404 - Page Not Found
Nothing to see here.
A blo>ckchain is an immutable ledger, but alas, our website is not. The page you’re looking for is either unavailable or no longer exists.
The fact that institutional holders are some of the biggest holders is a red flag in itself given that crypto marketed itself as a solution to problematic power structures. So far it has no use other than speculative value.
The report doesn’t seem to address any of the most damning arguments I’ve heard against crypto currently. Namely:
Bitcoin is mostly just a vehicle for speculation and is too slow and expensive to be considered for actual commerce
Nothing about crypto directly solves any of the existing problems with currency, since the problems are social structures and financial incentives brought about as an emergent property of organizations and are not a function of the currency itself (some of the biggest holders of crypto are the same huge investment agencies that created the subprime loan crash in '08)
The fact that blockchains are enormously inefficient, given that unfathomable amounts of redundant work are being done (Visa uses about 1.5 Wh per transaction vs BTC which is about 1,500-2000 kWh, making BTC over one million times less efficient)
In my opinion, there’s a reason why you haven’t been able to do anything with your Crypto besides bet on it for over a decade now. It’s because it’s just a bad product, engineered by techbros who think they know better than the global banking system how to create a decent financial product.
“Stores” and “companies that provide the service”.
What’s so confusing about that? Two distinct word combinations that mean very different things, even without the context of the argument most people would comprehend that those are two different things. Unless the entire purpose of the exchange was in bad faith, than yeah someone would intentionally misconstrue them, ie troll. Like you’re doing now. So was this intentionally or are you actually this lacking in reading comprehension…?
Stores are companies that provide a service. That’s what’s confusing about it.
But apparently your words are so perfect that anyone who claims they don’t understand them must be lying about it for some reason which also confuses me.
Why would I say the same thing twice in a sentence…? And I didn’t say “a” service I said “THE” service.
Excuses and fallacies to save face, you are either here in bad faith or are severely lacking reading comprehension and shouldn’t be conversing. I leave it to you to do the right thing and leave this argument.
How am I saving face by not understanding something? Doesn’t that make me look stupid if you’re correct and it was so clear that anyone could understand it?
I asked you do the right thing and leave the argument, which you didn’t which only means you’re here in bad faith. There is no you wanting to understand, I’ve been clear, very clear this entire exchange.
And since you’ve shown your intent and I see you just spout this same stuff in every thread on lemmy you are now blocked.
There are but virtually no one uses them, and I’m sure if they did they would take it away the due to the aforementioned issues. It’s just kind of a mess. It’s not not a good vehicle for commerce and it never has been.
The burden of proof is on you for making the original claim, I’ll provide stats once you do. The mere fact that these companies exist and have provided these services for years should ample proof to most people who want to have a discussion.
It’s funny, POS for most cryptos actually have cheaper fees than some other forms of payment, square wants 3.5% to charge a credit card, most crypto POS are sub 2%….
That’s also, what one of 100s of companies? It adds up.
BTC has a performant layer 2 called lightning. And if layer 2s are not your jam, there are plenty of L1s that can handle 1000s of transactions per second
Crypto solves the problem of having a central bank control the money supply. Also having private organizations controlling digital payment rails. Provides options or underbanked people in countries with unstable financial systems. I could go on…
Blockchains do not use an enormous amount of energy. You are thinking of the consensus mechanism used by proof of work cryptocurrencies. There are alternative consensus mechanisms that use much less energy
Also the adoption rates are not a measure of utility. The Linux desktop has been around 30 years and has an adoption rate under 5 percent. Mastodon has not grown as fast as twitter did. Democracy is not used by the majority of governments and where it is, voter turnout is low.
Is it also your opinion that these things are bad products?
Decentralized systems just take longer to mature. It’s crazy to me that fediverse users don’t understand this.
