiat currencies and use those right now.
- josephagoss 14y agoWhat I meant is you can't make more. If someone owns a million Bitcoins, that million Bitcoins cannot be devalued by someone mining a trillion Bitcoins. More Bitcoins cannot come into existence after the 21 million limit. Sure, they can be slit down and down, but Gold can too. The difference is you can mine more Gold. Not possible with Bitcoin.
- Devilboy 14y agoI guess the main difference is that we know exactly how many bitcoins are left to be mined, while we don't really know how much gold is left in the earth's crust.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Devilboy 14y agoWell then you'll be happy to hear that Bitcoin does NOT allow one entity to produce money out of nowhere.
- gamblor956 14y agoExactly. Bitcoin allows many entities to produce money out of nowhere...though this ethereal production will eventually stop at 21 million, if Bitcoin survives that long.
- tlrobinson 14y agoBy the same logic gold miners produce money out of thin air too. It's nearly equivalent, except the rate of production halves every 2 years.
- zanny 14y agoIt isn't out of nowhere, it is relative to the market price of electricity and transistors necessary to do the work to generate transaction hashes. There is a valuation of how much money you spend on hardware and power to run a bitcoiner miner to obtain the new btc entering the system.