The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think you can make good money with the technology, I think it is good that this thing is driving people to make technology with which you can make potentially better money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff by just letting people do what they want with it, and I personally find it useful in my life.
Disagree. You should do whatever you want so long as it doesn't negatively impact society more broadly. As I demonstrated in the Albanian example there is a real chance that allowing people to do as they please can lead to a complete implosion of the economy - and even war. Everything we do as a group is about balancing individual freedoms against their impacts on others. This is the "your right to swing your arms around wildly ends where my face begins" argument.
> You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
None of that is useful without the ability to step in and actively manage it during situations that weren't baked into the original design. Think the DAO.
> I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.
The argument I was responding to initially was your assertion that "surely there's something there because the number is so up! Check out that market cap!"
> If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.
They do, everyone uses dollars.
> But I do think you can make good money with the technology.
I disagree fundamentally because it cannot handle edge cases and the edge cases are the only thing that really matters in the end.
Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it practically useless as money due to the transaction times, costs and volume capacity.
It's bad at being money too.
The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ... anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.
Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing. Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's limited resources as you can within the budget allotted, and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine for the already wealthy.
Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is huge value-add for customers, the ability to block transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add for the world.