[turc1656]

good points. something else to consider - money derives its value from 2 sources: 1) the actual goods and services (GDP) that it represents and 2) the fact that government demands taxes be paid in it. BTC fills neither of these because no government does business with it and no one knows what it represents because it's not linked to a specific country or region of people. that alone should disqualify it from being considered "real money". until that changes, that should be everyone's view of it.

one other thing - with regards to fiat, BTC does have one theoretical advantage - the ability to limit government spending because it cannot be created out of thin air to be created as credit and spent as debt. and that is why no government will ever use it. but we wouldn't want this anyway because we actually DO want government to be able to create money as needed. the reason is that because the stated goal of the fed is "stable prices and full employment" stable prices are simple - your monetary supply expands AND CONTRACTS with GDP, pure and simple. 100 bushels of wheat in your economy and $200 in money? that's $2 per bushel. if your economy doubles due to additional population or technological/productivity improvements and starts producing 150 bushels, you need to have $300 in your economy for stable prices. the issue is that our government increases its spending at a rate that far exceeds the growth of GDP.

want a great idea for a far superior monetary system? read this: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209282

[smokeyj]

> money derives its value from 2 sources: 1) the actual goods and services (GDP) that it represents and 2) the fact that government demands taxes be paid in it.

This is historically and factually inaccurate. Currencies typically originated as highly marketable commodities that are naturally scarce and fungible - salt, gold, silver, cigarettes in jail, etc.

[turc1656]

sorry, i should have qualified that i was referring to FIAT money. otherwise, it would have no intrinsic value. The examples you give are all physical items that have intrinsic value because they can be used for something other than being money. what i said was directed at fiat only since that is what all modern economies use. without the 2 factors i described, fiat is nothing but useless paper with weird stuff printed on it.

[smokeyj]

> The examples you give are all physical items that have intrinsic value because they can be used for something other than being money

One could argue that's the definition of real money - but to say Bitcoin isn't real money is to move the goal post when what you mean is Bitcoin isn't a traditional fiat currency. There's no debate there.

[eridius]

I think the implication is that BTC has very little intrinsic value. Well, the BTC itself actually has zero intrinsic value, the only intrinsic value in the ecosystem is the blockchain (although the value of the blockchain itself is dependent upon the perceived value of BTC, as its ability to prove data existed at a point in time only works if a sufficient number of people are actually mining blocks, and people mine blocks in order to get BTC).