Topic: Value vs. utility (Read 1466 times)

I don't read your empty verbiage

As to me, it is perfectly clear that instead of simply answering either yes or no, you are now trying to obfuscate the issue through phrase-mongering and verbosity. It is as clear that if you mean 21M bitcoins as the scarcity limit of Bitcoin, then the number of bitcoins mined till now would as well be the current scarcity of bitcoins. So your answer should necessarily be "yes", whether you like or not (otherwise, you would be discarding everything you said before). But in that case, your claim to what is scarcity is outright bullshit (which you seem to realize somehow) since this number is algorithmically predetermined, and it doesn't and can't possibly take into account the changes in demand, which is what the real scarcity of Bitcoin is determined by and stands for

put it this way

in 2009 we knew what the scarcity limit was: 21m
boom. no more.... its a fixed amount, no surprises.. no shocks.. nothing up its sleaves.. hence LIMIT

now imagine 2 words.. scarcity... and scarce.
now please take a breather and realise.. these are 2 different words with 2 meanings. even if they look similar, they mean different things.
you may be mind blown. so take some time and have a coffee..
 ..
ok now then
how scarce<->abundant is the supply and demand question WITHIN.
again dont confuse scarce and scarcity.. might be worth having another sip of coffee and let your thoughts play it out a little longer
 ..
ok now then
how scarce<->abundant is the supply and demand question WITHIN.
 ..
so,
even on day 1 of bitcoin in 2009 we know the scarcity limit..
and separately we want to think about how scarce<->abundant bitcoin is
 ..
remember this is where we are talking about supply and demand.. not scarcity limit
remember supply and demand is speculative
 ..
well even on day 1 there were only a few coins and only a couple people held them thus dominating circulation.. so some would say scarce..
but, yes here is the but.. (remember the supply demand/scarce<->abundance  is just subjective and speculative)
no one was trading, people were just accumulating them for little to no work. so others would say abundant. especially if there were still 20,999,xxx coins to go
 ..
now we move onto a different day, different amount of coins being shared. people start competing over them and the 'bitcoin pizza' proves bitcoin has utility. the sliding scale shifts abit, but its speculative with differing mindsets on both sides

fast forward 7 years. mega mining farms.. 300,000+ merchants.. 2mill plus users.. from a macro nation overview of the whole thing now its treated as speculatively scarce by many people.. but.. abundant by others.(more claim scarce than abundant)
again we both agreed scarce<->abundant is subjective/speculative

here is the kicker
although thinking about it from the whole network view in last sentence, inside an exchange is a micro nation of speculation where supply and demand is at a fight.. most dont know about the supply within an exchange. so its more of a game around the reasons for or against demand..

so now we separate the argument about supply..... where your rhetoric of trying to highlight scarcity drops away and becomes unimportant..

and we move onto the reasons for or against demand..
so demand.

people desire it because they can spend it, move it hold it. get things for it make profit from it.
people dont desire it if it costs to much to have, costs to much to spend, isnt easy to use.

which are all about utility..

take away utility then demand dries up
if demand dries up those holding the supply drop their prices to try getting shot of it before they lose to much if they see no future plans for increased/new utility.
snowball effect

Scarcity limit? So it is the scarcity of Bitcoin when all coins have been mined?

If I got your point correct, this still comes down to claiming that current production (e.g. number of bitcoins mined so far) is the scarcity of what is being produced (if 21M bitcoins is the scarcity limit for Bitcoin). Do you agree with that, yes or no? Apart from that, you should know it yourself that scarcity has direct impact on utility and value (though just scarcity alone is not enough, obviously), therefore the question of scarcity is always "on topic". Didn't you say essentially the same in your earlier posts in this thread?

i corrected your post.
i see where you are trying to slide words in to confuse the matter to then twist the matter to then ultimately say what i originally said but you would say im wrong because of the words YOU slipped in. i see your game. nice try though

21M bitcoins is the scarcity limit

we both agreed that scarce<->abundance is the measure within the limit
scarce<->abundance AKA the measure within AKA supply/demand is the measure of scarcity

but no one takes much notice about supply. because they cannot say exactly how much supply an exchange they are using actually has or how much % of circulation or the end limit that works out as.

all they care about is the demand. which is derived from UTILITY
have a nice day

now back to the topic
UTILITY creates value, lack of UTILITY removes value

In fact, I gave you a chance to get off cheap

But since you obviously don't want to take it and thus save your face, you surely deserve to learn it the hard way. So you are basically claiming that scarcity is a limit of (in) production. In this manner, 21M bitcoins is the scarcity of Bitcoin (a measure thereof), right? You don't need to pour your mostly empty verbiage on me in reply, just say "yes" or "no"

which is where i said being scarce.. abundant.. is a separate detail to scarcity.. where scarcity is a sliding scale

my reasoning is not that. i stated a few posts ago.. bitcoins limit is known. has been known since day one.
the scarce<->abundance is separate question within the sliding scale.

my approach?? lol sorry but your the trying to confuse the matter. by ultimately saying im wrong but then saying the exact same thing i said to claim your right.


seems your trying hard to muddy the water..

things can have scarcity..
but how scarce<->abundant is a separate question (remember the WITHIN word you failed to pick up on)
also yes scarce<->abundant is an abstract concept.. hense why in earlier posts i was saying no one cares much about it and its UTILITY thats important.

but if you think no one should talk about utility (the important thing) until they circle jerk you about less important things.. then you are a fool

now lets just drop this unimportant scarcity meander you have rabbit holed down. and get back on topic.

