[XorNot]

Stocks represent actual ownership in the company, potentially voting control of the boards decisions.

Government bonds are backed by the full force and trust of the government they represent, and repay the face value plus yield promised at the time they were bought. They represent the most reliable yield you can get.

Real estate? You mean that thing you live in?

This is all a bunch of a false equivocation with one goal: "please buy my Bitcoins and give me USD for them"

[askmike]

> Stocks represent actual ownership in the company, potentially voting control of the boards decisions.

A company is an abstract concept around a group of people, framed inside a legal entity. But yes, if you own many stocks you can sit at the table with some big boys. Most companies come with less risk than Bitcoin. But I rather buy Bitcoin than WeWork shares (assuming they list).

> Government bonds are backed by the full force and trust of the government they represent, and repay the face value plus yield promised at the time they were bought. They represent the most reliable yield you can get.

Until a government defaults. This doesn't happy every week, but ruling out that it doesn't is not the best investment strategy.

---

I'm not denying Bitcoin is speculation, but so is everything else. Sure Bitcoin might be more speculative under your frame of reference. But it's not black and white.

[eru]

> But I rather buy Bitcoin than WeWork shares (assuming they list).

Depends on the price. Thanks to limited liability, WeWork share can never be worth less than zero. And just liquidating their existing office supplis is probably worth at least a few thousand dollars. But, of course, you'd have to pay off creditors first.

If WeWork lists and doesn't go under, and assuming even a weak version of the efficient market hypothesis, the price their shares trade on will be about 'right'.

> Until a government defaults. This doesn't happy every week, but ruling out that it doesn't is not the best investment strategy.

Agreed. Though in the developed world, inflation is usually the bigger worry. (Unless you buy inflation indexed bonds.)

[IllogicalLogic]

I find people's lack of knowledge about what makes Bitcoin valuable interesting.

The reason Bitcoin is valuable is because the work required to create one is significantly harder than Fiat currencies and it is one of the only truly scarce assets in human history (hard cap).

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit any fiat currency? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $10k?

Yes, easy.

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit Bitcoin? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $1 billion?

No, not easy.

You may think this is a trivial distinction but it has tremendous value knowing you have hard uncounterfeitable money with a hard cap.

The US treasury spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting fake bills, that's only 1 of the dozen or so problems bitcoin solves. The second is that all the verification and security is done by the most powerful supercomputer in human history.

These things gives it its value.

Garbage company stocks, you can throw those in the trash if the central banks aren't busy helping pump them.

Hard money wins, soft money gets snuffed in the night.

[eru]

What are some falsifiable predictions of that theory?

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm not a big fan of Bitcoin as a long term solution, I consider it little more than a proof of concept. It took a long time for steam engines to outperform horses, and it may take just as long for a crypto-driven economy to emerge that outperforms our current one. But I think it will happen, and those cryptocurrencies--I'm very excited about those.

Re stock: People are already working on blockchain voting mechanisms. Currently you need to own quite a sizeable chunk of a company's stock, and to go rather far out of your way, to actually influence the decision-making of a company you own stock in. Cryptos with on-chain governance, on the other hand, will remove most of that friction.

Re. government: Sure, right now this type of decision making only applies to either protocol design decisions or how to edit transaction history in the event of a problem, but once the proposal-vote-consensus-action pipeline is figured out and trusted, I see no reason it won't start getting applied to the same problems that we keep governments around to solve. So yeah, government bonds are safe nowadays because government's don't have anything to compete with besides other slow inefficient governments, but if people think that a collection of community maintained consensus algorithms are more effective than their government--well I wouldn't want to be holding fiat bonds when that happens, because why pay taxes when you get more bang for your services-for-society buck elsewhere?

As for real estate, just shooting from the hip I'd say that it's 10% real and 90% the game indicated in the article. In a world where large scale behavior of economies can be quickly altered by a vote and a parameter change, I certainly hope we can find a set of parameters that will eliminate the homeowners association and all of the waste associated with placing property resale value over utility. I'd much rather lose out on my "investment" in this house than continue to live in a world where my friends can't afford to live near me because of all the overpriced empty houses in the way--sucking up all the water for their perfectly manicured lawns that nobody touches while the poor kids down the road play on a field of gravel, broken glass, and thistle.

I don't hold much Bitcoin, but I promise that I don't value it because I think I can later dupe somebody into buying it at a higher price.

I value it because it's clumsily paving the way for a world with fewer parisitic middle-man institutions, and the further it gets before it falls over the sooner I'll get to live in that world. I guess that's called investing.