[jariel]

No, this is really quite upside down.

"People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it"

We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors.

Bitcoin creates no value.

It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system as a whole - and because it has negative externalizations in the form of CO2 emissions etc. - it's actually a net negative.

Making magic digital baseball cards and trading them does not help us make roads, bridges, iPhones, software, drugs, vaccines, clothing, homes - it just makes all of that a little bit harder actually.

Much like residents of Easter Island using all their resources competing to make Giant Heads. Those heads may have mad some people very powerful, they did not help them grow food, make boats.

If all BTC mining stopped right now, not a single thing would change, other than the price of electricity would be a little cheaper in some places.

BTC isn't going to 'end the world' but the energy consumption is a really negative artifact of this purely speculative activity.

There's not so much wrong with people wanting to exchange digital baseball cards if they want to do that - fine - but with the externalizes it's a problem.

[jerry1979]

> Bitcoin creates no value.

Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts.

Out here in the regular world where we cannot trust each other, having a ready-made source of truth has lots of value because it lets people all over the cooperate who otherwise could not.

[jariel]

That's a good idea, but in practice, no value is created by BTC.

And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'.

So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument.

If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ETF or real estate or whatever and you good.

[doggosphere]

Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will. It is a protocol that is open source, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant.

Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trillion of dollars they didn't have to prop up markets through quantitative easing.

And now you have housing markets and stock markets in bubbles. Inflation that is inevitably coming.

Mortgage rates only ever go down to support the housing market.

http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates_chart-graph.htm

Treasury yields only ever go down to support the stocks market.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...

Debt to GDP ratio only ever goes up:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Ask yourself why this is happening, and how we return to sound money.

[jariel]

"Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will."

That is not value.

You can do that with Gold.

We could do that with an arbitrary fixed currency that someone invents.

BTC 'has not value' because it can't be used for anything - as a currency it's useless, and as a store of value it's next to useless (there are better stores of value).

Your comments about 'money' don't necessarily relate:

1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.

2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.

3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.

Again - BTC creates zero value, there's no point to it - it can't be used as currency and it's not a better a store of value than rare comic books.

[doggosphere]

You can do that with Gold.

Yes, we had gold as a monetary standard for quite some time.

1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.

Money is supposed to be sound. Your notion that currency should not be a hard store of value is a new one, an idea created to support fiat. From first principles, money is a store of energy (creative work, physical work), which is then utilized for efficient exchange of goods and services. Money is not a tool for "greasing the economy", this was only possible when governments confiscated gold and declared all money to be paper that they controlled. Furthermore, buying stocks/houses/gold etc. is indeed a way of escaping USD into assets. However, someone else has to be willing to take that USD. It will still exist, and whoever holds it will be losing value over time. It is a problem when your base asset becomes toxic and no one wants it.

2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.

We used gold and other rare metals for thousands of years. It was literally the global standard for trade.

3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.

The USD's buying power has fallen dramatically over time. Inflation has been very visible in home prices and stock prices.

https://howmuch.net/articles/rise-and-fall-dollar

[jerry1979]

I think you make a good observation when you say that we have many kinds of sources of truth. People want to create many different kinds of sources of truth because people find sources of truth very very valuable. The fact that we can agree that bitcoin gives us a source of truth proves that bitcoin creates value because, as we know, people find them so valuable.

[jariel]

" The fact that we can agree that bitcoin gives us a source"

'Sources of Truth' are a commodity.

There are any number of ways to do that.

There's no reason to have a $50B source of truth.

And FYI there is no value merely in a 'source of truth' it has to be put to use in some way, and BTC has zero uses.