It’s not crazy. You are just shouting into the Gartner trough of disillusionment. Statistics favor an angry opinionated mob currently. I don’t know what the time line is (or I’d be rich) but eventually the response to this sort of comment will move away from grunt and downvote.
With Bitcoin it is simply impossible. And generally there’s a blockchain trilemma - it should be fast, decentralized and secure, and you can’t make a blockchain that is all three. Bitcoin reasonably sacrifices “fast”, Lightning sacrifices “decentralized”, and so on.
Being pro crypto doesn’t make you more experienced, it just makes you a gullible idiot who falls for scams. Also 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
I think the reason s lot of people don’t think crypto is a useful currency is because they’ve tried to use it to buy drugs and the process is awkward, slow, incredibly expensive, and messy.
There are so many little steps where someone else takes a cut of your money and waiting to see if the transaction goes through is agonisingly long. When buying weed it’s understandable but no one is going to accept that for anything where there’s other options.
And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures.
My point is that just because something doesn’t achieve widespread adoption immediately does not mean it is a failure. I use both Linux desktop and the Fediverse and the fact that they are not in widespread use doesn’t rob them of virtue for the people that use them. Technology adoption is a complex thing and its incredibly reductionist to just say "crypto has been around for a decade and a half and you still can’t use it for anything therefore its a failure. Our legacy financial system is very entrenched and its not to going to unseated overnight. These things take time.
Ultimately I think it should come down to consumer choice, those that prefer centralized finance should use that and those that are OK with the added overheard of decentralized finance should be able to have that choice. That is why I make the analogy to these other systems. Linux desktop for a long time was harder to use but it was worth it for people whose values aligned with open source software. Crypto has a similar trajectory and faces similar uphill battles including negative attitudes from those using competing systems. But for those who value what it provides, it is worth it.
I fail to see how crypto or BTC alleviates the problems with fiat that exist under failed regimes. If anything I feel like it would exacerbate them given that crypto operates on a public, append-only ledger that gives disproportionate power to those that leverage their existing influence and are able to interact with the ledger in bad faith/deceptively. Empowering the unbanned unbanked is a common talking point but I don’t see it actually becoming real outside of a few niche cases that tend to be exaggerated in crypto spaces. And even then I’m not sure those will stick around in the long run.
I will believe in initiatives like the lightning network when they actually see mass adoption. I personally don’t see that happening because of the aforementioned problems. Scalability and practicality compared to existing standards being the primary ones.
Power is still an issue considering BTC uses as much electricity as a small nation despite being the hobby of a few hundred thousand people, versus the entire global banking industry which is a million times more efficient as things stand currently. I don’t think “but it’s worth it because BTC is good” is really a good counter to that. It’s not sustainable.
Also “it’s too complicated to explain” isn’t a particularly persuasive argument lol.
To add to this concern, centralized currency has its pros. Because it’s centralized, it can be governed. If I wire some money to an unintended target, sometimes that money can be recovered. There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
Then there’s the Seth Green incident where he got phished and someone stole his IP rights to his bored ape. If the ape NFTs were centralized, Seth could have reported the fraud and had it returned.
How would this work at scale? Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss? What if your grandma gets her account stolen, she just loses her retirement with no recourse?
I’m quite happy that the legal system backed by the police and military are backing up my fiat.
There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
This sort of thing basically happened to me once with crypto and I literally just kept it, was great, minor miracle since I didn’t know how I was gonna pay rent that month and it was basically the full amount.
Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss?
Yes. Realistically though big companies wanting to custody large amounts of crypto are outsourcing this to reputable third parties like Coinbase specializing in secure crypto storage. Probably have insurance on it also.
This report has no critical value, they’re trying to convince sceptic investors that bitcoin has a value as an investment. Their whole argument is that it has the qualities and potential to replace other monetary goods. There is no questions regarding how the system works, the speculation, the inequalities, etc. Looking at the state of the world and the role of capitalism in this tragedy, it feels completely disconnected to read that bitcoin is great because it could maintain the statu quo.
