[mrtksn]

The strictly limited amount of BTC makes this into a land grab. First comers are entitled to the services of the real economy due to their virtue of being first(or lucky to be on the right place at the right tweet).

Musk is right on this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1401251430015582209?s=21

Unlike fiat money, BTC is not an accounting tool for value exchange.

Unlike actual land, it doesn’t have any intrinsic value.

I’m very curious to see an elite class whose core virtue is based on being an early adopter.

[berkes]

Isn't this the case for nearly all money-like assets? E.g. stock has very similar 'land grab' properties. This is almost entirely the businessmodel of VC and AI.

[mrtksn]

Yes, it's very problematic. The last time those screwed up, something called Bitcoin was created by someone who really hated the idea of bailing out that corrupt enterprise.

People play along when they benefit too. When they no longer benefit, they take action to take it down.

[globular-toast]

Not really because investors are committing resources to the business which, it is hoped, will deliver value greater than the amount put in. Merely owning land doesn't help the land improve and deliver any value.

[nroets]

The problem with BTC is not the accounting aspect. Some parts of the financial system (like option traders) have learned to do accounting in highly volatile situations.

The problem is that BTC gained it's intangible value differently from a normal fiat currency and it can loose it again. See https://bitcoin.isnot.money

[luc4sdreyer]

It bothers me to see so many spelling mistakes on an otherwise useful page with no way to notify the author.

[bawolff]

That's how all money-esque things work. First mover advantage is pretty extreme in anything money related.

> I’m very curious to see an elite class whose core virtue is based on being an early adopter.

How do you think the elite class became elite? How do queens and kings get their power? By having some ancestor in the right place at the right time take advantage of an opportunity before other people tried.

[mrtksn]

>How do you think the elite class became elite

They fought and murdered the competition. Their offsprings continue doing that until they no longer had the intelligence or power and got exterminated and their wealth redistributed.

This is very, very different than stumbling upon something.

[elevenoh]

>This is very, very different than stumbling upon something.

a) Accumulating capital & power (e.g bitcoin, land, property, influence) has always had a 'stumble upon' component.

There's no inherent 'fight and murder' evil to it...

b) Early Bitcoin acquisition required some level of computer/security/independent thinking competence.

Early land acquisition required some level of legal/defence/homesteading competence.

Aside: Writing 'very, very' made me take a closer look at this comment. Comments stating something like like 'very, very' pretty reliably tend to be flawed & indeed not 'very, very'.

[mrtksn]

>Accumulating capital & power (e.g bitcoin, land, property, influence) has always had a 'stumble upon' component.

I'm sure that inventing the Internet had a component of drinking coffee.

Anyways, the BTC is a power transfer by virtue of being early and demanding all the goods and services to be provided in exchange of transferring some amount of it.

If that is deemed unfair by the stakeholders it is very likely that there will be fight and murder phase. Can you imagine if it turns out that Satoshi is a mathematician from El Salvador and secretly holds half of the reserves once BTC is established as a world currency?

Do you think that El Salvador will instantly become world's richest country and everyone will provide them with food, wine, weapons, iPhones, software in exchange of some of the coins?

[bawolff]

Stumbling upon the right person to murder is still stumbling upon something. Lots of people fought and murdered, only a few became the rich and powerful.

[timdaub]

The intrinsic value argument is a funny one. What's the idea behind it? Assume you have asset X but then one key assmption fails. Now, is asset X still valuable considering the failed assumption?

For land, you can say that even in the case that society collapses it is still valuable. Or is it?

What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero?

[mrtksn]

The idea behind it is that it is useful beyond the accounting.

Gold has a very little intrinsic value. Decorative and tool making value due to its physical properties are there but they are minor comparatively.

BTC has none. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a value, of course but it’s simply a value within a certain ecosystem.

