Bitcoin isn't figuratively a store of value, it actually is. The amount of bitcoin on DeFi, backing collateral for flash loans and Stablecoin minting is astounding.
>When you own a share of Square (or Visa, or PayPal) each time a transaction takes place on their network, a portion of that transaction (revenue minus costs) accrues to the company - and by extension increases the intrinsic value of your share.
All the V3 crypto protocols have exactly as you describe above. However, instead of the money going into the coffers of the company, it goes into a 'Development fund' That will award the crypto to people who have applied and been voted on by the community to launch a project/technology in the protocol. [1]
https://fintechs.fi/2021/10/29/as-parachain-auctions-launch-...
It's a speculative, negative-sum MLM token. I suggest reading up on what a store of value is. [1]
I'm not saying there aren't ways of monetizing it within the network - which may indeed create value, but intrinsically, it is a negative-sum asset, a mechanism of redistributing real cold hard dollars from new participants to old entrants and miners. It creates nothing. Systems built on top of it might, exploiting let's say regulatory arbitrage, facilitating crime or gambling, but intrinsically, it creates no value.
I know people point to the current system and infrastructure of stock exchanges, SWIFT, the IMF, Central Banks, Retail and Commercial Banks, Internet Banks (Such as Stripe, Paypal, ETC.), Credit Unions, Savings and Loan Associations, Investment Banks and Companies, Brokerage Firms, Insurance Companies as working good enough. But for me... Occams razor hits me hard. Doesn't it seem weird that through this complex system of interactions, we can recreate all of that in Code? If there was no value in it, why did we create all those institutions in the first place?
If we can recreate those in a more humane, democratized, decentralized way, I think it's worth the .001% of the global financial system that it currently is. Even if it's grabbing 5% of the current headlines.
All of these systems are already software.
> If there was no value in it, why did we create all those institutions in the first place?
Centralization makes them massively more efficient than crypto. If there was a way to make them more efficient that did not involve throwing risk models out the window or regulatory arbitrage, someone could just do that in the traditional economy without crypto.
This is a lot like the programmer tendency to want to re-write instead of refactor because to understand a system is way harder than to set out on a quest to build a new one. Although they always end up the same way: at best what you started with. To me this falls squarely under Spolsky's "things you should never do." [1]
There hasn't been a single actual competitive business built on top of crypto in fourteen years. That's because they're all hamstrung by the massive inefficiencies they boat-anchor to their solutions. Decentralization and trustlessness and permissionlessness don't matter at all to 99.9% of humans. Attempting to offer these is incredibly inefficient and makes it totally uncompetitive with centralized solutions for every legal use case.
I would argue it fails Occam's razor to try and add miners to a monetary system.
The simplest, most efficient, most economical solution to moving value around is centralization. If there's a better way to solve any of the given problems with crypto, there's an easy way to optimize it further: get rid of crypto.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Do you ever think a human being can be a sovereign individual in his own right, without owing fealty, taxes and morality to a government in some future?
The current financial system is not all software. When i pay in crypto, i give you my money. When i pay in the current financial system I am giving you every bit of information to rob me blind and hoping you don't take it all. My currency(Value i produce) is not my own and at any moment in time some outside entity can cause rapid inflation, devaluing of my currency or take everything i own straight out of my bank account. My contracts are not upheld by code, but by courts of law. I have to do a credit check to outside entity's to ensure you've got the collateral to extend you a loan. I have to physically go into a bank, have a minimum balance, an address, a phone number in order to even have a bank account. That doesn't sound like all code to me.
Also, you're right. POW as a consensus method is flawed. But again, all V3 cryptos have essentially transitioned to delegated proof of stake at this point.
Lastly, in a generation of cancel culture gone wild and as an avid reader of history, I'm glad crypto is available to me as the nation-state that we've all known and loved is looking more and more stressed.
If you still claim there's absolutely no value in any of it, then me and you have very different definitions of the term.
Edit: There are 104 protocols/coins that have over $1B market cap. Value isn't a personal judgement, it's a group one.
Since you asked, yes. I do. To me, it's like asking if a beehive will always have a queen. It's in our DNA.