I also noticed that it was strikingly uncritical. Does not reivew any mass-adoption scenario, lists very few drawbacks, and seems to be a hype piece targeting individual investors.
That "fairly concise analysis" has way too much "gun manufacturer says guns are not a problem" energy to be trusted. Specially comming from an investment firm, which are the Masters of Scamming.
In my economics 101 gen ed course back in college, I remember a story about some society somewhere that used boulders as currency. But they were such a pain to lug around that often times they wouldn’t move them. They’d just keep track of who owned which boulders. “I’ll give you one boulder for a cow.” “Ok, it’s a deal.” “Cool, cool. The boulder over in so-and-so’s field is your now. Pleasure doing business with you.”
There was even a case where someone tried to transport a boulder across a lake but the boat sank midway and the boulder ended up on the lakebed under many feet of water. But they kept exchanging the boulder as currency for goods and services.
I’m imagining a dystopian Idiocracy-like future where Bitcoin has deleted itself, but people still trade seed phrases on slips of paper or pressed into metal plates with a “there’s 7 whole Bitcoins in this wallet. Trust me bro.”
The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
Funny, I was thinking about the point where the Golgafrinchams on Earth adopted the leaf as currency and then burned down all the forests to control inflation.
“I’ll give you one boulder for a cow.” “Ok, it’s a deal.” “Cool, cool. The boulder over in so-and-so’s field is your now. Pleasure doing business with you.”
This is how gold standard currencies work (or used to work). Most western currencies like the US dollar used to be permanently pegged to a specific value of gold kept in national treasuries (the Bretton-Woods system), and the dollar was meant to be redeemable for this gold. But because of the impracticality of handling and storing actual physical metals actual trade was almost never handled in gold.
In reality, the US financial system already kind of runs like your “dystopian future”, and has done so since 1971. There is no inherent value to a US dollar besides the federal government saying “trust me bro”.
The fact that people give money to the US, or any country, for essentially an IOU slip of paper promising to pay you back with interest is so weird.
Speaking of gold reminds me of this sci-fi book where aliens come to earth and cause damage. They ask how they can make things right and are explained gold and the monetary system. They go oh, we can totally filter gold from the oceans and pay you back in tons of gold per day. This caused panic as the huge influx would crash the system. I think it was an asimov short story.
It’s not weird once you realize that almost nothing has any inherent value if it isn’t food, medicine, ammunition, or fuel.
Gold does not have any inherent value. It has value for the exact same reason money does, only fiat currency isn’t prone to the problems a gold standard causes.
IDK is it really, to me pegging the value to some arbitrary piece of metal seems weirder. If we actually traded real gold and the government decided “hey no, that doesn’t count” you’d be forced to give it back anyway, and they could also force you to do it for no gold. Monetary value only ever had one real source and that’s the person with sufficient force to enforce the trade, which in any stable country is the government.
Funnily enough about that “forced to give back real gold used for trade”, the US kinda did that at one point, making it for a time illegal to possess more than a certain amount of gold and requiring people give anything over that amount to the government for a set price.
Oh, it’s so much weirder than that. When you take a loan, the bank just creates the money based on a percentage of their deposits. Then, they can count that deposit as part of their “real” money. They now have a debt, which does not count against their “real” money
They can then package the loans together, and sell those. This is again “real” money, so can be deposited and used to give out more loans.
But wait! You’re probably thinking “that’s way too simple, let’s run statistics on this!” You’d be right, welcome to the first layer of modern banking.
What happens if a bunch of people can’t repay? Then the bank hides whatever money they can before admitting they can’t make their payments, collapses, and a federal banking system takes over to repackage the assets and loans to another bank (usually without the customers noticing). Or the government writes you a bailout check.
You might think “wait, my constitution says who can print money, why do we have to take loans?” Because they haven’t declassified what happened to the last US president who thought private banks probably shouldn’t be given the monopoly to print money.
