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On March 13 2024 14:46 KwarK wrote:
The argument that you can turn bitcoin into a useful currency is not an argument for it being a currency, it is an argument for it not being a currency. Useful currencies are already useful currencies. Bitcoin debit cards and the like don’t pay vendors in bitcoin, they pay them in money and liquidate bitcoin at spot to generate that money. It’s not money.
Bitcoin has all the parameters of being money, medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, divisible etc.
What's useful currency for your definition?
Is Japanese yen is useful in countries that ain't legal tender?
Bitcoin is accepted in more nations than Zimbabwe dollars or Argentina lira (which is a forced legal tender in Argentina)
It's traded more across the globe, which as I have mentioned, 97.5% of fiat transaction is FX market speculative trading.
I get dividends in USD, HKD and AUD, I hold 95% of my portfolio in USD (outside Bitcoin). I own at least 4 other currencies and swap (or liquidate in your term) into another when travelling.
Which one is the useful currency for me in your opinion?
What about gold coins? I got a few. Do you think it isn't currency or worse form of money than fiat?
Your definition of money doesn't exist academically not realistically. When majority of fiat has no international presence and constantly failing.
Look up how we economists measure money supply, there's at least 5 ways to measure it. Decades ago we used to think a paper note that ain't backed by gold is outrageous and somehow that is becoming a norm.
Let alone the entire thesis that money should be controlled by a non democratic elected group of elites and forced adoption to the population is simply lacking some level of self respect.
I am only lucky because I travel a lot and have a very diverse portfolio in stock and currency to see through all the "only my nation money is useful because I can spend it" mental blockage
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can you buy milk with bitcoins? cause you can with yen, usd, aud, and every other fiat currency.
lose the tin foil hat and stop being stupid. youre regurgitating the same arguments that every other bitcoin fanatic makes and they dont hold up. you dont buy real life shit with bitcoins. no one does.
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Zurich15355 Posts
Crypto definitely has one thing over real currencies, it's a continuously appreciating source of entertainment.
Remember NFTs hahaha.
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On March 13 2024 16:46 evilfatsh1t wrote:
can you buy milk with bitcoins? cause you can with yen, usd, aud, and every other fiat currency.
lose the tin foil hat and stop being stupid. youre regurgitating the same arguments that every other bitcoin fanatic makes and they dont hold up. you dont buy real life shit with bitcoins. no one does.
You are looping the bad arguments.
You can't buy milk in AUD if you are in Japan, can you? vice versa? You have to swap to whatever is accepted there.
And you actually can buy real life shit with bitcoin, I bought coffee beans from El Salvador, I bought bitcoin related stuff from the US even though I am not from over there. Pretty sure, I can buy things with bitcoin at Venezuela, and Argentina. I can buy coffee in some cafe in Australia with Bitcoin.
So what doesn't hold up? Or is it that you have a mental blockage?
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On March 13 2024 16:51 zatic wrote:
Crypto definitely has one thing over real currencies, it's a continuously appreciating source of entertainment.
Remember NFTs hahaha.
I am hardcore pro Bitcoin and pretty against all other crypto, but NFT have their use, especially in banking.
Search up Real world asset and how many major banks are using/adopting.
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/explainer-why-banks-are-looking-at-real-world-asset-tokenisation-20231019-p5edly
citibanks, jp morgan, HSBC, ANZ, bank of england are already adopting blockchain and/or RWA. EIB already issued bonds on a public blockchain.
It is going to happen eventually, because blockchain is simply more cross compatible and efficient than traditional finance backend. The question is whether the blockchain they use are private/public one.
I have econ background (masters) and work in the banking sector (not in blockchain tech), it's just somehow not covered nearly as much in the mainstream media, the NFT jpeg craze, with FTX exchanges collapses make the public unaware of these major movements that never slowed down even when we don't have cheap money from low rates anymore.
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United States43203 Posts
“It’s totally a medium of exchange, you just have to convert it into money first before you spend it”.
Also a private ledger is called an Excel spreadsheet. You’re going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that a distributed blockchain ledger is more efficient. More trustworthy and open, sure. More transparent, okay. But more efficient? Than an Excel spreadsheet? Really?
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On March 13 2024 20:40 KwarK wrote:
“It’s totally a medium of exchange, you just have to convert it into money first before you spend it”.
