Bitcoin And Such

[tankasnowgod]

In other words there is something to be said for our nationally/internationally agreed upon system when discussing the value of currency.....

Until bitcoin becomes that majority agreed upon unit of currency it really holds no value apart from speculation or against fiat.

I'm surprised how many people argue for the monopolization of money. We all need to be "forced" into a certain monetary system. But... why? Why can't there be a marketplace of money? Spend Bitcoin for some things, Litecoin for others, Fiat dollars for others, Gold for others. To me, that is the true value of the crypto revolution. I've seen some arguments that Tokenization will get us closer to a barter system.

Forex Markets address this some, but they were still dominated by Government or Central Bank issued currency.

The problem with the marketplace of money in the past was communication. In 1820, if you were in New York and got currency issued from a local bank in North Carolina.... how could you check it? What's it's value? Is it real? Technology has largely eliminated those issues, as well as having to carry mulitple currencies (if you have a credit/debit card or a cell phone on you, you have access to thousands of currencies right now.

The benefits of Central Banking and central currencies like the Euro are being rendered obsolete, and we are starting to be confronted more and more with the very real problems of Central Banking,

 

[Kyle M]

So the key to an actual physical vault of precious metal is held in a blockchain and then distributed? Very interesting proposition

I've given some thought to a merger between commodity-backing and blockchain tech. At first it sounded like the ideal solution to every problem in money. I am only a novice in understanding the technical aspects of crypto, but I think tying it to a commodity might be tricky. I'm not sure how managing the ledger nodes would work without a mining function. You would have to have proof-of-work with a fee structure, and without a variable difficulty function you may run into problems when transaction demand spikes. But again I am only thinking out loud from a relatively ignorant position on this.

As far as people asking "who guards the vault," this is just a market question. Literally every social action in life requires trust in a second or third party(s). Maintaining possession of precious metals is just another service that people will compete to provide. Who "guards" that your auto mechanic actually fixes your car, or that your mutual fund manager has the funds where he says he does? In some cases there is government appeal if you are defrauded, but most of the time it's a combination of market forces pushing out bad actors and different arrangements of insurance.

One quick example is title insurance when you buy a house, in case the person selling you the house does not legally own it or there is a lien they aren't disclosing. Even today, people store precious metals in vaults (famously the Perth Mint in Australia) and often insure those metals with an insurance company (such as Lloyd's of London, a very old and reputable insurer). Nothing new here.

Bitcoin price - I have no idea where the price is going and I certainly can't time the changes, but I believe that bitcoin (and possibly other crypto) is going to gain in value over a medium to long term against most fiat. Some of this will be the inflation planted through years of central bank policy coming to fruition, but a lot of it I believe will be true demand from a perception of value in the public. For thinking of things like this, I always recall the Ayn Rand essay title: "It's earlier than you think."

 

[Kyle M]

100 Trillion Dollar Bill, Printed by the Central Bank of Zimbabwe- Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar Banknote, 2008, AA Series, NEW

Currently holds way more value as a collectible than when it was used as "money" back in 2009,

I have one of those, and some 50 trillion and lesser notes. I went through a phase of collecting defunct and inflated currencies. I had some Weimar German marks, but I may have given it away as a gift. I have Iraqi dinar with Saddam Hussein's picture on it, Iranian dinar, Hungarian, a few others. I plan on rounding out the collection a bit more and putting them all together as a collage in one frame, as a commentary on 20th central banking.

 

[LUH 3417]

Who would be guarding the vault? The US Treasury lied about the amount of silver it had stored for decades..... Billions of Ounces were being used in the Manhattan Project.

This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector’s two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today’s economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon—poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

 

[x-ray peat]

I dont see a very bright future for most of the cryptocurrencies. People are far too stupid when it comes to issues of money and investments and it is far too easy to rip them off. Just look at the ICO Token companies that have garnered 100 million dollar valuations for nothing more than a white paper of technical jargon and vaporware. The volumes in many of the cryptocurrency markets are so low that it is far too easy to engage in pump and dump schemes with little regulatory oversight. IMO there will be so many instances of fraud that governments will be forced to step in and shut down most of the worthless coins. This can easily be done by banning their trading on the soon to be heavily regulated exchanges which will cause their value to freefall.

