You can do the same with bitcoin too. I don't know if you heard the news, but there are now enormous liquidity pools of billions of dollars that enable realtime conversion between BTC and USD, and they even automatically handle generating all of the tax forms for you too!
This liquidity is so massive and the clearing so instantaneous that you can even get a bitcoin debit card. Open account, deposit bitcoin, spend directly in USD via debit card!
That’s not buying things with bitcoin. That’s buying with USD and having something convert last minute. It’s no different than a brokerage card that sells stock to cover transactions.
By that logic, nobody ever buys anything. Credit cards don't directly send funds from point A to point B either, there's complex technical and financial underpinning for the entire PCI industry.
Arguing that using a BTC debit card to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with Bitcoin because the bitcoin you deposited is not sent directly to the merchant is like arguing that using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
It's a nonsensical semantic argument entirely detached from the important aspect, which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it wherever you can use a visa/mastercard with zero friction, as easy as using your credit card.
> Credit cards don't directly send funds from point A to point B either
But dollars change hands (or accounts) at the end.
> using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
Nobody made that argument. You did and argued against it.
> which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it
You buy and sell cryptocurrency so you can use the currency you started with. The added two steps of buying and selling crypto are immaterial to buying what you want. You merely invested and divested in a speculative asset, you didn't use it as currency.
These two things are not unrelated. Moderate inflation is a feature, not a bug. It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along. One of the reasons the Great Depression lasted as long as it did was the Fed's tight money policy. And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
Bitcoin is deflationary by design. That makes it a great asset but a terrible currency.
Maybe from your perspective. From mine, it's as unwelcome of a "feature" as malvertising. If I can choose to opt out of this "feature", I will, and I do.
Thank goodness we have the legal freedom of choice to do so, and that bitcoin really exists, rather than still just being a concept on paper.
> It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along.
Who defines 'hoard' and 'too long'? If your definitions don't match mine, why should I be forced to respect your opinions? Simple answer: I choose to ignore them, because I can. I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor, even if they do it "for the good of society as a whole". Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
>And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
You want to talk about real bubbles? Look no further than the increase in value between securities and house prices relative to average incomes. That's the fed's money spigot. It didn't save the day, it just hyperinflated the bubble.
> I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor…
This bit I agree with, although I would add that salary (i.e. plain cash) alone as the fruit of labour is insufficient and unfair, and amounts to wage slavery.
> Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
Those are interlinked, as living in a bunker is not good for your wellbeing.
> I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor
If you were operating in a barter economy, as you seem to wish for, the value of your labor would not be guaranteed to have stable value either, and would likely be far more volatile (especially depending on what the product of your labor is... you think farmers can demand their product not decay in value over time?). You just wouldn't have a convenient boogeyman to complain about, but I guess that's better to you?
It absolutely did. Unemployment during the Great Depression reached a high of 25% and was above 15% for nine years (which would probably have been longer if not for WW2). Unemployment during the covid pandemic reached a high of 15% and dropped below 4% less than two years later.
> it just hyperinflated the bubble.
It didn't do that either. Inflation reached an annualized high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is now down to less than 5% less than two years later. That is not hyperinflation. Hyperinflation looks like this:
It's a feature! You see, it incentivizes spending, speculation, and investing, which are the only important economic activities, and punishes savers, which are miserly cash-hoarders who selfishly want to save for retirement without having to gamble.
BTW, you apparently don't understand what "saving" actually is. There are two kinds of saving. You can save by putting cash under your mattress, or you can save by putting money in the bank. These operate in fundamentally different ways. When you put money in the bank, it gets loaned out so that people can use it for productive activities. When you put it under the mattress it just sits there. It's very hard to lend bitcoin because there is no way to record a bitcoin transaction as a debt in the blockchain. All bitcoin transactions are structured as cash payments. So "saving" bitcoin is necessarily under-the-mattress type savings rather than in-the-bank type savings. This is one of the fundamental limitations of bitcoin, and one of the many reasons why it cannot be a currency, only a commodity.
Sure, but to lend your bitcoin you have to transfer it to a lending platform, which is to say, to a trusted third party (TTP). The whole point of bitcoin is supposed to be that it does not rely on a TTP. If you're going to trust a TTP to administer your loan, you might as well trust them to keep the ledger too. As soon as you lend your bitcoin you lose all of its purported advantages, including inflation protection. All you're left with is a ridiculously high electric bill.
"my currency is legit because that's the only currency accepted by the gang who threatens to use violence to abduct and imprison me in the middle of the the night for refusing to pay the protection (racketeering) payments they demand from me"
FIAT currencies are not stores of value. Think about how great they would be if they were though! Imagine if your wealth went up over time just for holding money rather than going down over time.
Why are you obsessed with holding currency? You say you don't care about society, which is fine, but why should society care about you by creating a synthetic store of value for you? If you want to store value, buy durable goods, not currency.
Your commenting resemble the libertarian cat paradox: expecting the world to be set up for your benefit to do whatever you want.
I don't know about parent, but I don't want to be forced to gamble on the stock market or to become a landlord simply to save the fruits of my labor. In an ideal world I could have used gold for savings, but gold already lost against fiat and people are looking for something better.
> but why should society care about you by creating a synthetic store of value for you?
That's the beauty of bitcoin, society doesn't have to care about it, bitcoin just does everything on its own and grows naturally.
I think you need to think about society as something that can only "buffer" a few months of productivity, or a few years at most. It doesn't matter what monetary system you use to value things. Prices will adjust to reflect supply and demand. It makes no sense for you to be able to save for X decades and then declare you have a right to Y decades worth of other people's productivity later in exchange.
The only way to get what you want is to physically save the goods and services you want to buy in the future, but obviously that is impractical. Hence, society, markets, money, and inflation or deflation to balance the supply and demand of goods and services.
