denisdman wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
denisdman wrote:
Naked shorts, short sellers, smart money manipulation amid the usual tropes whenever an investment goes down. Normally it’s just a valuation issue. And herein lies the problem with Bitcoin- it is not based on anything real, namely cash flow. At least gold has industrial value.
That's bullshit, Denni$. Nobody hordes gold so it can be used on printed circuit boards. Bitcoin is no different than any other currency. It has value as long as humans say it does.
Unlike most fungible currencies Bitcoin has the added feature that it cannot be diluted by demented presidents and their printing presses or billionaires funding space missions to mine gold throughout the galaxy.
The lack of dilution is a nice feature of Bitcoin. It is like the monetarists theory on the money supply for the dollar that has long since been abandoned. But under your theory that it has value as long as humans say it does, well, that could be applied to anything- flowers, baseball cards, beanie babies.
Correct. And once humans no longer value those things they become relatively worthless. It's happened with the items you mentioned. It happened with the Deutschemark. And it will happen to the U.S. Dollar eventually. I doubt it will happen in our lifetime, but I've seen shit over the last two years that I never thought would happen either. If you're going to convince people of the value of your currency, it helps to have the strongest navy.
My point is only that you have a bias that is causing you to judge Bitcoin as if it's any different than any other currency that humans have used historically. It is different, but in ways that only make it stronger.
denisdman wrote:
The difference with gold is that it is truly limited and has been used throughout modern history as a medium of exchange. Fiat currencies are a joke and always end up imploding. But Bitcoin is way too new of a concept to know if it is a Ponzi scheme, the next generation of currency, or something in between. The dollar, while flawed, is roughly backed by the strength of the U.S. economy. That is why it is worth what it is vs say the Mexican Peso.
All economies should operate on currencies linked to gold and silver, but sadly we are past that point. Only my guy Ron Paul would advocate bringing it back.
Point taken on the long history of the acceptance of gold as currency. The thing is though, even when the U.S. Dollar was allegedly backed by gold (tinfoil hat: Fort Knox is empty), we weren't really using gold as currency. We were using notes that supposedly represented gold. What was really being exchanged was faith in the power of the U.S. government/military.
I watched a show once on the history of money. At the end of growing season the Mongol farmers would bring their crops in to exchange them for gold. One year Genghis Khan told the farmers that they would not be getting gold, but he would instead issue them paper that represented gold. Naturally, the farmers were less than pleased, but what could they do? They could either take the paper or get their heads cut off. So they accepted the terms. And the paper was accepted just as gold would have been.