The magical fairy dust known as Bitcoin is back in the news as its price has soared to a record high in the last few weeks. Currently one bitcoin is worth 35,000 USD, which is close to double its value of a month ago. If last spring, when the Covid panic hit, you decided to get into Bitcoin, thinking it was a safe haven for your money, your return would now sit at 700%. Of course, if you were an early adopter when the price was a few hundred dollars, then you are now quite rich.
Of course, whenever Bitcoin is on the rise, the paladins of cryptocurrency are out evangelizing about the glorious future where currency is no longer controlled by those evil bankers rubbing their hands in their secret lair. Karl Thorburn has been making the rounds on this side of the great divide. Here is a podcast he did with Greg Johnson last week that is worth a listen. Bitcoin is popular among dissidents, because the bankers cannot get you deplatformed from it like they do with credit cards.
One problem with Bitcoin is right there in those huge gains. There are wild swings in its value as people rush in and out of it. Three years ago, Bitcoin had a similar surge then lost half its value over the next six months. A similar boom and bust happened the following year. As a means of exchange, it suffers from the same problem that all commodities suffer. That is, it tends to increase in value over time, but it also suffers from the cyclical tendency we see in these booms and busts.
One reason for this is that all cryptocurrencies are designed around a math problem that gets exponentially harder to solve as time goes on. Put another way, each new coin costs more to produce than the previous coin. If the first coin cost X, the next coin costs x+n with n being the slight increase in cost to produce it. If the first ten coins average out to 10 USD and the next ten are 20 USD, then the average value of each coin has gone up by 50% just by the mere fact of their creation.
Demand for Bitcoin, however, has tendencies that do not always correspond with the supply of Bitcoins. That explains the cyclicality. For reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent value of Bitcoin, demand rises, so the price rises with it. At some point, people with Bitcoin begin to cash in and the price starts to fall, leading to a rush for the exit as we see with any asset bubble. Like hard money, Bitcoin has cyclical tendencies that get increasingly wild over time.
The other problem with Bitcoin, in terms of it replacing dollars or euros as a currency is that it is not actually money. It can be used as a medium of exchange, but only because governments tolerate it for now. Otherwise, it lacks the key attribute that has defined money since the Phrygians started producing coins. It lacks the backing of a sovereign who will enforce its value. Legal tender is an item that must be accepted as payment and that is enforced by a government with a monopoly of force.
Now, this does not mean that things like gold or precious stones cannot be used in exchange, but they are not legal tender unless the government of the jurisdiction where the exchange occurs agrees to it. In the United States, for example, it is illegal to demand payment in gold. The legal tender of the United States is those bits of metal and paper we carry around with us. A check or credit card is just involving a third-party (the bank) to pay the merchant in dollars.
Now the crypto-evangelists always respond to this point by saying that governments can’t do anything about cryptocurrencies. That’s the beauty of them. Because their creation is independent of government and their value is set in the marketplace, the state cannot prevent people from using Bitcoin. They will also note that Bitcoin is anonymous, so the state will have a tough time tracing the source of Bitcoin, even if they try to crack down on its use and possession.
This argument has several problems, one of which should be obvious. The government can simply arrest people for using Bitcoin and throw them into prison. If merchants are told it is unlawful to accept Bitcoin, they stop taking Bitcoin. There is a reason no merchant accepts gold dust for payment. Not even a pawnshop will accept gold as a form of payment and most of them trade in raw gold now. One necessary quality of money is that it be widely accepted for payment.
Governments have a primarily interest in protecting their monopoly on the supply of legal tender. This goes to something called seigniorage. This is the profit the sovereign makes from the issuing of money. In the days of gold coin, the miners of gold brought their bullion to the king’s mint, where it was turned into coins. The value of the coins was more than the value of the bullion. This is one way the king could finance his government, without having to physically control the gold supply.