> Also, you're right. POW as a consensus method is flawed. But again, all V3 cryptos have essentially transitioned to delegated proof of stake at this point.
I honestly don't know enough about "V3 cryptos" to speak to it, and I'm not trying to add any FUD to the conversation :) I'll have to DMOR if you will before I can speak to that, which is why I've been constraining my comments to the system I know (BTC).
> Edit: There are 104 protocols/coins that have over $1B market cap. Value isn't a personal judgement, it's a group one.
[edit] Market cap isn't a judgement of value, just the most recent price multiplied by supply. Control the most recent price, you control the market cap. Unless you include legitimate market depth it's not really a meaningful number. SHIB for instance.
Not the asker, but thank you for answering this--it goes a long way toward understanding where your arguments are coming from.
I think the burden of proof that there is a possible future without government lies on those making that claim. That burden has definitely not been met and the thus the feverent belied in that claim by cryptocurrency bulls is not rational.
It would be accurate, for the time, but hugely short sighted.
My main point is don't completely dismiss a nescient technological field based on it's lack of utility now. Sustained development effort with real venture capital only dates back to around 2017, 2018.
All major silicon valley firms have launched funds to develop early research teams, nobel prize winning mathematicians developing protocols and some of these people are currently the richest individuals on the planet, just no one really know how much they actually have and obvious issues with liquidity withstanding.
> SHIB for instance
As many (If not more) of the crypto industry is marketing teams riding the 'Wave'. However, some of the projects have 100's of employees building infrastructure for the new internet. Check out Parity if you want an example of a true crypto company.
There are often analogies to the early internet, but I was alive then and remember some of the early, tangible use cases which had me hooked:
* You can look at Nintendo’s website. It has information about games, which you are currently getting from magazines (my first exposure)
* You can buy books you can’t buy locally (Amazon)
* You can mail a friend from another location, for free (hotmail, gmail)
* You can call a friend in another country, for free (skype)
* You can call a phone in another country, for cheap (skype)
What are some crypto equivalents, today, that would convince someone who is not already invested in crypto that they need to get into crypto to use it?
E.g. saying “you can get a loan of 66% of your Bitcoin holdings!” is a use case for people already in crypto.
I would also exclude stablecoin yields because the risks there are massive, and there exist plenty of investments with high risk and high return in normal land.
Both are applications of NFTs and both have significant players developing them.
I can elaborate more on these two applications if you want. Currently on mobile.
We can already achieve this without blockchain technology! Indeed that's not the way the system works, but that's not due to technological limitation. What makes you think that once "permissionless stock markets" are available on the blockchain then secondary derivative markets won't spring up, making the ownership situation as murky is it currently is for stocks?
In principal, yes, the trusted parties could have stepped up and implemented a more transparant and automated system. No, they did not need to base such a solution on a blockchain. But the reality is that they were not inclined to change the status-quo, and now we find ourselves in a world where every relevant financial system is looking at, testing, or in the process of rolling out a blockchain based solution.
For anyone asking where the value in the technology lies, the proof is in how seriously the large players [1] are taking it.
[1] just one of the many public facing examples of a blockchain-based stock market (under the CHESS replacement program): https://www2.asx.com.au/markets/clearing-and-settlement-serv...
What can I do, today that should make me want to buy the crypto to do a thing with crypto. Rather than buy crypto to hope for an increase in value.
> Do you ever think a human being can be a sovereign individual in his own right, without owing fealty, taxes and morality to a government in some future?
Without governments, how are social strictures enforced? How are externalities, positive or negative, accounted for? How does a government-less world not look like Somalia? (Or are you suggesting that you really would like to live in a place like Somalia?)
This isn't to suggest that existing governments are perfect (far from it), but it seems to me that the anarchic counterpart is infinitely worse.
It's not flawed, just hardcore. It's like the gold bars sitting in vaults deep underground in London, rarely moved and usually just relabeled to account for change in ownership. Every now and then someone gets spooked and asks to take custody, and it's expensive as hell to move it but you can lay your hands on it and know your ownership is secure.
I don't understand this. You're saying if I send you $0.01 via internet banking, you can somehow take everything in the account?