[timdaub]

OK but then considering your definition, I'd disagree. Bitcoin but more importantly general purpose blockchains (e.g. ETH) give rise to digital economies where real people can participate and earn money through work. Since 2019, I've now - for multiple months - been able to make an income by coding for various DAOs. Surely, BTC/ETH was used for accounting. But the social structures that formed and enabled me to have an income I can pay my rent with are of value to me and only existed because of the blockchain's technological capabilities (e.g. smart contracts). Ergo, there's intrinsic value beyond accounting.

[hutzlibu]

"Gold has a very little intrinsic value. "

Not really true, the only reason it is not used much more widely in electronic components, despite being superior to copper, is the high price it has, because of its function as value storage.

[xxs]

Gold is not superior to copper for everything - incl. the most important one feature: conductivity. Gold (22.14 nΩ⋅m) is, of course, a lot less chemically active which makes it ideal for terminals, contacts, etc. (and mostly as plating agent), however as a sole conductor it's worse than copper (16.78 nΩ⋅m). Gold has worse thermal conductivity as well... and it's a lot heavier.

That being said, it's still a very valuable material for electronics.

[hutzlibu]

Thx, for some reasons I believed it was also superior in conductivity.

[lagadu]

One of the most important features gold has is its ductility: it can be made into extremely thin, unbroken wires.

[mrtksn]

Gold is simply one of the metals in the universe and has different strength and weaknesses depending on the application.

It's not true that gold is naturally superior, in fact Gold is often mixed with other metals to create alloys to overcome certain issues. Pure gold is too soft for most of the practical uses like jewellery for example, so they add copper to it.

[nly]

> What exactly is the assumption that deems BTC's intrinsic value zero and land's value more than zero?

For me the easiest way to determine if something has intrinsic value is ask yourself what would happen if you owned all of it (and couldn't be forced to give it up).

If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, we wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties.

If you owned all the land in the world, people would come to you to buy or rent it. You can't build a house or a factory unless someone is willing to sell or lease you the land. That's what makes it valuable.

In many ways, this is why we have the word "priceless". Things become priceless when, in certain contexts (for certain people at certain times), they will not be sold for any price. Land can be priceless because I can have a sentimental attachment to a particular place. Its value isn't derived from how many $'s people will pay for it.

[atweiden]

> If you owned all the Bitcoin in the world, the world wouldn't accept its use, and would just create another currency with identical properties.

Don’t all modern currencies work like this?

[nly]

Yes, they do. It's literally the definition of fiat money that it has no intrinsic value.

[timdaub]

That's a rather theoretical argument. If you were the sole owner of the world's land, then people would probably resort to kill or capture you to redistribute the land.

[nly]

It's a thought experiment. Imagine you're trying to prove the relationship between your personal savings rate, and the date at which you can retire.

- If I save 100% of my money now, I can retire now (because clearly I don't need money to live).

- If I save 0% of my money now, I will never be able to retire (because I'll have none when I forfeit my income).

[timdaub]

Again, I think this is a rather theorerical argument.

Retirement is not solely coupled to the amount of money you have. I personally have aspirations and enough money to not having to work for a few years. And still I work lots of hours to achieve certain goals that have nothing to do with increasing my money.

[nly]

Perhaps financial independence is a better term. Retirement depends on FI, but FI doesn't necessarily mean retirement.

FI is solely determined by the amount of valuable assets you have

[whiskyant]

If one person owned all the land in the world, we also wouldn't accept it.

[lottin]

The point is that the process of bitcoin adoption is in fact a massive huge wealth-redistribution mechanism between adopters. Making people extraordinarily rich just because they were the first to buy a new currency and other people extraordinarily poor just because they were the last isn't probably something most people would agree with.

[pinkybanana]

> just because they were the last isn't probably something most people would agree with.

Most people also don't agree on huge salaries and bonuses for CEO's, in practice the people with money are willing to pay those perks. When people vote with their wallets, does it really matter what the people not voting are going to say?

[lottin]

It certainly matters if you don't want to live in fear for the rest of your life. Because if you think for a minute that the level of violence that would ensue would not be monumental you're kidding yourself.

