So is Bitcoin how to flee fiat money?
- Thread starter geomark
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Sorry, haven't been on the silk road, just read about it in that rolling stone article that helped make BTC famous.
I have shopped at one or two of these thousand or so merchants though:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
Can anyone find a niche market where you CAN'T use bitcoin right now? Shit's grown!
It's not that hard to check it out... Here's the designer's PDF on it:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
There's some tech stuff in there that admittedly is over many peoples' head, but I've yet to hear of a programmer say "I looked at the code and this can be cracked" or anything similar. -It makes instant Fans of every coder who looks at it.
Here's the community of BTC techie users/updaters... See what they think about it for yourself.
They got change for a $1,600 gold 1 ounce gold coin? Lulz... Not very practical. He'd have to keep weights and stuff to value a lot of gold, and worry about low-quality gold from ppl he doesn't know, too!
Meanwhile, right this very moment you can use Bitcoin or Paypal on your cell phone to send them PP USD$ or BTC... In both cases they just need a (free) account to receive.
It's all open source!
You can actually see every BTC transaction take place in real time. Everybody sees the money move but no one knows who owns the wallets its' moved to.
Of course, I don't expect it to happen over night... But since more people adopt it every day now, and accepting BTC is so damn easy and has such invisible fees, it catches on across many industries, even just as an investment.
I especially like its' fee structure. Free to give and receive, unless you're in a hurry. If you are, you pay 0.01 BTC for a "jump in line" fee!
Read it. I agree with every bit of it.
But where does it say that an electronic Fiat currency can't be as good or better as a paper fiat currency?
I would assume that if the Fed had issued BTC instead of FRNs they'd still serve as money today, right?
I haven't looked at all your links yet, but I will when I have time. Where can someone send someone cash via PP and get BC in return?
"if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power"
It all comes down to this lukep... Botnets come to mind...
If you want something that is easily transferable, why not use a virtual currency that is backed by gold (or something else)?
But in the end it is not up to us to decide what the best currency is. Let them compete and one (or multiple?) winner(s) will arise.
It all comes down to this lukep... Botnets come to mind...
If you want something that is easily transferable, why not use a virtual currency that is backed by gold (or something else)?
But in the end it is not up to us to decide what the best currency is. Let them compete and one (or multiple?) winner(s) will arise.
Seems like a sticking point with considering it money is that it isn't a commodity. Question then, what is a commodity? Does a commodity have to be something tangible?
If you look at a couple of the underlying characteristics of what makes something suitable as money it is that it is scarce (so a small amount of money can store a lot of value) and is not easily produced (so that it remains scarce and cannot be easily debased). That's why fiat money is not real money but is just a huge confidence game, and why things like gold or even bottles of liquid Tide detergent (It’s come to this: Tide laundry detergent being used as currency in some U.S. neighborhoods « The Greenroom) are used as real money.
So then, can a non-tangible thing be real money? I think the answer is yes if it has the same characteristics as traditional real money.
If you look at a couple of the underlying characteristics of what makes something suitable as money it is that it is scarce (so a small amount of money can store a lot of value) and is not easily produced (so that it remains scarce and cannot be easily debased). That's why fiat money is not real money but is just a huge confidence game, and why things like gold or even bottles of liquid Tide detergent (It’s come to this: Tide laundry detergent being used as currency in some U.S. neighborhoods « The Greenroom) are used as real money.
So then, can a non-tangible thing be real money? I think the answer is yes if it has the same characteristics as traditional real money.
No.
It needs to be scarce, it needs to be fungible, it needs to be malleable, and it needs to be durable.
Bitcoin at best, is two of those 4.
No, see above.
Bitcoin is scarce and durable, those features are obvious.
Fungible, BTC is certainly that, isn't it? You can substitute any BTC for any other one of the same value.
Malleable? That assumes it must be tangible which I assert is not a requirement.
Definitely disagree on these points. Seems to me that money need not be tangible.
Fungible, BTC is certainly that, isn't it? You can substitute any BTC for any other one of the same value.
Malleable? That assumes it must be tangible which I assert is not a requirement.
Definitely disagree on these points. Seems to me that money need not be tangible.
How are bitcoins durable?
Divisible? Convenient?
Has a secondary purpose other than for use as money?
Apparently you also didn't read the article posted.
What can you do with paper money? Eat them? Wipe your ass with them? Fold them into origami? Sir, those aren't good enough uses.
BTW 98% of money is just digits in a computer anyway.
Not arguing for or against BTC, but from what I've seen you can some how mine a fraction of a BTC. That's how it appears in some of those mining groups anyhow.
Not sure if serious actually since they can never wear out and are just retired voluntarily, but I don't understand it very well actually but they are infinitely more durable than physical money. Divisible to however many decimal places your computer can compute. More convenient than a bag of gold coins. And since the subject is "money" then whether or not it has another purpose would not be part of the discussion of whether or not it is money.
I don't have any Bitcoins and don't understand it well enough to buy into it but am interested in the debate about whether or not they can act as "real" money. The traditional definitions of money apply to tangibles only so that's why I'm asking if something can perform all the functions of money without being tangible. After all, that's what we do these days, most often just shuffle around numbers in accounts and now and then convert them to something tangible.