What happens if this happens all at once? Well that’s the government’s problem. They can devalue their currency by printing more money or take a loan from the world bank.
Then, you get a bank official that gets to take over your country’s finances. Depending how much the US likes you and how hard you bend over, either you get austerity and they sell off your economic future for a bit more cash now, and you get milked for tax dollars indefinitely, or they cut you a deal, and they give you a way out eventually if you do everything they say.
You might think you could just let the banks fail, but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom.
You might think about pinning the printing of money to exchange rates or to tax income and managing the banking system socially (since the risk is socialized, why let someone take the profits?), but no. That’s how you get an injection of freedom, comrade.
You should probably stop thinking about other systems before you look a little low on freedom, this is how banking and money work.
Their being wrong is pretty self-evident with even the most cursory of Google.
I’m not the person arguing in favor of wild climbs, but rather the person suggesting that those arguments have no proof, and don’t match the accepted reality. The more wild the claim, the stronger the necessary proof.
I was being glib, because I find our monetary system so ridiculous I have to embrace absurdity or it’s upsetting
Obviously the JFK conspiracy is light on evidence, but the entire situation is definitely a conspiracy - something happened, it could’ve been geopolitical or the people keeping tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald really messed up. His story alone is pretty crazy… But anyways, every time I dive into it I find myself leaning more towards it being related to his banking statements than the alternatives, but who knows.
The foreign interventions are mostly declassified though, they’re an absurd read. It wasn’t always the US, but it was always one of the 5 eyes who got involved when alternate systems started to gain traction.
The IMF/World bank piece wasn’t even exaggerated though. Obviously they make it sound a lot more innocent, but I don’t think I even exaggerated this - it’s a legitimate conspiracy working out in the open. It’s truly horrifying. I didn’t even know how it worked until I took an install in a relatively rich Caribbean country (aka big tourist Island with a large “white” population).
It was a tiny contract - I took it to help someone out and see somewhere beautiful, couldn’t have been more than $15k all together - literal hobbiest level gear. It’s not working and I’ve only got a day left to make it work (at least it turns out it wasn’t my fault), and this dude comes up with a big camera like he owns the place, says he’s from the world bank, and starts “politely” asking me to pose for the camera and do an interview about how this will help the country. I have no idea how to answer, I’m sunburnt, this isn’t really my field, and after seeing the computer center has all the computers on dirty blocks because it floods, I genuinely doubt this would be helpful in any situation… It’s basically a backup for if their Internet goes down, but in that case the place is probably flooded anyways
Turns out, the country was getting a pretty big uptick in income from tourism, so the world bank “offered” to fund a bunch of (from my perspective at least) unhelpful infrastructure projects. They’d had decades of austerity before that, their roads were worn out, the power grid was janky, obviously there was seasonal flooding in important places, and although tourism was their main income they didn’t have transportation or hotels… Just bed and breakfasts and a dude I could arrange to give me a ride in the mornings.
So instead of fixing anything critical, they had some plan to build a road straight across the mountain range, with some crazy long tunnel for an insane price and a multi-year time frame.
People were pissed. Their economy was basically government funding allocated by the IMF “recommendations”, which come with the stick of “we’ll pull out and downgrade your credit if you don’t pass this”, and people hanging around waiting for odd jobs from the people on the government payroll.
So the world bank was doing a bunch of little projects that changed nothing, and covering them like the staged rescue effort videos China loves so much.
This felt very weird to me. Google any 2-3 descriptions of the IMF (just read an and you’ll notice they allude to a lot Investopedia, first result, just read the IMF part carefully, then hit Wikipedia if you want to go down the rabbit hole). It’s pretty dark, it’s stuff you’d think was from a century ago, but it’s actively happening still.
So if anything, I think I undersold the reality of that real life conspiracy.
