Oddbean new post about login | logout Currency that is “backed” requires trust. If you trust your government, you do you….I’ll hold your bitcoin.
You're jumping to conclusions very far away from where I am, based on stuff I haven't said. Take a step back and relax a bit. Nobody is selling.
I know you aren’t, I am trying to bring my point to it’s ultimate conclusion to make it more clear (I don’t know the technical term for that, I’m sure there is one)
There is no need for government to back anything. Currency has historically been and can be again privately issued. For instance, Tether. If they back USDT with BTC instead of fiat trash, with a certain level of auditing and proof of reserves, won't you trust it?
Would I trust it? Maybe for a small amount I didn’t care about losing. But what is the point? Why would anyone want to receive Zimbabwe dollars over USD? That is what USD is compared to BTC - it’s Zimbabwe dollars. having something to trade that reliably loses value is not required for economic activity - if it were, why isn’t Argentina1000x more productive than the United States?
Have you read The Bitcoin Standard? It’s an excellent primer on money, how it works and how it’s adopted. Are you familiar with the Yappese Rai Stones?
Yes to both questions. But Saif didn't write the Holy Sacred Book, he just put his very valid opinions together. Which I share to a very large extent. I just think that you can have money that's currency, and money that's store of value, that they don't *need* to be conflated and that in BTC's case, they clearly aren't.
Why trade an abstraction of the thing, when you can trade the actual thing itself? I’m not sure the reasoning: do you think the currency has to bleed value to encourage people to spend it? Or do you think there is a technical limitation of bitcoin?
The second. The first, as you said, is what Keynesians believe, and I don't share it.
Ok I misunderstood your position then, I thought you were saying bitcoin can’t be a medium of exchange because it stores value. Technically I don’t think we need currency to scale bitcoin. Fedi mints, LN, or something else can do this much better.
And I can’t say that I’ve ever not been able to make a transaction that I wanted to make because I couldn’t , because fees or something prevented me. I have however passed on using Stablecoins because of the high slippage and difficulty getting rid of the excess change