Topic: Why is Bitcoin the Dumbest Thing Ever Invented - page 3. (Read 2676 times)

the only reason why bitcoin has any value at all is because enough people believe or agree to it having that value. everything else is a consequence of that, including the fact that it requires energy to mine bitcoin.

someone would have to have a serious misunderstanding to think that just because something uses lots of energy to create means it is automatically valuable.


i suspect it costs some gold miners way less than market price to mine gold. so i don't necessarily think that mining price is what determines the market price of gold. it's other things.

I'll roll the dice on you perhaps having the mental capacity to understand what is being said to you:

Bitcoin has value because it requires time and energy to produce. Work. Back when it cost a miner $50 to create 1 Bitcoin then Bitcoin would generally be sold by miners for more than $50 to ensure they covered their costs. Now it costs tens of thousands to produce 1 Bitcoin so miners won't sell for less than tens of thousands.

You're mistaken in thinking that gold is any different. Just because there are areas of production that can utilise the properties of gold that is not the basis for it's initial market price. Gold has a cost of production, too. Gold miners won't sell for less than it costs them to mine it out of the ground and as those costs increase so does the price of gold. Its use in industry is just an upwards pull factor on the price against the availability of the metal for purchase, the scarecity factor is related to this pricing. The push price, that which is the fundamental basis for it's introduction onto the market in the first place is the cost borne by the miner to produce it out of the ground.

to an extent what you say is true. bitcoin only has value because everyone agrees it has value. or enough people agree. unlike something like gold that has intrinsic value because it has physical uses.

I am not here to learn but to educate. Because it seems none of you actually understand Bitcoin. You just repeat narratives about Bitcoin and at the same time ignore what Bitcoin actually is - a database with data on nothing. A database that simulates real databases. Real databases contain data on some aspect of reality - for example on the number of actual things or about events that occurred. On the other hand, what is put into the Bitcoin database are units of the number 21 million that an anonymous guy created in their imagination. And then people create narratives trying to come up with a thing held by these units. A thing that doesn't exist in reality. It is both comical and tragic to listen to those narratives.

Ok I give up. You're not here to learn anything, you're here to parade your Dunning-Kruger level of ignorance for us all to gawp at.
Congrats, it is impressively confident.

HFSP

Stop making your own definitions of words because you look funny. First you defined money as work. Now you define it as a number. Money is not a number. A number is mathematical object used to count, measure, and label things - 10 cows, 5 ounces of gold, 100 units of debt(dollars). Cows, gold or debt are the things you're counting or measuring. Just puting numbers on a paper or electronic medium doesn't mean creating money.

Further, a currency is not "token we use to represent money"(whatever that nonsense means) but simply ... "money that is used in a particular country at a particular time". And again, money is a concrete thing (cow, gold, debt). That brings us to the fact that there's no concrete thing in the Bitcoin system. There's nothing to be counted or debited/credited. People simply spend electricity on random trial and error of finding a number. When they find it the protocol attributes a predefined number (units of nothing) to their addresses and shows them that on the screen.

Besides making your own, funny definitions, your main problem is that you don't understand Bitcoin. You've heard about Bitcoin from stories, such as the one called "The Bitcoin white paper". You've heard about some coins that exists in the system, about e-money. But you didn't actually check whether these stories are true. You just blindly believe them. I am here to educate you about what Bitcoin actually is. I am here to help you understand Bitcoin in all of its stupidity.

This is the correct reply to every single thing the OP has said lol. OP either really IS that stupid, or choosing to act ignorant in order to continue to appear to be 'that stupid'.

Is it perhaps the conditioning children receive to believe that being wrong is a bad thing which is responsible for your inabilty to consider that your understanding of the topic is erroneous?

Let me break it down into the simplest terms I can:

The 'token' we use to represent money is currency. But we absolutely do not need to have a 'thing' at all. We could simply keep a record of debits and credits in a central database, agreed?

Money evolved out of the very first debit and credit ledgers we created and it was simply recorded as a number in a ledger. So if you as the farmer dropped off your grain at the local temple you would be assigned a certain number of credits for it and some of those credits would then be deducted against the debits you had previously run up earlier in the year when needing to buy your farming supplies etc. So you, like every other farmer and producer of goods for the community's economy would all have your debits and credits recorded in thie ledger.