I’d be genuinely interested to know if I was actually wrong about any of this… I’ve found a lot of post-hock justifications why things are the way they are, but to me, monetary systems seem like layers of justifications for an organization too powerful to call them out on it when they cheat. Debt doesn’t produce value when housing prices go through the roof, when you take on credit card/payday debt, or when you get stuck with medical bills… It seems to me like it only works when you take out a loan for a small business, something that used to be big, but now more and more it creates nothing, expands no capability. It just flows upwards endlessly
I barely got so far as interventions and the IMF. The IMF is not involved in the political aims of the US, so your entire point about “bending over for the US” is absurd. Nothing in either of their descriptions is “dark,” and their interventions have ended total systemic collapse of nations - very notably those of Spain and Greece.
I am generally pro US intervention, especially in opposition to communism.
Between the above and ideas like this:
Debt doesn’t produce value when housing prices go through the roof
Which don’t even correlate, or necessarily even have any actual meaning as-written, it’s fair to say your baseline is grossly misinformed
As a for-instance, this example produces value twice
Yeah, that’s why I gave you some starting links… It’s a complicated topic, and I’d hope you’d at least take a look…I gave my anecdote. It’s not hard to find reputable accounts of them being straight up monsters, and the results speak for themselves… They have not been a good thing for the “third world” no matter how you slice it.
And I didn’t mean the US government, I meant spreading those cheeks for investors to buy up the underdeveloped resources at an extremely low value, and they’re forced to drop export taxes to the ground and maintain the roads from their mines to the port, they miss out on both the money leaving their country (reducing their tax income, because velocity of money is a huge part of taxes, and it’s not bouncing around their country anymore). It’s crippling.
But the alternative is economic warfare, a tool that the IMF has and does use with anyone who doesn’t play ball. They downgrade your currency, lowering the exchange rate. You then have to print more, until you get to balance between hyperinflation and getting cut off from global trade, because now you have to use dollars, and the exchange rate only gets worse (cough Argentina and Venezuela)
But again, this is complicated and I can’t do the necessary reading for you.
I’m more worried about your understanding of value… Friend, I don’t know how to tell you this, but money is symbolic. Categorically.
It is representative of actual value… It’s not the value itself - if money had intrinsic value, you’d just be bartering with commodities. We used gold and silver notes, because they were worth almost nothing themselves… It’s a necessary aspect of money, because if the underlying commodity, say iron ingots, suddenly had a critical shortage and shot way past the value of the notes, you’re back to bartering.
And money isn’t valuable because of intrinsic trust - you have to be able to buy things with it or it’s just paper.
You need actual value, otherwise we could all just print money and be billionaires. When a person or company is able to do a new thing, do more of the old thing, or do the old thing better - that’s value. There’s more of the things people want, or better things to buy, and that justifies more money being introduced into the system.
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted, and they used carved shells, beads, and pretty rocks pretty much everywhere beforehand. The value of money is the value of all the stuff divided by the money in circulation, and the king would hoard and spend to keep things healthy (ideally)
So debt is sort of like negative money. But it’s not really - it’s just the promise you’ll give them more money later. A payday
The amount of things didn’t change - but neither did the amount of money. Let’s go with payday loans since it’s clear cut. These people still have to pay rent, they still have to eat, and the positive money doesn’t melt when it encounters negative money. You introduce money with the debt, people buy the things they had to buy anyways, and maybe they buy a little less… Except we don’t live in a mercantile system, we live in a consumerist system that is transitioning to some sort of unholy techno-fuedalism hellscape.
In consumerism, the amount of money doesn’t matter as much. Velocity does. Velocity generates taxes now that we don’t do straight tithes to the lord, it drives production, increases worker wages, hires more people, pays for r&d. At every stage, things get cheaper, people can buy more, the whole pie grows. I think it’s horrifying, but that’s the value of money - it used to be normal for factory workers to have a vacation house and/or a boat.