A bitcoin is more durable than gold?
I didn't know that.
How convenient is it when you don't have electricity? How convenient is it when you don't have access to a computer?
Actually, that is a large part of this discussion. There is no such thing as money qua money created outside the market.
The traditional definitions of money apply to money.
A consequence of living with fiat money so long, folks don't understand what real money is, and how it achieves such utility.
If you can cite any example of such, I will give you a cookie.
Have you read anything about money by an economist? Who? What?
I hate when people make arguments like that because it is so sloppy.
Learn something about money. Then you will understand my posts about BTC. Your lack of knowledge is not proof of your superior argument.
Any exchange. Mt Gox is the most popular Bitcoin exchange, there are several others that specialize in Bitcoin too.
You really should look into how many bitcoin miners there are and what percentage of the world's computing power they represent.
The "Honest nodes" are an unfathomable number of operations per second. Possibly 2/3rds of the planet's computing power!
This is because the only real, hardcore caches of computing power that most people can purchase are all in the form of very high-end video cards. And for a good five years now all of those best video cards have been bought up by the bitcoin miners. Gamers constantly curse them for making it impossible to get their hands on the next best thing.
Wow, there are many reasons. Where to begin...
1. Taxes.
2. Do you trust those holding the gold?
3. Exchange rates are twice as complicated.
4. FEES. -Gotta be a lot of overhead involved with this.
5. Uncle Sam still doesn't like anyone using currency other than the FRN, and this one would be easier to track than an anonymous one.
Agreed completely. It's up to us to pick the one that we like the most each... That's called being the market, and the currencies that survive will have been chosen by the market.
I simply believe that BTC will be one of the survivors... It's the only anonymous money there is... Talk about having an advantage...
It will be if the market chooses it. So far it's been growing in worth for years, why do you thing it can't be market money? Was that growth all artificial?
BTC can be backed up, exist in the cloud, fit on a jump drive, and you can even take a picture of your BTC wallet and destroy your data entirely except for that picture, and still get access to your wallet again on the next computer.
In a world where everyone has a computer on their cell phone, that sounds far more durable to me than gold which can be melted, chopped up, lost, thrown in a lake, dropped down a sewer grate, etc... It's a NEW KIND of durable fit for a new age.
Awesomely divisible. One Bitcoin is divisible down to eight decimal places. There are really 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin design.
The value of "1 BTC" represents 100,000,000 of these. In other words, each is divisible by up to 10^8.
As the value of the unit of 1 BTC grows too large to be useful for day to day transactions, people can start dealing in smaller units, such as milli-bitcoins (mBTC) or micro-bitcoins (μBTC).
Paying for anything anywhere by phone seems convenient to me. Of course there ARE physical bitcoins too, I doubt that will catch on because the physical seems to inconvenient nowadays.
No, but neither does any fiat money.
As time marches forward those two scenarios grow less and less likely to happen to anyone.
Because of the approaching singularity and exciting new power sources like LENR and green energies, you can rest assured that within your lifetime you will personally have computing systems far more powerful than the PC in front of you that will never, ever be turned off again, always online 24/7.
I'd like to humbly suggest that the Fed created the FRN outside the market.
Those of us who do understand though, SHOULD WANT SOMETHING BETTER.
The FRN was a receipt for gold until Roosevelt confiscated gold. Gold was $20 an ounce for a long time in the US and you could go to any bank to exchange your notes for the yellow metal.
Gold was market money, and the government co-opted it, the way it co-opted education, roads, courts and defense.
^Sounds like we are in agreement here too. I just can't fathom why you come to such a different conclusion about Bitcoin than I do...
We both agree that the market makes money, excepting of course for the government-mandated Fiat money.
We both agree on all of the other criteria about money, and I haven't seen you seriously refute any of them. (i.e. divisibility, durability, etc)
The only thing left seems to be market preference. I too only want bitcoin to come about if the market prefers it.
...But why shouldn't it? It's literally better than a FRN in every single way, plus it is Anonymous... A power-feature that has never before been truly possible in money... A feature that you of all people should drool over and want to fight for, because anonymous money helps destroy governments.
Judging by its' killer feature set and the fact that BTC trades on dozens of exchanges for $5.75 right now, showing steady, long-term growth, I'd say that the market is happily accommodating it so far... No home run yet, but as we approach the singularity it grows more and more attractive each day.
We both agree that the market makes money, excepting of course for the government-mandated Fiat money.
We both agree on all of the other criteria about money, and I haven't seen you seriously refute any of them. (i.e. divisibility, durability, etc)
The only thing left seems to be market preference. I too only want bitcoin to come about if the market prefers it.
...But why shouldn't it? It's literally better than a FRN in every single way, plus it is Anonymous... A power-feature that has never before been truly possible in money... A feature that you of all people should drool over and want to fight for, because anonymous money helps destroy governments.
Judging by its' killer feature set and the fact that BTC trades on dozens of exchanges for $5.75 right now, showing steady, long-term growth, I'd say that the market is happily accommodating it so far... No home run yet, but as we approach the singularity it grows more and more attractive each day.