UTILITY creates value, lack of UTILITY removes value

There's head and tails, positive and negative people. Similarly there will be holders and there will be sellers. This thread will get many arguments and people will argue limit less. For me both are good. Though I prefer to use it cashless cause it's convenient and it's easy. Though sometimes I hold it to. So it's difficult to say which one is right. It's every one discretion, you should add a vote.

As far as I understood it's not exactly the problem here.
The problem is to find a scalable solution. One which will work in the long run. Because incrasing blocks isn't a solution at all, it just erase the problem for a few months thats all!

I'm not a specialist, but it seems like LN and Segwit might get all of this straight. I just don't know why miners haven't accepted it yet.

I'm not racist. I like China, the Chinese culture is very nice, and I also like Buddhism.

However you also have to admit that they are controlled by a communist government, which means usually heavy restrictions of private property.

So if they decide to regulate it some day (like for example recently) I am not sure if that will be positive.

Sure 10000 Chinese is a small number comparing to the 1.3 bn, but it's not about the users, its about the exchanges.

If you cut down the roots of the tree, that tree will never grow.

My point doesn't consist in proving you wrong

This comes as a nice bonus, though I'm mostly trying to explain why you are wrong so that you could understand that. Scarcity is in no way a limit of production since I could just as easily claim that a volume of production is in fact a measure of abundance, not scarcity ("half empty glass is half full"), and what does it tell us exactly? If production increases does it imply that what is produced becomes less scarce (and vice versa), which should directly follow from your reasoning? I guess we can't generally say that, and the reverse is also true. This is another argument that shows that your approach is futile and meaningless. It pretty much proves that volume, or limit of production can't be scarcity or a measure of it. Scarcity is an abstract concept which in real life can be used only as a relative measure. We can't even say that something is scarce as such since we should always refer it something else over which it is more (or less) scarce or over itself if we consider the issue on a time scale. Regarding utility, it is more complex concept than scarcity, and until you get familiar with this simple concept in a correct way, it doesn't make particular sense to discuss utility

did you look at the trade history image.. right column.. trades under 1btc...
they are not large 1000btc trades per hit..

as for 10's of thousands of chinese trading.......... well thats still not 1.3billion.. so lets not continue the endless racism of thinking "china"(whole country) own/control bitcoin

when we all know its only a small percentage playing with small amounts repeatedly.

i would cry wolf only if you see trade history results of 10-1000btc+ every few minutes.
these small 0.xbtc orders happening is not "china (the country) own bitcoin"

bitcoin is not a commodity.
a commodity is a raw product used to create other products.
EG crude oil =fuel, plastics
EG gold= jewellery, circuits

gold specifically sits on MULTIPLE markets because it has multiple USES/desires/demands for it. dont confuse golds commodity(manufacturing industry) market as the same thing as its asset value(speculative investment financial industry)

bitcoin is an asset currency. not a commodity. but if it loses its utility of being an active currency and just sits on some hardware wallet, much like a bearerbond. (which is still a currency but not an active currency). then its value dies because it lacks something concrete backing it. meaning the asset value declines.. which snowballs down

How do you know that fore sure? There are many exchanges, and in the chinese exchanges, there are mostly chinese people trading.

Looking at the volume of 1,609,323.75 BTC daily, I hardly doubt those are all bots.

Who the heck would do 1000 trades / day? Even if you run a bot that is absurd.

Maybe there are a handful of market maker bots, but the rest are just probably young chinese guys trading 1-10 BTC with their savings.

The chinese are known to be big gamblers, and they also spend a lot of tech items, so its easy to assume that there are probably tens of thousands of chinese trading 1-10 btc.