They create new things and make a demand for it. Everyone got more stuff, science and technology chugged along fantastically. Basic needs were met, and they made new shit… Value
Then we get to regenomics, the mofo actually convinced people that what we really needed was more inequality.
And here’s the problem… They’re not putting that money into r&d, they’re putting it into gaming the system. Money begets political power begets money. It’s far more lucrative to play with money than to create value
When someone takes a payday loan, where does the value come from? The amount of money is the same… But now it goes to someone not because they created value, but because they had money to lend. The guy paying his mortgage isn’t creating value - the money flows up to bounce around with people who use it like points in a game. You now make someone on the edge just a little closer to producing no value, because homeless people have less subjective value in their life now, because now they get to scramble to balance staying healthy with doing something, and the guy with the money either puts it in the quants, unfair advantage side of the investment markets gatekeep, he invests it into lobbying or media, or he stashes it in his hoard in the Caymans.
You can’t spend a billion dollars on adding value to your life - there’s only so many mansions to buy and so many that yacht a guy can buy before it becomes a chore (2… Boats are a pain). The money doesn’t have velocity, we’ve slashed taxes on hoarding too thanks to neolibs/conservatives.
One guy gets less value for his money, the other guy gets respect from his peers for screwing over a few million poor people on the edge.
Where’s the value? I don’t even agree with these systems of value, but I don’t think even post hock undergrad economics sees value here
I couldnt force myself to read this entire thing because it’s full of very incorrect gems like
They create new things and make a demand for it.
That’s not how demand works at all
The guy paying his mortgage isn’t creating value -
You know these things aren’t up for debate right? Like whether or not value is created is a fact, not an opinion.
Your worldview would be less weird if you understood the actual world . I mean cmon-
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted,
Really?
And money isn’t valuable because of intrinsic trust - you have to be able to buy things with it or it’s just paper.
How stoned were you when you wrote this?
I’ve seen some things on this site man. Some people totally unhinged from reality. This one might take the cake.
Lol Jesus dude I want this cross-stitched and framed
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted, and they used carved shells, beads, and pretty rocks pretty much everywhere beforehand. The value of money is the value of all the stuff divided by the money in circulation, and the king would hoard and spend to keep things healthy (ideally)
… Ok dude, I literally got that from a macroeconomics course.
But you’ve just called me crazy a bunch of times, I left a bunch of tidbits for anyone who sees this later, and you haven’t really made any argument. Maybe something I said will pop into your head later, you’ll crack a book to attempt to disprove it, but I accept I’m not going to educate you today.
But let’s hear from you - there’s one answer I’m really dying to hear.
Well there is a limit of mining, every new digit is 16 times harder to make, there are just 2 or 3 digits left.
This was made with growth and inflation in mind so the currency last like 60-80 years but they didn’t predict giant farms using entire powerplants of energy, so basically 50 years of bitcoin was shortened to the last 5. The thing is profitability as miners have to make an entire 28 bit hash at random wasting dozens of GPU in exchange of less money of what they cost so the prizes must be risen even more making it even more centralized (also lowering the price for every other holder)
This is almost poetic As bitcoin approaches its end only the top miners are allowed to continue increasing the risk of the death which is 51% attack, if some of the final miners will unite and reach 51% at this point they can cash out the entire currency and make it look that the price falls to zero.
Well, one thing is taxes, which are payable in the local government’s fiat currency, which ensures that there’s always demand for the fiat currency, assuming a responsible monetary policy.
There is a difference. For instance let’s say UK rejoins EU and has to adopt the Euro. The pound gets depreciated as people switch currencies. It’s the responsibility of the government to make sure people can exchanges their pounds for euros at a fair rate.
You can’t do that with crypto currencies because there’s no authoritative body who will be willing to take the worthless currency and exchange it for another currency without any initial value being lost.
There are plenty more example where the lack of an authoritative body (which is what people consider the benefit of crypto) is actually not good for the user.