It doesn't work this way in NZ, where it is common to put your bank account details on invoices so people can pay you directly.
I am trusting that outside entity in a number of different ways; To only take the required amount, b.) encrypt my information to prevent my information from leaking.
Credit card data is leaked regularly in mass uploads for pennys on the dollar. Credit card fraud is mediated by the credit companies themselves and is just an insurance issue to them.
Crypto, I sign the transaction to send it to you. You don't get anything but my public id, amount and block time.
Even with debit cards you have 3D secure these days which requires confirmation on your phone.
Just because USA is behind in banking department and even credit/debit card thing doesn't mean those problems are especially hard to solve. The rest of the world is already partially there and with more fintechs putting pressure on banks things will improve even more.
Also, you are trusting that the person you are sending money to honors their agreement as there is no intermediary to dispute transactional claims.
[0]: https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
I think another thing to note is that the other party is ASKING your bank/credit issuer to debit. The transaction can be stopped if not approved.
Normally I see the argument for crypto being that this helps merchants by avoiding charge backs, etc.
> Do you ever think a human being can be a sovereign individual in his own right, without owing fealty, taxes and morality to a government in some future?
All of this is doing nothing to change my view that cryptocurrency requires me to buy into this whole weird worldview in a way that few other products do. No, I don't particularly want to be an anarcho-capitalist.
> I really would like to see a defense of Bitcoin that doesn't rest on the assumption that I want to live in Galt's Gulch.
As long there is scarcity of resources, there will be wars/conflicts and humans will be collective species, even if we don't have scarcity of resources, some humans will invent a few, and even if humans will not invent one, it is debatable since I don't know of any evidence where humans can survive individually. This is without mentioning social classes over multiple generations.
World Bank estimates 31 percent of people globally do not have a bank account. Decentralisation helps these people.
When you deposit money into a bank account, it is not your money. It is the bank's money. You aren't allowed to use it, or spend it how you like without the permission of your bank. Crypto doesn't have this issue.
There are financial tools that only people with net worths of over $100 million have access to, such as market making, arbitrage, liquidations, insurance lending etc. Crypto solves this.
99.9% of banks in traditional finance run their systems on outdated, closed source, barely maintained and bug ridden software. Contracts, money and agreements than can happen in seconds in crypto, takes weeks and months in centralised finance.
If centralised finance had the potential to be more efficient, there should have been more innovation decades ago. Centralised finance needs to catch up.
Banking helps these people. Remember a fully-realized BTC transaction fee (pricing in electricity and mining hardware) is right around $250 each. That's a non-trivial amount of the GDP per capita of a lot of these countries you're alluding to.
Poor folks are also the most vulnerable to the massive volatilities of this so-called currency.
Real, centralized solutions help these people. Solutions like M-Pesa [1]. And Postal Banking, which a hundred years of legacy solving exactly these problems. [2]
> There are financial tools that only people with net worths of over $100 million have access to, such as market making, arbitrage, liquidations, insurance lending etc. Crypto solves this.
It certainly does not haha. It makes them less efficient, which is why not a single crypto-powered business in the last 14 years is competitive with any centralized solutions except in the areas of regulatory arbitrage or by throwing risk models out the window.
> If centralised finance had the potential to be more efficient, there should have been more innovation decades ago. Centralised finance needs to catch up.
It's obviously more efficient, and pretending otherwise doesn't change that.
Crypto doesn't help bank the unbanked.
He supports his family with his income, and frequently sends money from the United States to Bosnia.
Best case scenario, using Paypal (Xoom), a centralized company, this takes him two days. Two days is the best case scenario!
With Bitcoin it is almost instant.
They switched to cryptocurrency after a near disastrous situation with the length of time the transfer took.
How is Bitcoin less efficient here?
Sure, it's one use case, but just because something doesn't benefit you does not mean it's not beneficial for anyone.
Bitcoin is not accepted anywhere, practically speaking.
As such you're only looking at a small fraction of the transaction. You actually need to (1) transfer money into a crypto exchange for a 1-2% fee and whatever delay the domestic transfer takes (2) purchase Bitcoin for whatever fee the exchange charges (3) transfer it for $0.50-50 depending on the fee du jour (4) hope the market doesn't collapse out from under you while all this is happening (5) sell it at the destination unregulated exchange for whatever fee they charge and hope they don't flee with your money (6) transfer to the destination bank account, waiting as long as a domestic transfer takes.