In modern times, seigniorage has evolved into something else, namely the stability of the money supply, especially in relation to other currencies. A stable money supply makes for stable credit markets. The standing and legitimacy of a government is determined by the stability of its currency. This is why central banks have become the most important institutions on the planet. It is also why the major central banks will never cede control of the currency to cryptocurrency.
Note that stability does not mean fixed. The supply of money in its various forms can expand and contract. When the Fed changes interest rates, they are changing the supply of one or more forms of money. This is done in concert with the European Central Bank within an agreed upon structure. This means the supply of money is stable in that it is predictable. In the Covid crisis, everyone knew the central banks would aggressively expand the money supply in response.
The response to this is usually something about the immorality of government manipulating their currencies to finance debt. While true, the morality of the crypto advocates is not the morality of the people in charge. Since the people in charge have a monopoly of force, it is their morality that matters. The golden rule of power is that no one is ever talked out of retaining power. The United States gives up its control of the currency when someone more powerful takes it away.
There are other problems with crypto that prevent it from becoming anything more than a digital tulip bulb. Money, by definition, is self-verifying. You can examine currency and determine if it is authentic. Crypto requires a third party to validate the coin. That is done by examining its provenance. Each use becomes part of the coin’s validation, so it carries the history of its usage. The argument here is that government cannot access this, but the threat of prison will easily solve this problem.
The bottom line is money is about power. A ruler powerful enough to issue his own coin is powerful enough to enforce its use. The more powerful the king, the more valuable his coin, even outside his realm. This has always been true and will remain true. The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is that the rulers of the American empire are the most powerful and the most predictable rulers on the planet. The Euro is the second reserve currency for the same reason.
That said, crypto is not worthless. For dissidents looking to get around the financial restrictions placed on them by agents of the state, crypto is a solution. If you are looking to invest in a risky asset, Bitcoin is a good play. Over time it will keep going up, but in between it will be a rollercoaster. If you like that action, then crypto is a cheap way to get it. If you want to anonymously fund a dissident, crypto is also a good way to give someone money without easily exposing your identity.
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I threw a small amount of money in crypto Monday morning and I am up 20% right now. I assume the rug will get pulled out from under this at some point by the feds, but maybe not. Jamie Dimon is setting up a crypto currency through JP Morgan after calling Bitcoin a scam several years ago. The big banks and the government may opt to try and control this instead of crush it.
A good rule of thumb is that whatever rich insiders say they are doing is certainly not what they are doing. They did not get rich by giving away their insider information.
Correct. “A ruler powerful enough to issue his own coin is powerful enough to enforce its use. The more powerful the king, the more valuable his coin, even outside his realm.” America is about to crown a potato for its president, and a trollop for its VP. Its ruling class is peopled by similar cretins. There is now a voracious power vacuum in both our nation’s capitals, and only a motley crew of queers, pedos, and unstable psychotics to fill it. The stage is set for big changes. In short order, for the short term… any investment or transaction you… Read more »
Actually, JP Morgan and other companies setting up their own cryptocurrencies is an interesting aspect to all of this. I don’t claim to know anything about cryptocurrencies, but let’s just say that they are the equivalent of a king/country minting their own coins. You have JPM Coin and Facebook’s Libra. There may be others. My point is that several of the big Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs are beginning to mint their own coins. Normally, the big concern with this – as with Bitcoin – is that the government can shut them down, but, perhaps, these oligarch cryptocurrencies are… Read more »
Interesting. With power like that though… what point is there in having a king? Consider: you’re a Zuckerface or Bezos. Washington bends to your every command… for a fee.
At this point the sham is obvious, the number of red pilled normies is exploding exponentially. Washington is rapidly turning into an increasingly dysfunctional liability. At some point an effort to cut them out of the deal will be made… and perhaps that is what we really saw with Trump?
The swamp is in the eye of the beholder…
The king takes the blame when things go wrong. Then he is replaced. Also need a spokesfigure for their edicts. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Meanwhile, pay no attention to those lords of finance.