Also a private ledger is called an Excel spreadsheet. You’re going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that a distributed blockchain ledger is more efficient. More trustworthy and open, sure. More transparent, okay. But more efficient? Than an Excel spreadsheet? Really?
Bitcoin is very ancient tech now and many protocols have improved upon it. It's more a status symbol now than antything else imo. But the fundamentals of decentralizing finance and not needing a third party any longer is quite beautiful.
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Zurich15355 Posts
Entertainment value keeps appreciating!
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Bitcoin can succeed without being widely adopted as a medium of exchange, by being adopted as a store of value first. Also, the price is a common knowledge signal of the chance that bitcoin will eventually be widely adopted. It's like the stock price of Nvidia: everyone knows it's overvalued based on the fundamental cash flow of the company now, but few think it's in a bubble [1]. In a way, Nvidia's price makes sense because if AI takes off then a bunch of tech stocks could be worth much more than it is worth now. Similarly, bitcoin has a chance of being enshrined as digital gold. All it needs is a solid foundation of virtues (permission-less, decentralized, anti-inflationary ...) for the self perpetuating "belief in value" to take off (fundamentally, all that is required for for something to be accepted as money is that you believe it will hold value tomorrow [and you believe this because others believe this]). It could even happen as a majority of redditors ignore, deny, hate, and fight it, until they don't. Before that happens, institutional investors will speculate on bitcoin, and there's a high chance of it surpassing $100k in the run this year, regardless of bitcoin's eventual fate.
If you think that bitcoin has >90% chance to fail, then say so. The price history of bitcoin is evidence against this; there's at least 10% chance of becoming digital gold and 10x-ing in price (I think 33%). A weird dynamic at play is that because money is a self-fulfilling prophecy, public discussions like these feel like that add up to influence the price. So people tend to overstate their positions, even if the truth is that we're not sure (is it possible to predict what people 15 years now will think, when we will probably have widespread automation and space energy), and our rationality is influenced by if we hold or held bitcoin. To get at the truth, we should imagine as if we were someone in the distant past who marginally had the opportunity to buy or pass on bitcoin. If you bought it, imagine you considered it but passed; if you didn't, imagine you were barely nudged into buying and holding it. Both copies would be surprised by the price going up as it did, but they may have learned different lessons as their 'future' was revealed.
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Northern Ireland25996 Posts
It depends on what we’re talking about failure constituting?
As digital gold? As an investment medium, or as a transformative and widely adopted currency? As digital baby beanies?
I mean these are rather different areas with very different metrics for success.
From where I’m sitting blockchain tech in general does have some interesting applications. And I was quite interested along with what I’d say would be your ‘tech enthusiast’ types.
But we’re quite a bit down the road and a lot of that manifestly hasn’t manifested in widespread adoption. Genuine microtransactional payment methods to enable very granular ‘pay for what you use’ mechanisms, as a way to untether from advertising models, or subscription models etc.
All quite interesting to me but equally it’s been how long?
From where I’m sitting that initial combo of tech nerds and idealists were pretty quickly supplanted by the very kind of forces, or the ‘finance bros’ that they were excited to cut out of proceedings potentially.
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United States43203 Posts
Digital gold as an aspiration is pretty weird given that we’ve basically abandoned gold as a currency. It’s like if you tried to sell a new form of transportation as a revolutionary new approach to the horse.
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On March 13 2024 16:51 zatic wrote:
Crypto definitely has one thing over real currencies, it's a continuously appreciating source of entertainment.
Remember NFTs hahaha.
Idk man, seeing Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina, Zimbabwe.. etc try to print themselves out of corruption is pretty funny too.
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Northern Ireland25996 Posts
Is the criticism of fiat currency that you can just print money, or is it that you can’t just print your way out of trouble?
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Yeah, I am pretty anti-crypto but if money is sufficiently fucked in your country, Bitcoin really may be better. That's one of the only convincing things I've really heard in its favour, and being from a country where money is not currently fucked, I can't really evaluate how true it is.
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Northern Ireland25996 Posts
Yeah that’s a pretty legit use case, although I guess if your country’s wider economy is generally fucked you still can’t fully insulate yourself, plus I mean if an individual has a supply of a more stable fiat currency it’s not fundamentally all that different.
