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Re:Bitcoin Is Time by glitchc on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @03:13PM (#26319969)
As much as it's funny, this is a false analogy. Horses don't travel as fast as cars, or as far. They also can't pull/carry as much as a car, let alone a truck. How many horses are needed to carry the same load as one 18 wheeler?

Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?

Re:Bitcoin Is Time by root_axis on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @03:24PM (#26320126)
Horses are also living creatures capable of feeling pain, fear, fatigue and can also be stubborn or aggressive. Horses also need to be sexed, reared, trained, fed and cared for, you can't simply build more horses on demand or scrap and recycle their parts. It's a silly analogy all around.
Re:Bitcoin Is Time by trott on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @04:07PM (#26320757)
> Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?

Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.

Re:Bitcoin Is Time by fredfoobar on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @03:15PM (#26319996)
Nice, I just want you to keep going in that line of thought and be consistent everywhere. Fingers crossed.
Re:Bitcoin Is Time by glitchc on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @03:46PM (#26320416)
I think I know where you want to go with this, but I'm not falling for it. Bitcoin is not progress towards the future, but a regression to the past. Pegging our economy to a finite (potentially volatile) asset has led to boom-bust cycles in the past, whether it is physical like gold or digital like Bitcoin.

People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).