Always do the exact opposite of any public statements made by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
The whole bitcoin thing is a lot like Curtis Yarvin’s idea of the “Multiversity”, an institution (or website, it was never really clear) that would enlighten the people with politically incorrect truths, and hence weakening the regime. There’s no doubt that spreading the truth is an important part of any strategy, but we all know that the second any such site or institution started seriously inconveniencing the powers that be, it would be shut down ASAP. Same with Bitcoin. It’s good for what it’s good for, but it’s not “The Answer”, any more than Yarvin’s hobbyhorse was.
And the key lesson to be learned from this example is that if you seriously wish to degrade a corrupt government, you must do so surreptitiously and not with a clear target painted on your back.
Bitcoin is too risky. I’m investing in tulips.
How many bulbs would you like?
I’ve got some extra saffron bulbs. Worth more than gold by weight for some reason.
I’m just mad about saffron.
You so old!
I remember when Mellow Yellow was the southern Mountain Dew. Kid me wondered why somebody would write a song about soda 🙂
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not putting my money into something I cannot understand or control. At least I know what a tulip bulb is.
If you don’t understand Zman’s point about crypto not being an unassailable safehaven against tyranny let me boil it down for you.
For most of you, the ideas you have about God, nation, country and race would, 35 years ago, place you in the majority and by most measures you’d be considered “good people”
Those same beliefs y’all hold now make you unemployable, dissident, subversive and possibly amenable to prosecution.
Same here. And what if you can’t access the internet? I would never want my fortune dependent on me having 24/7 access to the internet. I lose signal driving through canyons as it is. Power outage hits and you’re screwed like a Tesla owner
bottom line. Bitcoin is valued in dollars. Dollars aren’t valued in Bitcoin.
The fools! I’m putting *my* money in tulips!
The first law of monetarism is that the bad money drives out the good. At this stage, the value of bitcoin is not so much increasing, as is the converse – the decline in prospects of stable reserve currencies as MMT and other financial experiments come into vogue. Because of our post-scarcity society, inflation manifests itself through asset inflation. And that is what we are seeing. And this is why the value of these coins will continue to surge. For a while. Eventually, governments will come after them and depress the value… on the short term. China tried this. South… Read more »
Molyneux rubbed some of his listeners noses in this investment telling them that he told them years before to get into bitcoin when it was cheap.
Smart guy saying this to people he begs money from.
If you want to listen to something sad and pathetic, listen to Molyneaux. All he does now is take listener calls, and has the same idiotic advice about how everything is the listener’s parents fault and the principled “libertarian” stand is disconnecting from them. There is literally no more content about current events or big think philosophical/moral/science issues. He clearly lost any sort of passion he had for podcasting and by and large hates his audience, but simultaneously needs the cash bad. But because of bans and terrible content, he can never recreate the wonder years and huge cash of… Read more »
Haven’t listened to Moly for years. He had some interesting “truth about” podcasts, but his libertarian outlook, well really his inability to move past his libertarian outlook, got too frustrating.
I always guessed that he was trying to stay on the good side of YouTube, which, in the end, didn’t help him anyway. He’s a good example of what happens to CivNat types who think that they can continue to hide from the Progressives. Those days are over. You either confess your sins or you’re banished.
He didn’t stand up to the censorship and it’s costing him now. It got hard to listen to him talking around and eventually avoiding certain subjects. Hope he finds his mojo again, wish him the best.
did molyneux ever say anything interesting? I watched him way back, before trump got elected, he just kept on annoying me with his interpretation of aristotle and the importance of not spanking kids.
I’ve always hoped that Steve Sailer got some of the Bitcoin gravy train. He’s been accepting it for a long time. Maybe he kept a few coins around.
Cryptocurrencies (the tech) are a totalitarian dream. Every transaction tracked and stored forever, the information immutable, unless you own the processing power.
