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Originally Posted by Bulrathi
You are essentially arguing for Mises Regression Theorem.
No, I'm not arguing an abstract. I'm arguing something specific to gold. I'm arguing that gold was valued across large numbers of cultures for its prettiness - even those that didn't value it as money or a store of value. Look at the Aztecs. Its unique prettiness combined with unmatched durability, corrosion resistance, and extreme malleable and ductile qualities (it is the most ductile of the elements) is what drives its use in jewelry or ornamentation (buildings, gilding which was widespread and excellent value due to the thinness with which gold could be spread and its durability) which sustains its value.
Prettiness and desiring of owning that prettiness - gold actually triggers persistent parts of the brain from looking at it - is what provides the value of gold, along with its rarity of course.
My position is that your comparison with gold - and belief that it was valuable just because it had properties of money - is not fact based and absolutely sucks balls as a comparison/indication of where bitcoin could go.
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Except that is historically flawled as humans have used pretty much worthless things as money/store of value. Things like Rai Stones (giant heavy stones that cannot be moved)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples
There's aren't plenty of other examples. A handful of people on a few Micronesian islands can't be generalized to larger populations. If we're going to generalize the behavior of islanders, all humans are favorable toward cannibalism.
The fact that the best example/evidence that the "properties of money = money" crowd could come up with is some remote Polynesian island
completely invalidates their case. Local drift and weirdnesses in local populations, such as shells or rocks, has nothing to do with large populations - cannibalism being one example, another being Easter Island statues, another being vine tower diving as a rite of passage.
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No, because in this case the assymetry is presented in conjuction with a lot of evidence for its bull case. A penny stock usually has no revenues and no real business.
Bitcoin has no revenues and no business at all.
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BTC has had a law passed in Japan (3rd lagest economy in the world) recognizing it as legal tender, its well known in Asia, in particular in South Korea. Its quite popular among millenials in several countries, including the largest economy in the world.
Sure. So what? All ponzis are popular, all speculation bubbles that grow large involve some kind of popularity. If bitcoin could actually function as a currency at any non-tiny scale, the above would have weight.
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You have to be blind not to see that more and more people are using it to store value.
How do you know what people use Bitcoin for? How do you distinguish someone who puts in $1000 for long term speculation vs one who does it to store value? It has to be the worst store of value on the planet given its volatility. It's dropped 70% in six months. Imagine a bank account that did that.
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In fact, a lot of those people that come in (usually for speculative reasons) will trigger a contrarian bug in certain people (usually traders) and be used as evidence against BTC bull case when clearly its FOR its bull case since one more 'true believer' is something good for its future. They are just BTCs version of gold bugs
There are certainly bitcoin bugs. They don't get it to trillions though. And there are also altcoin bugs, who have grown to the hundreds of billions and are growing every day. Gold never had that kind of competition or market cap dilution. There was gold and silver and not much else. Bitcoin isn't actually scarce, which is an enormous problem for it as a store of wealth in the long run. Altcoins have already diluted it by over half by increasing the supply. And if anything comes along that can actually transact at scale, bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin as a store of wealth without properties as a scalable currency is pure fantasy.
Last edited by ToothSayer; 07-03-2018 at 07:40 AM.