If people insist to use bitcoin only as commodity that is the gold standard 2.0 because of its digital scarcity correct me if  I am wrong but I believe the network performance will not be a very important matter because the transactions would not be particularly high so will not have an overload network traffic. On the other hand the vision of Nakamoto about a peer to peer payment system using the internet without the need of any third trust entity disappears. This means that banks will endure their dominance due to free knowledge of blockchain technology which will allow them to create their own digital currencies. Therefore all scenarios about a dream world without banks will collapse in the very near future. To summarize first we must consider the utility and after the value of bitcoin

i think somewhere along the lines you have ignored me saying UTILITY is important. not scarcity.
also scarcity is a sliding scale from scarce to abundant..
which is more of a local/real ability to get your hands on/availability thing.

having scarcity is a limit of production.. but how scarce or abundant is a separate question.
also i said that "the latter is defined though supply and demand"

this is not a fight over who got the answer right first, but it seems your trying hard to make it sound like i think scarcity is important when in MANY posts i have said UTILITY is important.. so i dont know why you are meandering down the 'scarcity' rabbithole..

but getting to the point. UTILITY means/affects value, not scarcity

most traders dont even know the exact number of coins in circulation. nor the supply in an exchange.. they only think about the demand and desire aspect of the speculation.

which UTILITY has the major impact on

what if i was to blow your mind and say that OKcoins 30k volume is not actually 30,000 people exchanging 1btc once. or 1person exchanging 30,000 coins once

what if i told you it was just 100 people exchanging just 0.3btc each ...1000 times a day

china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 1-30,000 coins each.
china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 1 coins each.
china (1.3billion people) are not hoarding 0.00000x coins each.

china (1.3billion people) are not even involved in bitcoin.. only a couple hundred people and only small amounts are played per day. once you realise how day trading works.

many miners dont use 'public' exchanges. they do private OTC exchanges with VC's behind closed doors.
the mining pools are not that impacting of public xchanges with their hoards of fresh minted coins..

all they need to do is use a small amount on an exchange to day trade multiple times a day to cause a volume rise and also affect the price.

just look at the trade history.. you dont see orders of 12.5btc every 10 minutes or a large 75btc order an hour or a 1800btc order hit the market each day.
instead its lots of under 1btc orders. which make the lack of real liquidity because theres only a few thousand coins in reserve get smacked around a bit not needing thousands of coins to smack it but single to double figures done repeatedly

I know that you didn't say nor implied that. But this is exactly how scarcity is determined, i.e. through a supply and demand mechanism (strictly speaking, through change in supply and demand)


Does just 21 million iPhones packed in some obscure warehouse tell us anything about scarcity?

If it does tell, then is this quantity of iPhones scarce or abundant? If it is neither scarce nor abundant, what the heck does it have to do with scarcity at all in the first place? On the other hand, if this number alone doesn't tell us anything (which would be contrary to your claims, just in case), then what does then? I guess it is a number of people potentially buying these flashy phones, or rather a change in this number, which would define scarcity of iPhones (e.g. more scarce or less scarce). But the latter is defined exactly as I said above, i.e. through a supply and demand mechanism

As long as China has monetary problems, I dont worry about Bitcoin, since that is the main source of cashflow into Bitcoin.

But as a global vehicle for wealth storage. Well, first you have to get these smartasses to listen to you.

The smartasses who put their money in a bank at 1% interest, while the inflation is 10%. You have to educate those dumbasses first.

If they are so stupid to fall into that kind of trap, maybe they dont even deserve Bitcoin as a wealth storage.

no. i said supply and demand work within scarcity not define scarcity.

EG a apple store may know there are 21million apple phones in a warehouse but are only able to sell 20 phones at the shop (supply=20, not 21m)
there are only 2 customers wanting it. so after 6 months, the store reduces the price of the phone before the next-gen phone hits the market (demand=2, not 20, not 21m)

bitcoins current 16mill circulation and 21m scarcity has nothing to do with supply and demand.
EXCHANGES.. here is the kicker you missed. EXCHANGES are not hoarding all 16m-21mil coins.
at most the SUPPLY is a couple hundred thousand coins per exchange.

and the EXCHANGE price is based on the supply and demand of the couple hundred thousand coins (not 16m not 21m)

which is where the supply and demand is the speculation within scarcity. but not impacted by scarcity

EG think about food. some regional distribution centre may have tonnes of baked beans.
but people dont care about whats in the regional distribution centre. they only care about whats available at the local store.

if an crisis happens where everyone buys up the stores food because there wont be a delivery. (supply drop) everyone speculative their need and demand for it. and suddenly food becomes a premium priced product where people are literally willing to sell their oldest daughter in an extreme crises event..

yep
bitcoins threat is fiat. if bitcoin becomes no better then fiat no one will want it.

the threat is Hyperledger. which is the banks own blockchain currency powerhouse of multiple interchangeable chains. which laughably the blockstream paid core devs are actually helping the bankers with.. and yes them hyperledger crew have been invited to have special secret talks at this months 'satoshi roundtable'.

so incase your wondering why Sipa, Gmaxwell, adam back matt corallo and other blockstream devs are so ademnt to cripple bitcoins onchain growth for no RATIONAL reason. and why they have changed the fee estimation engine to push the average fee more biasedly up rather than down.. it becomes obvious once you look at who is paying their salary and sitting with them over cocktails at an all inclusive weekend this month