Once the technology matures and can actually handle high traffic without using up all energy of a small country, the governments will issue their own cryptocurrencies as the only legal tender, while outlawing paper money and all non-government cryptos.
Anybody caught providing processing power to non-government cryptos will be considered a counterfeiter.
Yep. From Z:
The government can simply arrest people for using Bitcoin and throw them into prison.
Monopoly of force allows monopoly of the currency. It is the bottom line.
You could say much the same thing about credit cards. If TPTB decide to get rid of paper currency, everything becomes trace-able through debit and credit cards. So, same thing. They are already promoting this idea.
Technology of crypto-currencies is much more robust than the mess that is the current banking software. It also has a lot more rabid fans that will love their enslavement.
Precisely.
Near to medium-term dissidents need to focus on cash, bullion, tradeable items, and tradeable skills.
The cryptocurrencies like bitcoin offer anonymity. Not so with the digital Dollar envisioned by the Fed.
Bitcoin isn’t anonymous. And even if it were, it would be irrelevant to what I wrote.
Yep, a future where every online move your make and every purchase you make is recorded will be a nightmare. Couple that with hate speech laws and a social credit score that can cost you the ability to get a bank account or loan or even shop at stores – and, of course, get or keep a job – and we’re staring down the barrel of a world that even Orwell couldn’t imagine. Luckily, the people running that show will be either fanatics or idiots or both, so the whole show will be run into the ground soon enough. But… Read more »
Put another way, each new coin costs more to produce than the previous coin. If the first coin cost X, the next coin costs x+n with n being the slight increase in cost to produce it. I had not thought of this before. Presumably, the same cannot be said of gold. Does it cost more to mine later gold? Most likely it gets cheaper or stays the same. Although the cost of surveying, building and making profitable a gold mine are probably far greater than the costs of mining one’s first Bitcoin. Apparently for a gold mine to become profitable… Read more »
nm
The increasing cost of production is true of almost all commodities. The first gold from a mine is the easiest to get at with equipment. As that runs out you need better gear, more men and so on, so the cost goes up. This is true of oil and gas too. The thing is, technology makes getting at the expensive stuff cheaper over time. Mine operators also balance their production based on price. When prices for gold shoot up, they switch production to the expensive mines. When prices fall they move to the cheap mines. This is not currently possible… Read more »
EROEI is a huge issue in the oil industry, especially because modern fracking has never been very profitable, even at triple-digit oil prices.
Of course, WuFlu hysteria serves as a very convenient distraction from this reality.
The whole fracking industry is dependent on massive injections of capital. My theory is that the US is trying to overproduce natural gas to suppress Russian export earnings and get importing nations dependent on the US.
The US did something similar in the 1980s by getting the Saudis to overproduce oil to the point where the US oil industry went into a depression. This probably caused more trouble for the Soviets than Afghanistan or Star Wars.
Renting out servers to “mine” bitcon was a play a couple of years ago. Legal, paid in cash, reportable to IRS.
Like selling supplies to the gold prospectors. They’re the one’s who really made reliable income.
There’s an exponential factor on this. Eventually all cryptos will get to the point that their chain cannot be expanded since doing so would require all the CPU cycles on the planet to accomplish it. The irony is that Bitcoin might still have some sort of face value, but you will be unable to buy it. Another issue is that while banks can act as a low cost arbiter for payments by snagging a piece of the transactions flowing through them, crypto cannot do that which is why these clearing houses are all sketchy since the only way they can… Read more »
Another issue is that while banks can act as a low cost arbiter for payments by snagging a piece of the transactions flowing through them, crypto cannot do that which is why these clearing houses are all sketchy since the only way they can make payroll is by renting out their customer’s crypto. ES, this is an intriguing observation. The very first thing that is mentioned in the original Bitcoin paper is that is solves the ‘trust’ issue – that is the need for any third party during a transaction. Am I correct in interpreting your statement as something that… Read more »
Already cryptocurrencies consume a measurable percentage of electricity production.