This is probably a few days total, with severe counter-party risk, forex risk, and substantial transaction fees.
Or you can use Wise for a very low fee directly bank-to-bank, or open a Wise multi-currency account and support almost-free instant transactions. They're also super, duper regulated by a number of world regulators.
I know which I'd do, but to each their own.
Flash loans are used to arbitrage across exchanges, not create any extrinsic value.
Due to this emergent phenomena of smart contracts you can have very low slippage between exchanges, high liquidity and high yields.
A.K.A Every stock market financiers dream.
And what if they did want to refactor the existing system. Can they? What does that iteration process look like? Is the system currently evolving to fit everyone’s needs?
Remember, RMS actually did want to refactor the printer. He just wasn’t allowed to. [0]
Contrast that with how fast things are moving in DeFi. It’s permissionless innovation at its best and worst. We can barely even wrap our heads around OHM, but nobody needs permission to fork it into SPELL. Systemic refactors happen faster. [1]
When somebody in the future doesn’t like a piece of decentralized infrastructure, they can _literally_ fork all of it and just make their change. With fewer black-boxes, we share more intellectual property.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...
This is assuming there is no value in regulatory arbitrage, which is wrong.
The value of this is proportional to the dysfunction of the existing system in any given country. In countries that impose currency exchange limitations or other authoritarian policies enforced through the financial system, cryptocurrency has more value.
You could capture that value by reforming the laws and governments in those countries, but that hasn't happened.
And one of the benefits of cryptocurrencies is encouraging those reforms. If you can't use the financial system to impose authoritarian policies because people will just use cryptocurrency instead, you might as well not try to use the financial system to impose authoritarian policies, at which point people can use the more efficient ordinary banking system instead of cryptocurrencies. But we're not there yet, are we?
One of the primary reasons for the rise of the complex system of interactions, as you put it, is trust. A lot of financial interactions require dealing with people who might not merely not have your best interests at heart but are literally in diametric opposition to your interests--several financial transactions are inherently zero-sum. So you need mechanisms that give you trust that your counterparty will actually honor their side of the transaction.
Code fundamentally does not provide trust--indeed, you might even say it is the antithesis of trust. Even accomplished software developers are frequently unable to write code that works in edge cases or even slightly abnormal operation. For regular users, code is as opaque as if it were written in Linear B. Indeed, to popular sentiment, software is often equated with a learned notion of bugginess--people tolerate the frequent mistakes of their computers far more than we would any other piece of equipment.
And the cryptocurrency community takes their misunderstanding of trust to new levels. I mean, we're being told by people like you that we shouldn't trust the government, but instead trust code [that the lay person can't and won't understand] written by people like the owners of Tether--people who have been convicted of stealing people's money and, in the history of their own company, lied about what they were doing.
As Matt Levine put it, only in the cryptocurrency industry is "we may be charlatans who will run off with all your money" literally something people feel necessary to put in their risk prospectus.
His column a couple weeks ago about the "main move" in finance (i.e. transmuting an amorphous pile of risk into tranches with radically different riskiness) and how this explains Tether was absolutely brilliant.
That's just one argument for Bitcoin, there are more. For example, it provides the opportunity to second/third world countries to break free from the IMF debt slavery.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the role of currency in a modern economy and the mandate of the federal reserve, which is to maintain a low, predictable rate of inflation to incentivize investment and maximize employment. Literally any asset will "save you" from the "relentless printing." That's the role of an asset, not a currency.
> That's just one argument for Bitcoin, there are more. For example, it provides the opportunity to second/third world countries to break free from the IMF debt slavery.
They're all basically debunked, but advocates trot them out and try and Gish gallop over any criticism.
> A store of value is an asset that maintains its value, rather than depreciating.
Value is just what others are willing to pay for something at a point in time. Literally nothing is guaranteed to maintain it's value, not even US Treasuries. So this is just circular logic saying "things that maintain value are value stores" and "if something that previously maintained it's value no longer does, then it is not a value store".
