Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 859. (Read 2032266 times)

Great post.

I was never quite aware of this concept of money as memory until I stumbled upon Bitcoin. Needless to say it has radically changed my view on a lot of thing economic.

Moreover, I think it needs to be emphasized more why it is that the bitcoins are so vital to this system : they are the only units trust-less units within this decentralized ledger.

This all seems obvious to most of us yet so many still hang on to the idea of issuing an "asset-backed" unit that would be traded within this ledger. This is asinine and defeats the whole purpose of having a trustless ledger.

Thanks for this post and the links to David Andolfatto's works and comments. He came on my radar for the first time a few days ago and seemed to have some real interest in and understanding of bitcoin, despite some skepticism in a few areas. That quote you posted means I shouldn't have been particularly surprised that he was favoriting tweets which suggested that bitcoin was an effectively ideal implementation of Kocherlakota's money as memory thesis.

I've noted previously that if bitcoin fails ultimately for some reason, it will nevertheless have served to get possibly millions of people thinking harder about the financial system and the nature of money. Hopefully an understanding of money-as-memory will proliferate.

Nice one. I really believe this is the key for the masses to understand bitcoin. They must understand what money is first..a ledger. A ledger controlled by centralized entities with full control over how many units are allowed on the ledger, with the ability to move your entries whenever they feel like it, and / or confiscate said entries.

This is why gold is / was important. Gold is a distributed, trustless, fungible unit on a distributed scarce ledger.

Bitcoin completely destroys the credit / money ledger and has additional properties that the gold ledger cannot compete with (trasmission)

Therefore..it is the perfect money. I don't think it will completely eat gold's SoV role anytime soon but the SoV role of currency will be destroyed.

Money as a Ledger

The shift in the mainstream discourse surrounding bitcoin from "it will never work" towards a recognition of the value of decentralized trustless ledgers has been pointed out several times in this thread, in particular by Cypherdoc.  Acceptance is growing for bitcoin as a "ledger," but with plenty of doubt reserved for bitcoin as a "currency."  Here's a relevant opinion piece from 'The Economist' (Insights) that demonstrates this effect:

http://www.economistinsights.com/technology-innovation/analysis/money-no-middleman/tab/1

The author claims that finance experts are intrigued by a distributed ledger:


yet are skeptical of the currency aspect:


Such thinking is incongruous.  To simultaneously claim that Bitcoin's blockchain is useful as a ledger yet unsuitable as a currency belies the very essence of what money is.  Money is a ledger.  Melbustus has posted links to Wences Casares' (XAPO CEO) video talks, and here's another where, in 7 minutes, Wences explores the evolution of money, and the technological and economic advancements that transformed it from for a balance sheet stored in the community's collective memory, to an analog ledger implemented with tokens of gold, to what we have today with bitcoin:

http://bigthink.com/users/wences-casares

This view of the history of money is hardly controversial (the view that rather than evolving from barter, money came from the need to better remember what value was owed to which person).  In this blog post, David Andolfatto (SFU professor and VP of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), "scores one for the anthropologists" and provides several references arguing against the barter myth, in favour of the memory view:

http://andolfatto.blogspot.ca/2014/07/debt-first-5000-years.html

He makes the comment here that "Bitcoin will retain its value as long as it records information in a useful manner (whether or not it possesses legal tender status)," focusing on the importance of its memory ("records information") function.  

This aligns with Kocherlakota's (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) "money is memory" view.  Kocherlakota argued that all historical forms of money were imperfect attempts at creating a system for remembering what value was owed to which person: "in the monetary environment, money is merely a physical way of maintaining this balance sheet" [Kocherlakota, 1996].  

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/qr/qr2231.pdf

He proves that under very general conditions "any allocation which is incentive-feasible in an environment with money is also incentive feasible when agents have access to memory" [Kocherlakota, 1996].  Tying this post back to the thread's topic "Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP." is easy:  Bitcoin is the first example of a technology that can implement Kocherlakota's "memory function" without the need for physical tokens (gold) [or the need for trust].  Bitcoin supersedes gold.

As the world slowly comes to recognize the usefulness of decentralized trustless ledgers, and later comes to understand money as an entry on such a ledger, I believe the detractors to the currency-aspect of bitcoin will lose their voice.  What could be better money be than entries on a global trustless Ledger, freely-accessible via bitcoin's protocol rules, and secured by the largest single-purpose computing network ever created?


I'll end with this comment that made me smile:



----------------
By the way, I've become a big fan of David Andolfatto since discovering his blog a few days ago.  He is an independent and critical thinker, asks questions when he doesn't understand something, and has a wealth of knowledge and insight to share.  He has three interesting articles related to bitcoin that I suggest you check out http://andolfatto.blogspot.ca

Maybe they do that today, but they haven't always.

They started out selling many or most of their coins OTC to investors and other companies.

I heard that for a while Coinbase got most of the coins they sold from BitPay.

Damned straight!

They dump them straight away spread out on the biggest exchanges.

That's crazy

Nikkei hit hard but Europe is bouncing high today

Fun facts: Netflix (NFLX) shed more than the entire market cap of bitcoin yesterday

Yeah, decent AMA. I caught most of it... Tuned in right after they said they're not doing anything with alts anytime soon (so I gathered from the chat), which is great. The ecosystem is tiny and companies need to focus. Glad Fred and Brian get that.

All in all, they were both remarkably casual, straight-forward, and open. Much more so than even interacting with them in-person at conferences, in my experience.

I'm curious though how Bitpay handles their merchant coins. Who buys them?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3OWzZSr8Nc

fred & brian from coinbase putting to rest some obvious myth in this AMA

merchant processing volume is marginal and sell pressure on the price from these operations quasi-inexistent

they actually mention they RARELY, if ever, have to dump coins on exchange from merchant processing and most often the coins are bought by coinbase users (bullish)

They'll always need something or someone to blame. Next it's ISIS, Putin, Iran, China, WWIII, Aliens, whatever. I hate people who don't assume responsibility for the shit they do. If you're enslaving the world using a fiat money ponzi scheme and colluding with corrupt politicians to take everyones freedom away, at least be proud of it and admit it.

The last two are related.
Naked shorts would only be possible by leaving coins on exchange.

I agree. We have so much to learn (and unlearn) still.

As long as it's not "naked" shorting, I don't see a problem.

Yes, the lender is an idiot for assuming a risk without awareness and the shorter is an asshole... bit it's legitimate in my mind.

Yes and don't go whining to the holders or to the mass media if your money is lost.  As you were sitting around raking in trading profits on Gox -- fake profits BTW that only existed because they weren't backed by real USD or BTC -- the truth is that the only reason you were able to do so is because the majority of the market players -- the true players -- were missing.  They were missing because they correctly estimated the counterparty risk and found proposal nonviable.

We seem to have our own version of rewriting history here in the US now. I  can't seem to find the infamous Cramer video anymore where he talks about manipulating S&P futures pre hours when he ran his hedge fund. 

Cramer himself would admit he is an entertainer.  CNBC has a problem with low viewer counts and the market in general is suffering low participation despite greater then ever subsidy by government.    If he really isnt that dumb already then he is doing it for the headline and the general interest, thats his job pretty much to put on the clown suit and draw in the crowd.  
  I think he is half decent in his instincts at least, like the flash crash for example. How much of that gets twisted before we hear it Im not sure

CNBC ratings at record lows, Cramer with ZERO credibility, and yet they still find a way to plumb the depths of the Well of Stupidity even further.

Cramer: Why Ebola is behind the selloff