If you were to look at a page of that ledger you would only see numbers being assigned to names as a result of whatever basis they had warranted a credit for. So you'd have no idea whether one unit was for grain, or grapes, or timber, as this wasn't necessary to know.

Do you know why it wasn't necessary to know? Because each unit recorded represented only one thing. The value introduced into the economic system as a result of time and energy expended creating it. Work.


That we then decided to create a token system which would then allow people to hold their own representation of that monetary unit, and then buy goods and services from other people who would accept it in exchange, is what saw the creation of a currency unit representing that monetary unit previously recorded in the ledger.

That is the difference between money and currency. Currency is just the token 'thing' we created to be able to move those written monetary unit records from the central ledger into the hands of the people so they could trade freely without it having to go through the central record for every transaction.

Sure, someone could insist on getting a product, let's say an iPhone 15, delivered via XX postal service instead of FedEx or UPS. In the same way, he insists on getting units of nothing via Bitcoin system instead of email system. But the problem is that for some bizarre reason the iPhone 15 send via XX postal service costs 70 million dollars.  If I send it via FedEx it costs a thousand dollars. Likewise, 1 unit of nothing send via Bitcoin system costs 70 thousand dollars. If I send it via email it costs zero dollars. So basically he doesn't want the units. He wants me to join the Bitcoin scheme and give dollars to those who joined it earlier. He wants me to give up 70 thousand units of something and get 1 unit of nothing. But I am not stupid or ignorant. So I won't join the scheme.

I don't think you're that stupid you don't know the difference. You're just choosing to act ignorant.

He has every right to prefer a specific system or medium of exchange for the transaction. All financial transactions generally follow established protocols. There's some flexibility in choosing a method the recipient accepts as valid, but still within the parameters set by the recipient. For example, you can enter a store and choose to pay by cash or card, but you cannot take the goods and tell the cashier "I will send you units of money via carrier pigeon" and expect him to accept such a transaction. But, if you persist in using a carrier pigeon instead of the preferred method, it raises concerns. It could be that you don't have the units readily available, or maybe you're simply trying to scam.

So, why do you keep insisting on your own "system" for the transaction instead of a method the recipient is comfortable with?

Of course, that's why I asked for your e-mail address. I will send you units of nothing. But you insist on getting them via the Bitcoin system instead of the e-mail system. So, do you want the units or will you keep insisting on the system?

You can repeat the nonsense that money is representation of work done, but reality won't change. In reality, neither work is required to create Bitcoin, nor money is representation of work done. Work is activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Money is an item, a thing used as a medium of exchange. In the Bitcoin system no such thing exists. That's why nobody here was able to answer my simple question: "the unit of what thing is BTC".  In the Bitcoin system people are just informed that they have xx units of nothing. They spend energy on random trial and error of finding a number that solves a hash combination after which the protocol tells them: "you have xx units of nothing". They then sell those units to others. That's the reality.

But you can keep denying reality by talking nonsense. It is not a problem for me to keep repeating what reality is.

At this point it has become painfully obvious the OP does not know what they are talking about, and even more importantly, they do not want to know, they just hate on bitcoin and they will never change their stance, so any attempt to try to reason with them is not only a waste of time, it is quite likely they are happy this is the case.

So it is better to just ignore them as I doubt the fall of the fiat system and the long history of failed fiat currencies could change their mind.

If they are "units of nothing", then it takes nothing for you to send them to me, right?  So do it. 


It is highly relevant to our discussion.  I'm trying to demonstrate that Bitcoin has value as a form of currency, even though it's not backed by a specific asset or commodity like debt or gold.  You've argued that it's essentially worthless, created out of thin air.  If that's the case, then I challenge you to send me 1 million Bitcoins.  If you're unable to do so, it would contradict your claim that Bitcoin is just like monopoly paper which can be printed out of nothing. 

Yeah I'm getting the feeling that you *really* don't understand a word of what is being said to you.

'Money' is a representation of work done. Time and Energy.

An issued unit of Bitcoin is the result of Time and Energy, ergo, it is not 'nothing'.