> Gold and other precious metals are good stores of value because their shelf lives are essentially perpetual.
Gold and other precious metals are terrible stores of value, their dollar values are incredibly volatile, they are incredibly expensive and risky to store and transact with, and contrary to popular belief, they really don't actually have much "intrinsic value". Let alone that "intrinsic value" is a nonsensical concept. "Intrinsic value" is meant to be understood roughly as "useful for some practical purpose", but valuations clearly often have nothing to do with their practical purposes. A stick or a basket can have very significant and diverse intrinsic values too, but that doesn't mean it has value. Likewise, some sticks and baskets might have very high values, despite actually not being very good sticks or baskets! (eg if they're antiques or archeological artifacts or whatever)
> A nation's currency must be a reasonable store of value for its economy to function smoothly.
Most central banks aim for 2% inflation per year, literally guaranteeing any amount to become worthless over time if stored in currency. (vs bonds or some other appreciating asset)
> intrinsically, Bitcoin is a negative-sum asset, a mechanism of redistributing real cold hard dollars from new participants to old entrants and miners.
Just what. Bitcoin is strictly positive sum under any sane definition. Unlike MLMs or pyramid schemes, Bitcoin never alleges to return anything other than Bitcoin.
> It creates nothing
Neither do currencies. They're just currencies. Their purpose is to be means of transacting things that are created, that otherwise wouldn't be created, if there was no means to transact. Bitcoin does that too. But in Bitcoin's case, it actually does create something: it creates the ledger of transactions itself, the wallets, the ability to sign things etc, which currencies don't.
> Systems built on top of it might, exploiting let's say regulatory arbitrage, facilitating crime or gambling, but intrinsically, it creates no value.
Even if you disagree with the valuation of Bitcoin and how inefficient the mining is (and I do), the realized idea of a distributed, tamper-proof ledger is useful, and thus has "intrinsic value" just like toilet paper or gold. (again, intrinsic value is a nonsensical concept, but under that logic, it does)
Just to be clear, my point was that the classical definition of a "store of value" isn't something that goes up exponentially and flails around wildly at the whims of folks trying to liquidate leveraged positions.
It's broadly regarded as something you can purchase and expect to get your money back. Not a ton more, not a ton less, roughly what you put in. I don't think there's a single world in which any cryptocurrency falls into that definition today. Might it? It could. I don't think it will. But that's speculation, what's not speculation is that it's not one today.
The "store of value" narrative was coopted once folks in the community realized it couldn't ever actually sustain more transactions than required by a small Costco.
> Gold and other precious metals are terrible stores of value, their dollar values are incredibly volatile...
They're dramatically less volatile than cryptocurrencies which does make them better suited, however I do not personally advocate for owning metals - for exactly the reasons you rightly describe.
> Most central banks aim for 2% inflation per year, literally guaranteeing any amount to become worthless over time if stored in currency. (vs bonds or some other appreciating asset)
Modern economies intentionally split long-term stores of value from short-term medium of exchange. Currencies are inflated slowly to incentivize investment, and to maximize employment along the Philips curve. This is the charter of the Federal Reserve and most other world central banks.
> Just what. Bitcoin is strictly positive sum under any sane definition. Unlike MLMs or pyramid schemes, Bitcoin never alleges to return anything other than Bitcoin.
It doesn't allege a return, however literally every frothing at the mouth holder of crypto will allege it for you, as they are incentivized to do. Bring in more people, you get wealthier. Sound familiar? It's a decentralized MLM. It's negative-sum because miners constantly extract $60 million dollars per day, $21B per year in block rewards. These are liquidated and cause negative price pressure, socializing what amounts to a $250 transaction fee. [1]
> Neither do currencies. They're just currencies.
Which is why they don't go up in value. You can't have it both ways :) dreadful currencies go up astronomically in value, because this creates a deflationary spiral. Dreadful currencies go down a ton in value because it doesn't offer you time to productively allocate. A good currency averages a low, predictable rate of inflation.
> ... tamper-proof ledger is useful, and thus has "intrinsic value" just like toilet paper or gold.
