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by JoeAltmaier 1860 days ago
Exactly. Its not so much a currency as a tulip bulb, or a ponzi scheme, or something new that has the worst features of all those.
3 comments

I don't think of it as currency but as an asset, like gold. I refer to it as digital gold. Assets are not ideal for currency because overall they inflate in value (deflation), which discourages spend. Currency is designed to deflate in value (inflation), albeit at a controlled rate, to encourage spend. That's why you don't want to keep an excess of money in the bank - you want to move that money which deflates in value to assets which inflate in value - you want to buy gold, stocks, real estate, digital gold (cryptocurrency) and stuff like that.

The confusion of treating an asset such as bitcoin as currency is it's fluidity - which is just a measure of how easy it is to convert currency into an asset and an asset into currency. Stocks, for example, have an extremely high fluidity, which also contributes somewhat to their variability. Real estate on the other hand has a very low fluidity (historically speaking anyway, today's market notwithstanding). No one thinks of purchasing goods and services with stocks, nor should you think of purchasing goods and services with bitcoin.

Viewed in that light bitcoin is actually something that's quite familiar: gold. It's digital gold. Now is it good to invest in such an asset? That's another question we can tackle on another day!

As a Dutch person I can attest tulips have an actual purpose. And worth- the flower business is worth billions every year.
>tulips have an actual purpose

As a 1/4 Dutch person I can attest tulips hang around for decades doing nothing while being completely ignored.

The tulip bulb mania story is an incredibly persistent but inaccurate myth.
The “debunking” of Tulip Mania has, itself, been thoroughly debunked:

https://fee.org/articles/tulip-mania-not-a-myth/

Plenty of financial records still exist from back then. Tulip bulb mania actually happened.

That article doesn't debunk anything lol Goldgar's points are still just as valid.