If you are incapable of grasping this premise then you have no hope at all of understanding the topic of money. Stop confusing it for currency, that is merely its representative token.

I understand perfectly that you said the same nonsense as before by using more words. Bitcoin is unit of nothing. Nothing is not scarce. Nothing has no value. Nothing cannot be money. No energy is being spend in creating nothing. In the Bitcoin system energy is spend on plain brute force random trial and error of finding a number that solves a hash combination. It has nothing to do with "creating Bitcoin". Bitcoin is created as a unit of nothing via simple declaration.

Well for me it is not Bitcoin that is the dumbest thing ever invented by humans in my opinion it is fiat. Bitcoin has fix supply but with fiat central banks can print as much money as they wanted to and it is also affected by inflation which Bitcoin isn't. Bitcoin is a revolutionary currency that allows all believers to achieve financial freedom while fiat holders struggle because it's value is getting less and less every single year so which do you think is dumb?

Oh I see what the problem is. You're struggling to understand what a unit of work is in an economic sense and you're conflating money with currency.

Your trite 'payment in dust' analogy shows this misunderstanding. The 'dust' as a means of payment would be considered currency in that case because you are declaring it to be 'your money', but it fails as money because there is no scarcity and no value can be ascribed to it because no work is needed to be done to create it.

If I perform some work, say, building a house for you, my time and energy introduces additional value to the communal economy as that house will have value for many years to come. This would warrant the issuing of additional units of money to the community's collective money supply so that it is accounted for (if no new money is issued then the net effect of the value I have added to the economy is deflationary) If I want to pay my utility bills, buy a car, go on holiday, I need to offer the utility company, the car salesman, the travel company, sufficient proof of having done the equivalent value of work that equates to the price of the goods/services I am purchasing. So you need to give me a number of units of something which will maintain the same economic value as every single other unit of currency our communal economy uses (which denotes it as fungible money, one of the essential qualities of what makes something 'money')

Now, if you replace 'dust' with 'fiat currency' in your analogy, you could perhaps be a skilled forger and simply create units of currency in your back room and hand them to me, but in most fiat transactions the person paying has done some work for somebody else who, likewise, did work for others, and you all received various amounts of units of money which represented that. If no new value was added to the economy then the same monetary units all move around between people and there is no inflation or deflation.

Ideally, because I have created new value in the economy, our community central bank would print X number of new units of our money and that would be introduced into the economy, ensuring that additional value is accounted for and no deflation (and no inflation through excessive printing) occurs.

But, say central banks (and forgery) do introduce excessive amounts of new money into our communiity's economic system. Let's imagine they introduce a whole YEAR's worth of additional money into the system. Each unit of that money represents work that will have to be done to produce the equivalent value. Otherwise we're all going to see prices rise as there is more money in the system than there are things of value being created it equates to. Suddenly everything costs more but we still have exactly the same amount of value in the community's economy.

We have debased our money until we are able to balance the scales by producing more things of value into the system.

Each unit of money in an economic system represents a unit of time and energy spent (work), regardless of the token we adopt as its national currency (dollar, yen, pound, euro etc). It is how that money is created and the abuse of that process which results in the mess we see nations in these days.

This is what Bitcoin solves. It can only be produced through work which has been done, not work which is yet to be done.

Do you understand?

I already knew that the Bitcoin protocol is set to issue units of nothing after some work is done. But where did you get the idea that because of that the unit of nothing represents work? If I give you a grain of dust after you do some work for me that doesn't mean that dust is the unit of work. It just means that you were stupid to trade work for dust. In the case of Bitcoin we have even greater stupidity because work is traded for nothing. 

So, you want to get units of nothing that are printed by protocol X instead by protocol Y. Ok, that's your personal thing. But here we are discussing about the stupidity of wanting something like that. And the stupidity of wasting energy on transferring it. It's seems that you're constantly missing what this discussion is about.

As for the money, money has always been unit of something, either tangible or intangible. So, Bitcoin is not real money. It's like money in the game of Monopoly. But regardless of the definition it's still stupid to trade 70 thousand units of something for 1 unit of nothing. Or spend tones of energy on nothing.