We have yet to find a single use for it. All you can do is look at your spreadsheet cell in a web browser, or get someone else to buy it from you. You can't do anything with it. At least you can turn gold into electronics, like bitcoin miners.
[1] https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin...
Just because idiots abuse cryptos for baseless manias doesn't make the underlying technology or idea or thing bad, nor a pyramid scheme or an MLM. You could say the same thing about property, art, vintage cars, any number of things that are also not pyramid schemes or MLMs. Bitcoin is definitely experiencing baseless manias, but it's very clearly not a MLM or pyramid scheme.
> It's negative-sum because miners constantly extract $60 million dollars per day, $21B per year in block rewards. These are liquidated and cause negative price pressure, socializing what amounts to a $250 transaction fee.
Agree this is bad but that's an artifact of what people are doing with Bitcoin, not an inescapable fundamental quality of Bitcoin. Bitcoin can and for a long, long time used to run just fine on comparatively little energy and transaction costs measured in cents. More energy efficient protocols (and those exist now) can comfortably accommodate orders of magnitude more transactions than Bitcoin for orders of magnitude less energy. (I guess if you wanted to calculate in dollar terms the "intrinsic value" of Bitcoin, it would be the equipment and energy cost of running a comparable or better blockchain, which could possibly be what a couple of grand per year?)
> You can't have it both ways :)
I'm not making claims about whether Bitcoin (or any other crypto) is a currency, or a good currency. But they undeniably share in common with currencies that they are means of transacting (other) things that are created, that otherwise wouldn't be created, if there was no means to transact. (despite them being insanely deflationary) (and while their psuedonymous nature certainly makes them attractive for illicit transactions, it simply isn't true that they're "only" used for those)
> We have yet to find a single use for it
This just isn't true. It's not difficult to imagine how a distributed tamper proof ledger could be useful, or find actual practical uses of blockchains. I'll be the first to admit blockchains are overhyped and that they don't offer any meaningful advantages over existing tech in many, many of of the proposed use cases, but the legitimate uses cases do exist.
I'd love to see you address any of jstolfi's points directly!
> Agree this is bad but that's an artifact of what people are doing with Bitcoin, not an inescapable fundamental quality of Bitcoin. Bitcoin can and for a long, long time used to run just fine on comparatively little energy and transaction costs measured in cents.
It really can't. Its security is proportional to its wastefulness. It must always waste more than its opponents are willing to spend to destroy it meaning its waste must grow with its valuation. It's a proof of waste algorithm.
> I'm not making claims about whether Bitcoin (or any other crypto) is a currency, or a good currency.
I am making the claim its so utterly bad at being a currency pretending it's a currency is pointless and harmful to the discourse.
> This just isn't true. It's not difficult to imagine how a distributed tamper proof ledger could be useful, or find actual practical uses of blockchains.
It's been 14 years. There isn't a single use that isn't crime or regulatory arbitrage - or solving a problem crypto created for itself. The proof is in the pudding, and there's simply no pudding.
> ... but the legitimate uses cases do exist.
If you find one, and productize it, you will be the single wealthiest person alive. Elon better step aside.
The handle I'm responding to hasn't exactly provided "evidence" either, including for:
* the existence of nebulous things like "value stores", "intrinsic value" or what constitutes or possesses either
* that Bitcoin is a negative-sum asset, a MLM or a pyramid scheme
* that a distributed tamper proof ledger doesn't have any usefulness for any practical purpose
which is fine by me, we're all just here to kill time between builds and deploys anyway :P but if you think evidence is required knock yourself out and prove some for any of the above
So you replaced "shareholders" with "developers of cryptocurrencies/beneficiaries of the development fund".
Does a rose, by any other name, not smell as sweet? I mean, from the case you're making, these v3 protocols seem more like securities.
Stablecoins sound exactly like banks. Which means AML/KYC/Reserves on the horizon.
The entire cryptocurrency space recreated the current financial system, rooked in a new generation of suckers (and some old one's that should have known better), did everything current financial product regulations were put in place to prevent, made it as energy inefficient as humanly possible in the case of PoW, but it isn't all that cause it's called something different.