You’re saying if the GBP starts to lose value the UK government will start exchanging the now-worthless currency for another more valuable currency like USD or EUR to keep its value up? Where do you think the UK government will get all this foreign currency? Wouldn’t they run out of money and go bankrupt at some point?
No. I said that if the country is going to switch currency, from example pound to euro, then the government will facilitate that switch even though the pound is going to become worthless. But you are kinda hitting the nail on the head. The government will make sure they have Euros to exchange to and they will “take a loss” when people bring their pounds for exchange (I won’t get much into the will they go bankrupt question because the US has 32? trillion in debt and the US hasn’t gone bankrupt so I’m not sure if countries even can go bankrupt).
Now apply those two question to crypto and answer them. Let’s say one day people want to switch from bitcoin to something more viable (which is a very realistic thing to happen because the underlying tech can depreciate) who is going to facilitate that currency exchange? Who is going to stock up on this new currency and who is going to buy the now worthless currency?
I am sorry but I sense that you are speaking out of ignorance of how markets work, I do not mean to be condescending at all, I wanted to meet your points but it would have been a wild goose chase of squaring out the faulty premises and conclusions. Here’s an article on bankrupted nations in recent times: tbsnews.net/…/6-major-countries-went-bankrupt-rec…
Neither do I but nothing about your comment comes even close to my point was making. The bankruptcy aspect is just a minor detail that can be easily dismissed by common sense, no government is going to change currency if it bankrupts them. If it does then it’s just bad governance.
Yup. One of the original tokens people used as money was kaori shells. They held value because they were considered pretty decorations, were limited in the number that entered society and were easy to serve as a intermediary trade good. All you need for a currency is for people to treat it as a currency. The other bit that usually ends up being a factor is scarcity. You can either create scarcity artificially for things like coins or bills where you make replicating them a crime or you choose a natural resource where new stuff coming in does slowly enough it doesn’t destabilize the system. If ever there is a sudden glut of new currency stuff entering the system the currency gets devalued because you are tying it to stuff you need to survive like food, shelter and tools which are finite and have actual concrete value.
Gold for instance historically was not particularly super useful but it doesn’t corrode, can be infinitely reused, enters the system at a trickle and is nice and shiny so people like it. It is functionally just like trading seashells.
Yes. A diamond is just a rock somebody found. Same for gold. They have value because they are scarce and people think they are pretty (up until the last couple of centuries when we developed industrial uses for both). Nobody has ever needed a diamond or a hunk of gold to survive, yet they have value because we say that they are valuable.
The paradox of value (also known as the diamond–water paradox) is the contradiction that, although water is on the whole more useful, in terms of survival, than diamonds, diamonds command a higher price in the market.
I like your wishlist! The fact nobody mentions that the devil still lives among us is sad. I hope he gets accidentally castrated by a dull knife in times square during the live NYE broadcast.
All cryptocurrency isn’t stiricrly based off of magic and mysterious bitcoin code.
Even if there was code that made the coin erase itself, it would have been found and fixed (or abandoned for a new and better blockchain coin a’la Ethereum or Monero).
Yup. This is the basis for a trustless system - you can reasonably bank on the idea that, if there were some self-deletion clause, a bunch of people with vested interests would go ‘huh. let’s change that so that our bitcoin still has value.’
Mostly likely isn’t, I follow the account. Most of the time they post very obviously outlandish fake facts, sometimes smaller fake facts and sometimes innane ridiculous real facts. That’s their gimmick “low quality”.
Only if every btc node used this binary but because it’s decentralized theres multiple people compiling the source so the affected binary would not be affected.
In centralized software something like this is way easier. VSCode for example adds proprietary telemetry on top of their open source code and because most people downloads from the website instead of compiling, they ended up using a software that diverges the source code implementation. But even in this case you could use Codium that implements the source code version.
Add comment