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by lumberjack 2544 days ago
> The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.

Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger. Also philosophically speaking, "wealth that one truly owns" as in "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing. If your wealth is in Bitcoin, you are trusting in fellow Bitcoin users and your wealth is entirely dependent on their feelings about the cryptomarket. That is hardly a better safer store for your wealth.

2 comments

> Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger.

I disagree with that. Bitcoin did not start off with get-rich-quick schemes. It started off with a core bunch of people who wanted independent options to wealth. One of the major issues we're going through today [ in terms of tech-misinformation ] is how everyone assumes cryptocurrency & blockchain are just buzzwords that people only got interested in to make money & scam. Not true. Bitcoin started off with a completely different ideology among the early adopters before it got to where it is today. Don't look at the current trend of youtube """educators""" [ read: hype-beast / scammers ] and think that's what drives the development.

> "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing

That's actually a very good point! I wouldn't necessarily agree to your ending statement of whether it is / isn't a safer store for one's wealth, but I do agree that wealth needs dependencies. I guess I should have made my statement to be more along the lines of: "Independent wealth OPTIONS where users can control their dependencies."

I prefer depending on the market instead of the state dictating how much my money is worth.
Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly monitoring and adjusting. It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

Sure the Tesla makes mistakes and kills someone every now and then, but I’d take that over the brick.

> Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly monitoring and adjusting.

The market is relatively 'dumb', but its decisions are based on human expectation and applied peacefully through voluntary transactions. The state is relatively 'dumb' too, but it's also evil most of the time, and its decisions use violence to be committed.

Also, when the market is wrong, some people may lose money (specially those that were the most wrong), but the system corrects itself. When the state is wrong, the error accumulates because the system can't self-correct.

>It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

The market is much like a machine learning algorithm. I say the market is the Tesla AI and the state is a drunk driver.