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Comment by aryan14 | Hacker News Reader

You could say any currency is just a bunch of numbers, the US dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.

The question is more like: Would you let everyone dictate the value of a currency and leave it decentralized? Or would you rather a government controlled centralized currency.

It’s preference and opinion at the end of the day

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The dollar is backed by the fact that you can pay any debt with it and (if you’re a US citizen) have to pay your taxes with it.

I'm not sure people care much about the debt repayment thing? If I rack up a bill at a bar, I can technically force them to accept a sack of pennies as repayment, but most people use digital payments like credit cards. At that point it doesn't really matter if my bank account holds USD, GBP, BTC or any other liquid asset, as long as the payment infrastructure can handle any necessary conversions.

There are no assets for digital currencies so the words you're using to describe it are ontologically nonsensical. It's numbers, binary sequences, in databases. The only thing that makes it all work is your belief and faith that the numbers mean something other than the electricity and infrastructure necessary to maintain the databases. The only real assets in the entire scheme are the computers and power plants with the spinning dynamos necessary for maintaining the illusion of "value".

This is why the masses are always dazed and confused. Your water and food are full of poisons but the numbers in databases are what get the most airtime. Bitcoin is the purest distillation of fiat currencies because there is no longer any actual physical manifestation of it anywhere other than whatever paper key you keep on you as a reminder that there is a database with some numbers which you and those like you collectively believe to be "valuable".

The fact that it is not physical makes Bitcoin more valuable. Why? Because I can store millions of it in my pocket. I can move millions around the world in less than an hour. 24/7. No banks or approvals or intermediaries required. I can keep it in my own custody safety. It is easy and fast to exchange. It is easy to validate its authenticity. The supply is fixed and near impossible to dilute. Etc.. Etc..

that is why Bitcoin is valuable. It’s valuable because it stores value with all the important properties I listed above. Those properties are intrinsic to Bitcoin. Say that for any other asset.

If you’re worried about civilization crashing and Bitcoin becoming worthless. Fair enough, you should diversify into guns and toilet paper.

Well, with toilet paper I can wipe my ass. Even a dollar bill will do the trick but I'm not sure what I can do with a number in a database disconnected from the spinning magnets that make it functional.

I'm not here to convince you that bitcoin is worthless because clearly there are enough people who think it is worth more than $100k so you'd be better off convincing those people to offer you services in exchange for bitcoins instead of arguing with a random stranger about the collapse of civilization.

> Well, with toilet paper I can wipe my ass. Even a dollar bill will do the trick

Wait, are you saying dollars are good because you can wipe with them? I think you're in full agreement with the person you're replying to!

My point is that Bitcoin is no different from fiat. In fact, it can't be anything but fiat because it has no physical representation.

Fiat can be minted easily. Bitcoin cannot any faster than the rate that it is mined. Massive difference. And the key reason why the dollar continually depreciates.

Fiat means faith and that's all you have with bitcoin, faith in the algorithms that make the ledger very hard to mutate without spending the required "effort" to "mint" the entries on the ledger. You can believe whatever you want but as I said previously you're better off convincing people to sell you services for your bitcoins instead of arguing with random strangers on the internet about cryptographic hashing functions.

Great for the government, terrible for anyone holding dollars. The government continues diluting the dollar to pay its debt.

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