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On March 13 2024 20:40 KwarK wrote:
“It’s totally a medium of exchange, you just have to convert it into money first before you spend it”.
Also a private ledger is called an Excel spreadsheet. You’re going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that a distributed blockchain ledger is more efficient. More trustworthy and open, sure. More transparent, okay. But more efficient? Than an Excel spreadsheet? Really?
It takes days to have final settlement in banks, weeks for international transfer.
So yes, it is a lot more efficient.
Even if we assume it's the same final settlement, the fact that it is immutable (transparency leads to accountability but not necessarily immutable nor secure), remove tones of issues like auditing.
I am not sure why I would have any trouble convincing you on this. Traditional banking sector on the backend hardly progressed and slapped with tonnes of auditing and compliance issues.
On March 14 2024 06:18 KwarK wrote:
Digital gold as an aspiration is pretty weird given that we’ve basically abandoned gold as a currency. It’s like if you tried to sell a new form of transportation as a revolutionary new approach to the horse.
Except the "revolutionary new approach" is just a giant social experiment that hasn't even lasted more than a century and we are running at turbo speed crashing.
I think some people just lack the background to fully comprehend how terrible things are, or they are blaming the issues incorrectly to something else.
Let's take USD as an example.
There is no legit way to measure just how much money supply there is in the system. There is 5 different ways to measure money supply, most economists would give that to you.
But it's pretty much a lie, there is no actual measurement of the entire USD circulating the globe, it is missing the entire Euro dollar system (which keeps USD the strongest currency there is)
We have all the evidence something is wrong.
Cheap liquidity for past few decades with low real growth and huge debt. Rent seeking becoming the main product value, rather than a productive society. MASSIVE income disparity.
Unless you are a modern monetary theorist that essentially say debt don't matter, there is something wrong.
Now USD is the strongest currency there is, how many more fiat money will collapse in the next decades? I guess in that sense, that is pretty revolutionary.
We don't even know how to diagnose what's the issue, because money as I have mentioned, have became a tool of the economy and speculative trading, instead of representative of hard asset that is fairly immune to manipulation.
Going back to the core thesis of money, if money is value then you are saying money is determined by the central and private banks? As in they can determined how much value SHOULD exist in a system?
It's not logical, and like I said, a complete lack of self respect.
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On March 13 2024 21:23 Uldridge wrote:Show nested quote +On March 13 2024 20:40 KwarK wrote:
“It’s totally a medium of exchange, you just have to convert it into money first before you spend it”.
Also a private ledger is called an Excel spreadsheet. You’re going to have a lot of trouble convincing me that a distributed blockchain ledger is more efficient. More trustworthy and open, sure. More transparent, okay. But more efficient? Than an Excel spreadsheet? Really? Bitcoin is very ancient tech now and many protocols have improved upon it. It's more a status symbol now than antything else imo. But the fundamentals of decentralizing finance and not needing a third party any longer is quite beautiful.
Hard disagree from me.
Blockchain (public ledger) will solve plenty of issues, and vastly improve on efficiencies, but that was never the innovation.
The real innovation is to create a new hard money, through proof of work, transact in a trustless and permissionless manner.
It is the world's longest running most secure public ledger that anyone is open to attack.
It represents the thesis that money cannot be created out of thin air, and that it must be HARD.
POW ensures a separation of power between miners and node operators. (POS validators and node runners usually don't have this)
It is ethical in the sense that no one needs to trust anyone, forced collaboration.
Open source and open protocol.
Permission-less.
Any miners are welcome to join and leave at any time, from any where.
No special "foundation" that has special bag of coins reserved for "Development".
Can outlast any government.
It isn't forced adoption by any government through tax. (though El Salvador forces companies to take it as legal tender)
POW is much more simple than POS
I personally think it is one of the most elegantly designed system ever created.
An entire monetary system that encapsulate the theology on money, game theory, the importance of self custody, and a fully functioning system in just 9 pages.
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You can buy things for bitcoin in the same way you can buy things for MTG cards, you can sell them and get a proper currency that is accepted by vendors. I once knew a guy who did exactly that, whenever he went on a trip he took a bunch of MTG cards and sold them in local MTG stores to get local currency. Are MTG cards currency then?