My distinction without a difference alarm is ringing itself off the wall at the moment.
I'd encourage you to broaden your understanding of the purpose of PoW and specifically the energy used. The energy used is the cost of securing a PoW blockchain--quite literally, the cost of the energy used is what makes it difficult to mount a successful attack. It is simple and universally accessible. It is not "inefficient"; it is functioning exactly as intended.
What I think you are really trying to say is that you think the benefits provided by a PoW blockchain do not merit the economic expense of securely maintaining it. And that's a fine opinion to have. But the only reason you pay attention to the electricity cost is because it is highly visible--you probably have no clue how much electricity is consumed by all the other economic activities that you may consider pointless or wasteful.
There may be some Bitcoiners who think it should be used for all payments, but I’m not one of them. Centralized payment processors will always be more efficient, especially for the massive flow of low-value casual transactions that the average consumer produces.
If I borrow a Bitcoin what makes you think that I can repay the Bitcoin after it grew 10x in value? Who is doing 10x the work? (10x more productive)
That would make Bitcoin a very good store of value. However, to benefit from the "store of value" property you have to, you know, actually store the bitcoin yourself, not sell it now and try to buy it back later…
The difference is that if you shut down gold mining, existing gold would still retain all its value. If you were unable to protect your gold reserves, they still retain all their value. If you shut down Bitcoin mining it's immediately worth nothing. In fact if you reduce your energy expenditure below some unspecified threshold it becomes utterly worthless. Mining gold consumes resources, but once extracted it does not. I would consider it to be zero-sum, as compared to the negative-sum nature of Bitcoin.
I would argue if institutional demand and even jewelry demand for gold fell, it would still be a fairly valuable commodity, and its use in electronics would likely expand substantially as it became less expensive. Connectors, switches, wires, PCB contact plating. All big demand drivers, and gold is better than the status quo - just too expensive at the moment.
I am not sure I understand the negative sum game you mention. The first payment miners get is (I don't know the proper name) a bounty, which is equivalent to a gold miner obtaining gold. This can be seen as a built-in inflation, which not only gold but also any fiat currency has. The difference is there is no known limit on this inflation factor for gold or fiat currencies. For gold we assume some gargantuan deposit will not be found and that it will maintain its scarcity. I don't think anyone thinks there is an inflation limit for the US dollar or any other fiat currency. Bitcoin has a known amount limit. (As a disclosure, I own gold, bitcoin, and US dollars.)
The other part of what miners make is a transaction payment. That exists in every other payment system I assume, except I guess physically handing an object to another person, which covers a pretty small fraction of transactions.
Now to be sure there are some customers of the bitcoin system, using bitcoin as an intermediary to move money across borders or purchase from certain online marketplaces, and those customers are paying some amount of money into the system to use bitcoin for this purpose (analogous to the 2% that VISA skims off the top when you use your card to buy something on Amazon), but the majority of the money flowing in to balance that $20B outflow is from investors buying in. Unless you think bitcoin has managed to capture something in the order of $20B/year in transaction fees from the likes of Western Union, AMEX and Paypal, what's mostly happening is money being funnelled from investors taken as a whole to the the supplier industries that bitcoin relies on.
I'm taking about examples like when someone uses bitcoin to transfer money, by converting an external currency into bitcoin, sending the bitcoin somewhere then converting it back into an external currency. Whatever loss of value they see from that overall transaction has been transferred into the bitcoin system as a whole.
Except that it is impossible ever shut down Bitcoin mining at once(). It might be more similar to gold than what you think.
There are too many incentives to keep it up. The holders want value to be kept, the miners have vested interest in the system to continue to work. If you shut down, say, half the miners, this will create opportunity to other miners to invest and expand. If it drops too much, people inject money into the system, which gives liquidity to the miners again, that can continue to trade their work for goods and services with Bitcoin or by trading Bitcoin for fiat.
It is very similar to Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Square and other centralized systems. The fees you pay for transactions keep the centralized finance business working and profitable as well as they invest back in software and hardware. For miners the Bitcoin fees, based on Bitcoin price, keep their systems profitable too. Not to mention some mining companies started to get listed on the stock market too.