 

[x-ray peat]

This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector’s two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today’s economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon—poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

unless you are ok with depopulation or poverty, economic growth is required just to maintain standards of living, let alone improve them. In a world of increasing population a growing economy is required just to break even. TPTB would be quite happy to see us move towards a deindustrialized feudal system where everyone but them are equally poor and miserable but far easier to control. They have written openly about this being their goal. This is what is behind the global warming scam and the fashionable attack on capitalism and growth taught in schools today.

 

[LUH 3417]

unless you are ok with depopulation or poverty, economic growth is required just to maintain standards of living, let alone improve them. In a world of increasing population a growing economy is required just to break even. TPTB would be quite happy to see us move towards a deindustrialized feudal system where everyone but them are equally poor and miserable but far easier to control. They have written openly about this being their goal. This is what is behind the global warming scam and the fashionable attack on capitalism and growth taught in schools today.

They are coming!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[LUH 3417]

unless you are ok with depopulation or poverty, economic growth is required just to maintain standards of living, let alone improve them. In a world of increasing population a growing economy is required just to break even. TPTB would be quite happy to see us move towards a deindustrialized feudal system where everyone but them are equally poor and miserable but far easier to control. They have written openly about this being their goal. This is what is behind the global warming scam and the fashionable attack on capitalism and growth taught in schools today.

@x-ray peat do you think they have figured out how to dehydrate and eat fortune and chance? Maybe they inject it intravenously. How about space time?

 

[x-ray peat]

@x-ray peat do you think they have figured out how to dehydrate and eat fortune and chance? Maybe they inject it intravenously. How about space time?

They dont have to. They are the prime movers behind any increase in chaos you perceive. That is how it is done. Order out of chaos. To build the new you have to destroy the old, blah blah blah

 

[LUH 3417]

They dont have to. They are the prime movers behind any increase in chaos you perceive. That is how it is done. Order out of chaos. To build the new you have to destroy the old, blah blah blah

It’s only real if you believe in it

 

[x-ray peat]

It’s only real if you believe in it

I think you had a great post before in response to someone's magical thinking. Something like "that used to be consoling to me when I was a child."

 

[LUH 3417]

They dont have to. They are the prime movers behind any increase in chaos you perceive. That is how it is done. Order out of chaos. To build the new you have to destroy the old, blah blah blah

BRIC in the wall

 

[LUH 3417]

I think you had a great post before in response to someone's magical thinking. Something like "that used to be consoling to me when I was a child."

None of your posts come through as inspired or critically thought out. You use key phrases like depopulation, economic growth, standard of living. You lack imagination.

 

[LUH 3417]

I think you had a great post before in response to someone's magical thinking. Something like "that used to be consoling to me when I was a child."

All thoughts are wishes!

 

[CarbAppreciator]

I'm surprised how many people argue for the monopolization of money. We all need to be "forced" into a certain monetary system. But... why? Why can't there be a marketplace of money? Spend Bitcoin for some things, Litecoin for others, Fiat dollars for others, Gold for others. To me, that is the true value of the crypto revolution. I've seen some arguments that Tokenization will get us closer to a barter system.

Forex Markets address this some, but they were still dominated by Government or Central Bank issued currency.

The problem with the marketplace of money in the past was communication. In 1820, if you were in New York and got currency issued from a local bank in North Carolina.... how could you check it? What's it's value? Is it real? Technology has largely eliminated those issues, as well as having to carry mulitple currencies (if you have a credit/debit card or a cell phone on you, you have access to thousands of currencies right now.

The benefits of Central Banking and central currencies like the Euro are being rendered obsolete, and we are starting to be confronted more and more with the very real problems of Central Banking,

One value in a centralized currency is its use for long term projects e.g. infrastructure. Lol no way you could fund a large project with any free floating asset, even the largest commodities like oil, corn, etc go all over the place over a few years, no one is going to sign a contract unless they have confidence in their payment. Eventually, the big cryptos will stabilize and be way better funding tools than dollars due to stable inflation, clearly we are far from that stabilization tho.