Note that the base utility of currency is that it is a store of value of work provided (mining gold/ mining bit coin/ running a mint and paying people with guns to stop other people from running their own printing press…). Honey, a dozen eggs and leather all have value. However, you can’t put any of them in your pocket or exchange without a big mess. The reason the pawn shop doesn’t accept a bag of gold dust is because the utility of converting is not worth the effort. If you walked into the same pawn shop with 10-50 round… Read more »
The reason the pawn shop does not accept gold as a payment is they go to jail. That said, they will buy your gold at spot minus their profit and you can then pay them with the money you received.
Good point, Mr. Z-Man. The tax man must be paid.
“For reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent value of Bitcoin,”
What is the “inherent” value of Bitcoin?
There is a real cost to creating a coin, so it has that value, plus whatever utility it could have for buying heroin on-line.
Cost of creating doesn’t lead to value. You can spend a lot of money creating worthless shit.
Indeed. Pay a visit to the Tate Modern for a prime example.
That’s kind of ironic, because the high end art world is just a big money laundering scheme.
Is not bitcoin the modern equivalent of the wheel?
The computing hardware and all the associated energy consumption that go into one BTC are stunning.
There are reasons BTC miners were migrating to zip codes with cheap electricity and running parasitic mining operations off the output from the local power plant or their employer’s backup generator.
So the threat of the American Military is behind the use of the worldwide dollar? Is that right.
Shocking, isn’t it?
To an extent. It at least is seen by all comers as the dominant player in the world. In military, economic and perhaps social terms I think that Joe Average and even Joe Informed in his mid-level role in the EU bureaucracy still see the US as unassailable. I suppose it is the belief of the threat of US everything. Naturally, the bigwigs will trade in the dollar, but the plebs of the world will find local commodities to be also of value. I am reminded of one event from the book I mentioned in my comment above: In 2003,… Read more »
Iran has a central bank so they should be safe. Although I believe they prohibit usery so who knows?
iran has no rotschild bank, we all know what the us military has in store for them.
then there’s irak, libya, afghanistan, who were already destroyed by us military.
north korea doesn’t have one cause north korea.
and cuba, who will probably get reformed in the future.
You forgot syria
It’s not even that.
It’s the presumption the US has the largest, most effective nuclear arsenal.
As Mao said, “True power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
Maybe. The US hasn’t field tested a nuke since 1992, modernization is an issue, and the US struggles to produce tritium triggers that boost blast yields.
Say, rather, we have a sufficient amount.. Given the change in political winds, we may all find out soon enough as the new boss starts some new wars.
At one point I believe Trump raised the idea of a new nuclear test to build confidence in the US arsenal and to send an obvious message to the rest of the world.
But in order to pay for that military they have to create ever increasing Dollars which must be disposed of overseas to avoid massive inflation. Military spending overseas solves part of this problem as does a huge trade deficit. Buying cheap goods from China masks inflation and when some of these Dollars return, they go into US government bonds to keep taxes and interest rates low or real estate and stocks to maintain the illusion of prosperity. However, the US Dollar and the US military are like two climbers joined by a rope. If one falls it takes the other… Read more »
The mole ate my tulips, then the dog ate the mole. I broke even.
Eat the dog.
Not exactly. The mining difficulty can go up and down, depending on total processing power (hashrate). In practical terms, it’s indirectly adjusted based on the crypto-currency price and cost of processing power.
Bitcoin: the lolbertarian barter system. Trading in (supposed) freedom! Good lord, even ideas get commodified.
There’s this thing called force. As in, don’t mess with these guys or they’ll mess with you. Some find it distastefully brutish, but it looks to me that’s how the world is going. The nerds had their day, and now it’s over. The future belongs to the street fighters.
I always thought it as a form for out-in-the-open money laundering; I wouldn’t even count it as a commodity (like gold).
