Topic: The $1000 Bitcoin, yes it's worth at least that. - page 6. (Read 41589 times)

False. There is something special about gold. No other commodity possesses its particular blend of characteristics - and these characteristics make it desirable as a money, thus it is used as such. Lumber and coal do not possess the same benefits as gold, and thus they are not used as money. Same with stuffed animals, buckets of water, and raw iron. Gold is unique in its properties, and its use as money is derived precisely from these properties.

That doesn't mean it's the ONLY good money, or that it will ALWAYS be preferred as money, of course.

And indeed a few of us on this forum believe Bitcoin possesses special characteristics which make it a superior money even to gold! =)

I wrote a piece about this if anyone wants elaboration - understanding money is very important for anyone who wants to encourage the growth of Bitcoin.  http://bit.ly/dk0VzY

It's always wise not to put all your eggs in one basket.  I don't own any gold, mostly because I don't have a personal use for it beyond it's trade value.  But I do own silver, because even if society were to completely collapse to the point that even silver had no trade value because no one can eat it or shoot with it, I can still use it for it's anti-bacterial properties by dropping it into my raw milk and keep it from spoiling.

I also have a not-small stock of the things one can eat and shoot with, I call that "insurance".

QFT

Good points all around, although I'm not entirely convinced that people will give up a 5000-year-old social technology so easily. I'm not attached to it, but I'm still going to keep some on hand just in case. But the good thing about a free market is it doesn't matter which one of us is right, because nobody's going to force anyone else to accept one way or the other.

Ah, yes, good point.  Mess with it, two more clients come back online, and there go your ill-gotten funds.

You would also have to know that your's was the last copy.

Of course, the network (or what's left of it) would then be extremely vulnerable to tampering.  If there's only one copy, well, you'd better hope the person with that copy either doesn't know how to mess with it or doesn't want to.

That's a colorful way to put it.  And as I have already pointed out, once even one full node is on a satillite in orbit, even the Madmax scenario couldn't kill Bitcoin even if there were no living humans left to make use of it.
Actually, it only takes one full copy of the blockchain somewhere accessible.  It's the Many-Copies-Keeps-Data-Safe method, and might mean that the blockchain is, or soon will be, more safe than the text of the Bible.

For that matter, a copy of your wallet file on a CD-R or a flash drive kept in a steel safety deposit box should be plenty safe from an EMP.

You forgot three more: mobile, replicable, and hideable.

And gold is certainly lacking in all three of those.


1) Moving larger quantities of gold from A to B is risky, expensive, and labour intensive.  Moving BTC from A to B is trivial.

2) Since gold is physical, if you lose it, it's gone forever. You can't keep a backup anywhere.  BTC, encrypted and backed up in several places, is practically impossible to lose.

3) Finally, it's very difficult to protect your gold against confiscation/theft by despots and other thugs who are powerful enough and determined enough, as history has shown time and again.

In fact, gold's track record as a safe store of value is pretty lousy given how many times in history people have lost their gold through methods 1) 2) and 3). This happened on a massive scale as recently as WWII.

Really, people just used gold throughout history for lack of better options, not because gold is such good money.



As the saying goes ... technology is everything that was invented after you were born.  

Gold depends on technology just like Bitcoin, although older technology.  Without safes and guns to protect it, scales and density meters to measure it, and ships to carry it across oceans, gold isn't awfully useful either.

Bitcoin only needs a very rudimentary low bandwidth internet to keep going. For the internet to stop working totally and  permanently, the world would have to be so fucked that it would be the end of "civilized history" as you put it.  In that kind of Madmax scenario, gold too would lose its usefulness for above reasons.

Bitcoin is perfectly capable of surviving a temporary breakdown of the internet as a result of war or natural disaster. The blockchain is duplicated on millions of machines around the world. It is sufficient for just of few of them to survive in order to reboot the Bitcoin network. A few people would lose their wallets of course but not those who backed them up diligently.  For instance, a QR code of an encrypted version of your private key, printed on a piece of paper, even engraved on a sheet of metal, could easily survive an EMP. Bitcoin is far more durable than you think.

