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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

I started writing a long comment about currencies, assets, rarity, and a few more things, but I realized it's pointless.

Please get some history books out and read about money. Read about ancient Rome and what problems rose when mad emperors decided to replace money with new coins out of the blue. Read about why and how the US dollar is not based on gold any more. Read about hyperinflation after WWII. Money is regulated to protect us from ourselves.

Now take a look at the war between BTC and BTH, at how the majority of miners are not willing to overcome technical issues and work together, the incredibly waste of energy and hardware, computing the nothing, and tell me: do you honestly think it's not history, repeating itself, just in another light?

Of course, there are always some who don't care, "get rich or die trying". I'm not one of these believers.

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Your examples comes down to centralized decision & regulation, isn't money printing also "regulation" that's how they call it, wile bitcoin is the most decentralized currency, no Emperor can replace it, no changes can be done without widespread conses.

The incredible energy for digging out gold just to keep it in locked boxes, same for all precious metals, diamonds.

Gold has real life use even in electrical circuits, besides being pretty. Diamond is used in the industry as well, not just engagement rings. They are also all physical objects.

> no Emperor can replace it, no changes can be done without widespread conses.

When was the last time humans were capable of agreeing and working together for long term? The blockchain thinks it's got rid of the mad emperor problem, where in reality the BTC/BTH, ETC/ETH hard forking an existing blockchain is very similar, and introduced a whole new spectrum of problems humanity tried for centuries to solve, without success: reaching consensus.

Gold real life use is a myth, around 10% of the demand, copper is much more valuable from this perspective.

When the US constitution was born, I don't know, democracy? BTC/BTH, ETC/ETH, crypto is even more democratic as the other side can go on their separate ways, as oposite to countries.

> crypto is even more democratic as the other side can go on their separate ways, as oposite to countries.

countries go their separate ways. Sometimes peacefully sometimes with horrible violence.

Do you not see massive issues with that happening with currency? Some dev gets pissed one day and fractures the currency market?

> mad emperor problem

As a tangent, what is that? Didn't find it on google (thought I wanted the wikipedia on caligula).

> Read about ancient Rome and what problems rose when mad emperors decided to replace money with new coins out of the blue

I think it was a reference to one of the previous comments in the chain.

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