One slight addition: from what I recall what really cements fiats use as currency is that the government accepts it (and nothing else) as payment for taxes. Even with the most laid back government in regards to currency usage that one fact is enough to force pretenders out of the market.
The thing with gold is that it has for a very long time and most probably always will retain some value. It also something that, if you have it, can easily be seen and felt and perhaps more readily protected, God bless it. I do not know how it came to have such value, but it just seems to. It gleams and bedazzles people in a way that a cryptocurrency never could. It is, from chemical perspective, incredibly resilient adding to it’s value which I believe to be both a practical and mythical thing. It’s going to take Bitcoin a… Read more »
Why bother with taxes then? Why not just create the money if people are forced to use it?
Bitcoin is not the savior many dissidents think it is, but cyrpto smart-contract technologies like Ethereum, Polkadot, and others will make it an order of magnitude more difficult to silence dissidents on the internet. If your web site is running as part of a massive cluster consisting of millions of PCs with no central authority, good luck getting that shut down. While they are mostly payment to miners and Proof of Stake holders for processing power, these tokens can become de-facto currencies in their own right, especially if markets start running on these chains. The only real way to stifle… Read more »
Much as I read and try to absorb, I don’t understand Bitcoin. It seems Bitcoin assumes a necessity for stable (and eternal) computing power? Not a likely scenario but does Bitcoin still exist after an EMP strike? I expect cryptocurrency may be here for awhile, particularly as globalism runs its course and implodes, but I have a hard time imagining it being around for centuries. We of the gray-hairs remember the tangible value of an LP album, despite the snaps and crackles. Heck, even the younger set are starting to like the vinyl vibe. This goes along with the title… Read more »
Not being able to understand brings to mind a magician dazzling you with tricks you can’t understand
or some fast talking bernie madoff
no thanks.
I came real close to pushing that send button but then i chickened out. One thing that made me hesitate was in regard to privacy. Just who exactly was i sending my Driver’s license image, personal information, account numbers, even a selfie – who was i sending to? Then on to who else? What if they found out that i once pulled Peggy Sue’s hair back in third grade or uttered something as despicable as that it’s OK to be white?
I almost bought some bitcoin back when it was a few dollars per, but something never sat right with me about it.
My sister used to be into that SETI thing where they scan the sky and send packets of info over the internet to your computer to parse instead of using a supercomputer. Blockchain reminds me of that.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought maybe the whole thing was some kind of encryption-defeating scheme disguised as digital freedom.
I’d have a pile money now if I’d done it. Oh well.
You need to provide all of that to buy Bitcoin?
lol. Talk about Facebook 2.0. Now you KNOW the feds are involved in Bitcoin.
If I were intelligent I’d have put the little I had into Tesla and Bitcoin in 2012 and have retired with 8 figures in 2020.
Well, the vision through one’s ahole is always 20/20, ‘innit?
Easy come, easy go
never fails. All that money would have been blown on stupid shit .
shopping malls are now attached to casinos for a reason
Oh, I’ve certainly improved my money management and personal spending and now live well below my means.
I still live a comfortable life and could easily cut my monthly expenses 50 or even 75 percent.
If I ever made fast easy money, and I’m pretty good too at money management, but no way I wouldn’t blow 75% of it
but better than blowing all of it I guess. I ain’t no nogger being nogger rich 🤪
I imagine “green” technology is about to be hugely funded in the US given the change in DC. While it’s a fool’s errand, plenty of fortunes will be made.
Might want to think about that play.
This was your worst post I’ve read. All the faults you lay at the feet of cryptocurrencies and gold easily apply to Fed fiat money but without the reinforcement of the Fed’s power. Wait until the Fed rolls out it’s digital Dollar which will give it total control over which transactions will be allowed for its use. And it sure won’t be anonymous. The bright side is that, foreign users of Dollars will be very reluctant to a medium of exchange subject to the whims of the US government. They will have alternatives and will use alternatives which will surely… Read more »
I think you answered your own question
the moment the feds say those paper dollars and coins mean nothing is the moment they mean nothing.