Bitcoin required the Internet to get started, but it does not require it's continued existance to function.  If Bitcoin becomes as widely used as the British Pound, or even half as widely used worldwide, then Bitcoin would survive regardless of the Internet because there will be way too many people with a vested interest in it's ongoing success, and many of those people would endeavor to establish new forms of direct peer connections, radio nets, or re-establish existing network infrastructure as a priority.  Although we are not there yet, once Bitcoin is mainstream I can't imagine anything less than a nuclear war actually ending Bitcoin.  And even that wouldn't work once the first full blockchain node is in orbit.

Wealth is ALWAYS in those things. The little lumps of shiny metal are a medium of exchange. As is bitcoin. And bitcoin does it better, assuming the current level of technology remains functional. But I make no such assumption.

Ha!  I thought about doing something along these lines with askrol oil, which is used as liquid insulation in large transformers. 

As for me, if the internet stopped working, I suspect I'd have little use for lumps of shinny yellow metal. For me if the internet no longer functioned wealth would be in canned food, guns, ammo, shelter, medicines and basic tools. I guess wealth is a matter of circumstance.

Gold has been used as a money for most of humanity's civilized history because it possesses all the necessary qualities for money: it is homogeneous, divisible, durable, and scarce. Bitcoin possesses all of those qualities, but it isn't as durable as gold. The fact is that bitcoin's usefulness as money is dependent on all the same things that gold is, and then it is also dependent on other factors as well. Gold carries no risks for technical failure. Gold will still be useful as money if the internet stops working. Bitcoin has advantages over gold, but they all depend on technology never failing to function as it is now. I don't trust that to be the case, and I suspect most other people won't, either. I value gold for its independence from technology.

What's the problem exatly, the profit motive drives bootstrapping a bitcoin economy. So some people end up rich, so what? What they're going to do with the money is buy yachts and big houses and expensive shoes and so on. Who will build the yachts? Who will maintain the big houses and hand-crafted shoes? People who work for a living, this is who. Why should people that work for a living be pissed off to have more customers. everybody want more spending power, for themselves and for others. People that run or work for businesses do at least.

I would have thought the problem with bitcoin is about capital formation, but having a problem that some people got lots of spending power for being early to the system, this doesn't make sense. Sounds like just resentment to me.

Some people also own lots of gold, or land long before any of us were born, some owned shares in Google back when everyone used Lycos or something, does this mean anyone else is against owning gold or land or shares in Google?

Your thought on this is broken.

Use the aquariums for this instead.

http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

I'm going to invest in a saltwater aquarium right now. In fact, I'm going to set up a whole *farm* of saltwater aquariums.

This is going to be even better than carrots.

I’m in it because a) this technology will change the world, regardless of your ideology, b) it will give us economic freedom and c) I could profit hugely from it.

Without profit incentive, Bitcoin wouldn’t rise this fast. Problem?

I also don't agree with inheritance or old money. In an ideal world we would all start equal, not benefit only because your parents or family are rich. You make your own luck... It goes against equality and worth.

Most of us have had an easier start to our life than your Indian Rice Farmer, and it's unrealistic to think that we in the western world are really interested in sharing our wealth.

But to answer your question, if this is the start of something new, then let's try and be better, not worse. If anyone thinks they deserve to be rich because they mined bit coins early on, then that person is seriously full of shit.

You're a hypocrite because you're justifying why you should be rich for contributing very little. You mined cause you're greedy, just a geek or both. Now you're saying you deserve to be rich, or that you're only into BitCoins because of the monetary revolution.

OMFG, can you hear yourselves. Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites!!!

I'd like to hear at least some of you admit that you're a greedy mofo in it only for it's speculative value and that you don't give a shit about the rest.
Amen

You're hording groceries?

(Sorry, I just love pointing out ambiguities in language)