 

[x-ray peat]

None of your posts come through as inspired or critically thought out. You use key phrases like depopulation, economic growth, standard of living. You lack imagination.

Reality can often appear that way. You seem to suffer from far too much imagination.

 

[LUH 3417]

Reality can often appear that way. You seem to suffer from far too much imagination.

How Christian of you.

 

[LUH 3417]

Reality can often appear that way. You seem to suffer from far too much imagination.

 

[CarbAppreciator]

Well fiat currency used to be backed by precious metal. This has been abandoned now of course but was gold really the only thing that gave the dollar and other fiat currencies any value? How about the nation of workers of a country, the military behind that country, the production of a nation, the production of a global economy, our laws, our morality, our agreed upon barter system and how that becomes structured into the very fabric of our personal lives, our communities, our economic and political systems. I would say all these things and more combine and result in the actual value of the dollar, or other forms of fiat currency. In other words there is something to be said for our nationally/internationally agreed upon system when discussing the value of currency. Now, we know this can all go south like we have seen in certain countries past and present, however we know that this happens when that country's political structure and economic production is collapsing and the actual fabric of their system isn't structurally sound anymore. So of course the dollar and fiat currency in general is implicitly dependent upon that nations' system.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has none of this structure and nationally/internationally agreed upon system of value. Thus realistically it cannot be compared to fiat currency and the dollar in terms of value. Perhaps it will in the future but right now that is a mythical future world that has no reality in current times. Current investment in bitcoin is purely speculative and it is only being driven by the next persons belief that the value will keep going up to the moon. Once this growth of value is perceived en masse to have stopped or reached its peak, well why would anyone buy bitcoin anymore? At that point people invested will either hold on to their coins, jumping at any slight variation in value in fear of a crash as relative to fiat currency and the dollar, or they will sell. If they sell en masse (which is the most likely scenario), it will all come crashing down.


Don't see how the practical use of oil is relative here, oil is another resource bought and sold in fiat currency for a purpose in use. It's value is due to its practical applications. In a foreseeable future of renewable energy, battery cars, solar power etc, oil will be a lot cheaper and in less demand (of course there will always be some demand for its use as an energy source but potentially nothing like we see today). Point is we need a currency system in place to function in the modern world in place of barter, and fiat currency is our agreed upon unit of trade. We need something to act as a unit of currency unless we go back to small communities with a barter system and the entire world as we know it collapses. Until bitcoin becomes that majority agreed upon unit of currency it really holds no value apart from speculation or against fiat.

Yes, gold is only really valuable during times of war, when currencies, and the sovereign debts they are pegged to, all of a sudden become unvaluable in the sense that they can't be truly valued until the damages are accounted for after the war. This fact points to how the legendary Rosthchilds made their fortune (besides the famous Waterloo affair), they set up an incredible network across Europe that reliably carried out payments, mostly in gold, during the various wars that ravaged the continent, especially during Napoleons time. One could see how reliability is important when the delivery of a wagon of gold (through countrysides full of dirt poor peasants) could mean the difference between victory and defeat. That's why the nobles and kings hoard chests of gold, waiting for the next war to break out. During peacetime, gold isn't nearly as useful for everyday payments as silver is, paper is even better as long as it's not inflated to death lol.

The value of currencies simply reflect the "credit score" of the issuer. Hoards of gold help that score, but the strength of the society at large is the major factor. Rule of law(contract enforcement), social development, national defense( not necessarily imperialism, creditors get weary when a nation over steps its bounds) etc. Of course these rules change if we move from a Westphalian nation state system to a UN globalized system.

 

[dfspcc20]

What are you all's thoughts on demurrage as being built into cryptocurrency? I know this is part of Freicoin; I haven't been following that closely to know if there are others.

I did like this essay (though from 2013, it is probably old news as far as crypto goes).
The Next Step for Digital Currency | Charles Eisenstein