I guess crypto is great until there is a power outage or your internet goes down As with everything digital, I’m skeptical that you ever actually own it in the full sense of the word. Rather, you own rights to it. I noticed this with digital video games; I decided to play an old game and it required all sorts of updates and I had to create a new gamer profile, new account, had to download various updates — and if I didn’t? I couldn’t play. Then they flash all these crazy warnings on the screen to make your ball… Read more »
Probably admonish you for not being vaccinated against The Greatest of Yellow Perils too. I can in fact imagine such coercion being used – enough people are addicted to video games to do anything for their hit.
I like Raoul Pal’s description of Bitcoin – ” a store of value that trades like a commodity”. The idea of Bitcoin being a digital currency that could replace Fiat is gone. I don’t know anyone in the crypto space that actually believes that anymore. What Bitcoin has become however is something like digital gold. Bitcoin as first mover in the space has the advantage of being, well, first. It’s always good to be first. Ethereum being second. Take it for what you will but there is huge amounts of money moving into Bitcoin. That is enough to convince me… Read more »
One of the key attributes of cryptocurrencies (and their ancient kin in black/grey markets) is that these alternatives serve as a useful barometer of people’s trust in their government. When governments are more honest than corrupt, and the value of money is stable & predictable, no one thinks twice about using official currency in daily life. But when people get anxious about government malfeasance, they naturally look for a backup. The rise of Bitcoin is tangible evidence that trust in government is falling precipitously.
Who is the waiting monster? Which commenter? I see you guys are laughing it up at my expense! in the ancient regime, currency was backed not just by the power of the sovereign, but also the metallic quality of the coin. That was the whole point of silver and gold and copper being used in coins. You were receiving something of inherent value. The power of the state factored in with how reliable the metal content of the coin was. That’s why the Spanish piece of eight was so sought after; Spain was a great gold rich empire at that… Read more »
I’m not laughing at you. I love silver and gold. And I always make sure I have some of it close to me. But other day I was thinking I would be having to help my daughter move from California to a new house in Florida. And I also planned on offloading a lot of my stuff over to the new house. I have pounds and pounds of silver coins and so forth and thought about moving some of it to spread out my risk. But What if someone breaks into my car when I’m asleep at the hotel? Do… Read more »
I see the United States creating their own crypto currency. They will still call it a dollar in order to not frighten the old people who hold onto the idea of paper currency. The computer symbol on your IPhone of the digital currency will be Obama shaking hands with George Washington wearing a dress.
In time all currency will only be digital.
Ah, just listen to AC/DC..
One way we’ll know for sure that Bitcoin has gained cultural acceptance and is here to stay is if the special people begin adopting a permutation of it as a surname.
If we ever see a law firm or accounting company called “Cashman Goldbaum Silverberg Bitcoinstein” we’ll know it’s legit.
“There are other problems with crypto that prevent it from becoming anything more than a digital tulip bulb”.
I wasn’t there for the tulip bulb balloon blow up and pop, but from the tea leaves I can read – cryptocurrency seems to be on a similar trajectory
Bottom line. I think the guy who invented Bitcoin his last name ends in a stein or a berg.
if that alone doesn’t raise a bunch of red flags in your mind then your parents didn’t raise you right
i thought it was a jap
The crypto world is a fascinating space, and the ‘value’ of bitcoin is simply that someone else will happily buy your bitcoin from you. Same as the value of fiat. I do see a future where govts want their own version of crypto but whilst it will be on a blockchain, any distributed leger will be owned and run by them. A crypto version of an intranet as opposed to an internet. I can see more and more people moving money out of the financial system and into semi-liquid assets, which are then sold, and converted into fiat/govt crypto as… Read more »
Bad Touch Joe will charge up our EBT cards.
Bitcoin? We don’t need no stinking Bitcoin.
Let them eat rainbow stew bubble up on the road to Ozymandias.