As things stand now, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are functionally just highly volatile speculative financial assets, with vast amounts held by early adopters. And while the traditional banking system can be inefficient, one has to remember that it handles financial transactions for essentionally the entire world, billions of people. Given the amount of transactions processed every day by banks, credit card companies etc, i would say they still get things done pretty fast. By comparison, crypto blockchains process an infinitely smaller amount of transactions and can still be susceptible to slowdowns during peak hours or to volatile gas fees that can unpredicably increase the cost of making the transaction.
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Northern Ireland25996 Posts
On March 14 2024 18:24 PoulsenB wrote:
You can buy things for bitcoin in the same way you can buy things for MTG cards, you can sell them and get a proper currency that is accepted by vendors. I once knew a guy who did exactly that, whenever he went on a trip he took a bunch of MTG cards and sold them in local MTG stores to get local currency. Are MTG cards currency then?
As things stand now, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are functionally just highly volatile speculative financial assets, with vast amounts held by early adopters. And while the traditional banking system can be inefficient, one has to remember that it handles financial transactions for essentionally the entire world, billions of people. Given the amount of transactions processed every day by banks, credit card companies etc, i would say they still get things done pretty fast. By comparison, crypto blockchains process an infinitely smaller amount of transactions and can still be susceptible to slowdowns during peak hours or to volatile gas fees that can unpredicably increase the cost of making the transaction.
This basically.
It’s the real fundamental problem with a prospective currency with a finite supply, and it’s that fundamental nature that sees it generally end up functioning as a speculative investment vehicle as opposed to a stable currency primarily used to purchase other things.
I don’t personally think the tech or potential other applications are without value, but crypto bros will sit and hum when it’s pointed out before sidestepping into complaining about fiat currencies and government banks.
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On March 14 2024 18:29 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On March 14 2024 18:24 PoulsenB wrote:
You can buy things for bitcoin in the same way you can buy things for MTG cards, you can sell them and get a proper currency that is accepted by vendors. I once knew a guy who did exactly that, whenever he went on a trip he took a bunch of MTG cards and sold them in local MTG stores to get local currency. Are MTG cards currency then?
As things stand now, Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are functionally just highly volatile speculative financial assets, with vast amounts held by early adopters. And while the traditional banking system can be inefficient, one has to remember that it handles financial transactions for essentionally the entire world, billions of people. Given the amount of transactions processed every day by banks, credit card companies etc, i would say they still get things done pretty fast. By comparison, crypto blockchains process an infinitely smaller amount of transactions and can still be susceptible to slowdowns during peak hours or to volatile gas fees that can unpredicably increase the cost of making the transaction. This basically. It’s the real fundamental problem with a prospective currency with a finite supply, and it’s that fundamental nature that sees it generally end up functioning as a speculative investment vehicle as opposed to a stable currency primarily used to purchase other things. I don’t personally think the tech or potential other applications are without value, but crypto bros will sit and hum when it’s pointed out before sidestepping into complaining about fiat currencies and government banks.
Nope, it's not a fundamental problem.
99% small cap stocks are volatile, it's the nature of smaller market cap, immature of market and the type of holders.
And crypto market is essentially a mini FX market, volatility is what brings in trading profit, which is why it has such a large trading volume even for small altconis at the moment.
But over time more institutions adoption, more companies holding it as reserve, including ETF will make this less volatile, which have been happening as volatility for bitcoin has been going down every cycle.
In fact bitcoin supply has been halved every halvening, but volatility has been decreasing proves my point.
Take a look at the second largest market cap crypto, Ethereum that has self-tuning money supply, with an infinite max supply, has more volatility than bitcoin should highlight how wrong that assumption is.
Or going back to gold, that has highly fixed issue rate, and "max" supply are extremely stable.
On the other hand, oil is insanely volatile, precisely because it is mostly about its demand use case, instead of monetary store of value premium that gold has.
There's no side stepping with fiat currencies and gov banks. It's just a matter of understanding the thesis and value proposal of bitcoin.
The type of holders will be increasingly sophisticated once volatility goes down, which drives out traders.
Ironically early adopters are always either people like me who have long history of finance/econ background, or degens traders flipping it like burgers, and the ones sitting out have minimum idea of how things work but don't quite get it until they finally do.
In this cycle, it is definitely the turning point with the spot ETF approval. (though spot ETF can be used as a trading vehicle as well)
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EPT