Imagine a world where everyone is your age. You and everyone around you works and is productive. You're saving money. Then, you all retire around the same time. What value does that money have? You all have money, but there's nothing to buy with it. This is obviously an extreme example. But what you want is also extreme: that population and productivity are constant over time.
This is the best explanation so far. If you want to store value in non-inflationary asset you can purchase gold. But there is no guarantee that the value of gold against the fruit of other people’s labor will remain constant or increase over time. It doesn’t matter that the total amount of gold remains constant. If the world consists of gold hoarders who want to buy food but all they can offer is gold and one farmer who has food for sale then that one farmer can demand as much gold as the market is willing to pay for the scarce good food.
“Sheafra” is the Arabic word for “Cipher”, which is, in turn, translated from the Arabic word “Sifr”, which means Zero.
One of the first detailed explanations of Zero was made by Persian Muslim polymath AlKhawarizmi, whose name went through multiple translations, eventually giving us the word “Algorithm”.
AlKhawarizmi lived in Baghdad and was head Astronomer of the House of Wisdom there. Persia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) were under one political entity, along with Arabia, the Levant (modern-day Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon), Egypt, and others. Even today, many Muslims identify with their faith more than their race, ethnicity, or nationality.
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis liquidity is so massive and the clearing so instantaneous that you can even get a bitcoin debit card. Open account, deposit bitcoin, spend directly in USD via debit card!
Arguing that using a BTC debit card to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with Bitcoin because the bitcoin you deposited is not sent directly to the merchant is like arguing that using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
It's a nonsensical semantic argument entirely detached from the important aspect, which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it wherever you can use a visa/mastercard with zero friction, as easy as using your credit card.
But dollars change hands (or accounts) at the end.
> using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
Nobody made that argument. You did and argued against it.
> which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it
You buy and sell cryptocurrency so you can use the currency you started with. The added two steps of buying and selling crypto are immaterial to buying what you want. You merely invested and divested in a speculative asset, you didn't use it as currency.
Bitcoin is deflationary by design. That makes it a great asset but a terrible currency.
Maybe from your perspective. From mine, it's as unwelcome of a "feature" as malvertising. If I can choose to opt out of this "feature", I will, and I do.
Thank goodness we have the legal freedom of choice to do so, and that bitcoin really exists, rather than still just being a concept on paper.
> It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along. Who defines 'hoard' and 'too long'? If your definitions don't match mine, why should I be forced to respect your opinions? Simple answer: I choose to ignore them, because I can. I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor, even if they do it "for the good of society as a whole". Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
>And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
You want to talk about real bubbles? Look no further than the increase in value between securities and house prices relative to average incomes. That's the fed's money spigot. It didn't save the day, it just hyperinflated the bubble.
This bit I agree with, although I would add that salary (i.e. plain cash) alone as the fruit of labour is insufficient and unfair, and amounts to wage slavery.
> Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
Those are interlinked, as living in a bunker is not good for your wellbeing.
If you were operating in a barter economy, as you seem to wish for, the value of your labor would not be guaranteed to have stable value either, and would likely be far more volatile (especially depending on what the product of your labor is... you think farmers can demand their product not decay in value over time?). You just wouldn't have a convenient boogeyman to complain about, but I guess that's better to you?
It absolutely did. Unemployment during the Great Depression reached a high of 25% and was above 15% for nine years (which would probably have been longer if not for WW2). Unemployment during the covid pandemic reached a high of 15% and dropped below 4% less than two years later.
> it just hyperinflated the bubble.
It didn't do that either. Inflation reached an annualized high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is now down to less than 5% less than two years later. That is not hyperinflation. Hyperinflation looks like this:
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-december-annu...
BTW, you apparently don't understand what "saving" actually is. There are two kinds of saving. You can save by putting cash under your mattress, or you can save by putting money in the bank. These operate in fundamentally different ways. When you put money in the bank, it gets loaned out so that people can use it for productive activities. When you put it under the mattress it just sits there. It's very hard to lend bitcoin because there is no way to record a bitcoin transaction as a debt in the blockchain. All bitcoin transactions are structured as cash payments. So "saving" bitcoin is necessarily under-the-mattress type savings rather than in-the-bank type savings. This is one of the fundamental limitations of bitcoin, and one of the many reasons why it cannot be a currency, only a commodity.
https://milkroad.com/lend/btc/#:~:text=In%20DeFi%20BTC%20len....
Currencies are not stores of value.
Your commenting resemble the libertarian cat paradox: expecting the world to be set up for your benefit to do whatever you want.
I don't know about parent, but I don't want to be forced to gamble on the stock market or to become a landlord simply to save the fruits of my labor. In an ideal world I could have used gold for savings, but gold already lost against fiat and people are looking for something better.
> but why should society care about you by creating a synthetic store of value for you?
That's the beauty of bitcoin, society doesn't have to care about it, bitcoin just does everything on its own and grows naturally.
The only way to get what you want is to physically save the goods and services you want to buy in the future, but obviously that is impractical. Hence, society, markets, money, and inflation or deflation to balance the supply and demand of goods and services.
Imagine a world where everyone is your age. You and everyone around you works and is productive. You're saving money. Then, you all retire around the same time. What value does that money have? You all have money, but there's nothing to buy with it. This is obviously an extreme example. But what you want is also extreme: that population and productivity are constant over time.
Aristotle would have disagreed with you, and today's market seems to disagree as well.
One of the first detailed explanations of Zero was made by Persian Muslim polymath AlKhawarizmi, whose name went through multiple translations, eventually giving us the word “Algorithm”.
What is the relevance of religion in this context? I rarely see religion being mention in connection with other scientists.