[incrudible]

I think you are kidding yourself. Throughout history, cleptocracy has been the norm. Uprisings, especially successful ones, have been the exception.

The "you have nothing to lose but your chains"-argument just doesn't work on people who have more than enough junk to fill their stomachs (and brains) with.

[echelon]

CEOs, at least, tend to work at companies that add value to the world. Usually.

Bitcoin adds anonymous violence, increased CO2 emissions, and subtracts brilliant minds that could be working on more important problems.

[solotronics]

Land ownership is a totally abstract idea anyways it's just been a thing for longer.

[mrtksn]

Ownership is abstract, there are communities where the concept is rejected but the land has intrinsic value regardless of the claims of those who use it.

Capitalist, Communist or Anarchist - the land doesn’t care, it grows the tomatoes the same way.

[timdaub]

Surely if you look via godmode on earth, you can even ascribe intrinsic value to it in the case of complet societal collapse where there's only tribes fighting for tomatoes. But is that a useful view?

[mrtksn]

Coins in WoW have a value, anything can have a value. The problem is that these are in abstractions many levels over the biological processes that the life is based on.

The core of the human life is based on people processing materials to sustain biological processes and the rest of the humanity is built on top of it.

Intrinsic value comes from the ability to support that structure. At the top of the structure there are the higher ideals, like art and happiness and people who produce these are often rewarded with the goods from the bottom of the pyramid.

The problem with the BTC's "early adopters get rewarded extremely well and are entitled to all the goods for a liftime and generations to come" nature makes an extremely top heavy structure.

If that becomes a reality I suspect that a rubber hose cryptography breakthrough event will occur. After all, whoever has the private key, has the coins and the private key is transferable by force.

[timdaub]

Re: Intrinsic value:

I'm annoyed that the intrinsic value argument is constantly being brought up even by economists against crypto currencies. I have a similar understanding of the concept as you have, in that the value derives from the material eventually - land being most valuable.

However, what many that say BTC has no intrinsic value neglect is the opportunistic value of the traditional banking sector. German Wirecard e.g. went broke and now its stock is worth nothing anymore. Seems there was no intrinsic value either except for a few office chairs I guess.

Nobody warned investors of that. But for Bitcoin, where corruption is less likely given its transparent structure, people keep talking about intrinsic value and how it apparently has none.

[timdaub]

Fair enough. I think it's also worth considering that in terms of technological progress, BTC has been rather shit such that this thesis of "earlier adopters" becoming the new overlords is a quite speculative argument.

Sure, in this hype cycle Bitcoin has once again had a huge inflow of capital. But if you look at Bitcoin dominance charts, you can see that it is at an all-time low, and IMO will continue to be if its community stays so conservative.

[mcosta]

That is why mankind has waged war for millennia

[JumpCrisscross]

> That is why mankind has waged war for millennia

Societies with no concept of private land ownership wage war. Nomadic tribes with no private or even communal land ownership structures wage war at the scales they can. Tying warmongering to private ownership or money is oversimplifying.

[vincnetas]

I think about this through basic needs of human being. Food and shelter. Can i use land to get some of my basic needs if there is nothing else around? Probably yes. Can i use bitcoin for that. Not likely.

[tmlag]

And unlike land you can start BTC2, BTC3 and so forth if people are no longer content to pay the early adopters and want their own pyramid scheme.

[whiskyant]

People have created btc2, btc3, times a thousand. Look at all the altcoins out there. Yet all the clones of bitcoin are worthless because it's a direct copy of the protocol or with minor alterations (it's akin to trying to convince people to use a different protocol than TCP for the internet, and to use your version of it instead).

Those clones have almost no one mining with it, thus limited hashing power, thus no ability to secure transactions on the network. The amount of hashing power + number of nodes makes the protocol decentralized and secure, and thus far only Bitcoin has that and none of the clones.

There's a bunch of people that have little to no knowledge about the space coming in and buying new coins believing it will make them rich, but they're usually clueless about the underlying technology.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Limited amount of BTC is easily circumvented by issuing new cryptocurrencies.