(): Yes, you can shut down Bitcoin eventually, bugs, attacks, etc., but those have been tried and not very relevant to my point.
For those unfamiliar, Beanie Babies were a collectible toy that had a multi-year fad in the 1990s, with 5-dollar toys trading for thousands: https://www.ft.com/content/1563d643-332f-3887-8c6e-caf7435f3...
It's true that the Beanie Baby market never totally went away. And I'm sure that some die-hards will keep Bitcoin going for decades after it ceases to be practically relevant. But however much the bubble incentives keep major players aligned during the bubble, that doesn't mean the prices will stay up forever.
I wonder if we'll see things like that in the NFT market.
This is not really true--it's not like lowering the security budget means all the old blocks can be rewritten at will. Roughly speaking, the cost of rewriting a block is the cumulative PoW cost of that block and all the blocks after it, although this amount typically decreases over time as better mining equipment lowers the present cost of hashrate.
For current transactions, if the security budget relative to the transacted value gets low, all it means is that one must wait longer to achieve the same level of confidence in transaction finality. It doesn't abruptly render the currency "utterly worthless".
This ended in 1971, when the Bretton Woods agreement of exchange rates broke down and Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard and in 1975 we were allowed to buy gold again.
Are you under the impression that Bitcoin is a company? This analogy really doesn't make sense from any angle, even being extremely charitable, so it's hard to address.
Starbucks cards are akin to pre-selling coffee tokens. Each time Starbucks redeems these coffee tokens for coffee, they collect a portion of the transaction just as miners do. And just as miners do, they pass on the majority to their suppliers and employees. Just as in the Bitcoin example, the fact Starbucks is selling tons of coffee, collecting a lot of transaction fees, doesn't mean that the Starbucks cards themselves become more valuable. Starbucks Inc, and Starbucks shares do, and that value accrues to their shareholders.
I hope that clarifies my thoughts. Open to being wrong about this framing.
You pay a fee for each transaction you send, just like any other service. b
However, your holdings increase in value the more other people use the same chain because the value of the entire ecosystem needs to scale proportionally to the value people are attempting to transact across it.
Financial systems, like social networks, and most businesses coming out of SV rely on network effects for much of their value.
USD has been the default option for the world, and enforced through violence when people attempt to create their own networks of trade.
The positive sum value that cryptocurrency is attempting to create is the ability to send anyone in the world any amount of value (money or otherwise) not subject to government permission, or sabotage (ie money printing)
It's like any one being able to suggest a Federal Reserve policy, and the vote being handled by the people, not representatives or a committee.
It is revolutionarily democratic.
Hah! Of course, who can forget how US paratroopers abruptly ended the attempted creation of the Euro shortly before its intended launch in 1999. Or the way the US Seventh Fleet blockaded China's commercial ports starting in 2002, preventing their rise as a commercial power. We can only wonder what a world with multilateral economic power might look like.
It's ok to disagree without resorting to arguments like these, they just poison the discussion.
When you own a share of Square (or Visa, or PayPal) each time a transaction takes place on their network, a portion of that transaction (revenue minus costs) accrues to the company - and by extension increases the intrinsic value of your share. The transaction revenue is spent on furniture, on R&D, on employees and on buffing up their cash position. As a shareholder, you benefit from every single transaction made on their network.
On the other hand with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, as a holder of Bitcoin you are a customer not an owner. You lose money on every transaction. That value accrues to miners, and by extension, your local PE firm re-opening a fossil fuel power plant or the Kazakh coal mining complex.
Square shares ~= Hut8 shares.
Bitcoin ~= a Starbucks gift card you hope appreciates in value when Starbucks sells more coffee. Currently there are enough, uh, savvy investors who think it should, so it does. In accounting terms, it won't though because that benefit accrues to shareholders of mining companies, which you are not. You hold a gift card. One that costs money to spend so must be worth less than face value.
Bitcoin is a strongly negative sum MLM, or if you agree with jstolfi, a Ponzi scheme with a fresh coat of paint. [1] The network currently costs $60M per day to operate. That's $21B per year in new money that has to come in to prop up the price. [edit](And all that money goes to burning coal and throwing away mining hardware).
[1] https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin...