Bitcoin and Hawk Tuah Aren't So Different | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin and Hawk Tuah Aren't So Different

foreignpolicy.com

5 pointsfsagx7 comments

> "Bitcoin remains a strangely useless asset that doesn’t do anything. All you can do with it is buy, sell, or hold."

I have to laugh at people confidently making naive comments like this.

How about: all you can do with it is store and transfer your wealth in a highly liquid, divisible, digital and fungible form without any use of the state or fiat banking system, which means that it can't be stolen from you through supply inflation (even the US dollar is HALVED in value every decade), or through legal frameworks such as "taxation" or bank bail-ins.

A nice addition is that you can't be debanked if you hold opinions that the state doesn't want you to (e.g. Canadian trucker protests).

No other asset can offer this (even gold's value halves every 3-4 decades through supply inflation).

So yes, just "a strangely useless asset that doesn't do anything"

If USD was printed on gold paper worth it's value I could agree to this article but ultimately it is just a piece of paper we agree holds value. In some cases you might not even hold onto that paper like as a Canadian I can invest and own USD but not have physical ownership of it while it is in my account. Perhaps the dollar could collapse due to politics or some unseen revolt. Or perhaps some massive hacking incident wipes out all computers and records of what I own are lost.

Bitcoin is not much different. I don't physically own a bitcoin. And they too can lose their value potentially for various reasons. So to say they are useless really doesn't make sense. They have value if we agree they have value and many people around the world have agreed they do hold value.

> ... and many people around the world have agreed they do hold value

Not unlike physical gold. Which people have agreed has value since thousands of years.

I bought gold in 1999 because I knew the upcoming EUR was one heck of a mediocre shitty currency: that thing is responsible for the EU's total lack of growth compared to the US and China since it was introduced. A dumb money created by ideologues imbeciles: you cannot have a common currency with different productivity and different fiscal rules in all the countries.

Young dumb me could understand that. I heard economists saying the EUR was the biggest fucktardery ever conceived and I was sold... To gold.

My bag did very well, tyvm.

Now what do I see? The EU losing any relevance on the international scenes, many EU countries without any government at the moment. The US having gone from $10 trillion in public debt to $37 trillion... Since Bitcoin's creation.

And there's this thing, some kind of digital gold, secured by cryptography and electricity, which is, on purpose, scarce.

And its genesis message contains a middle finger to government bailing out banks?

I'm sold.

And all the mainstream media, the same who were explaining us there was no way masks would work before we had to wear masks for six months and the same who were explaining us the lab couldn't possibly have originated out of a lab (which is now officially considered the most probable cause) all hate Bitcoin with a passion?

I'm sold even more.

Give me gold, Give me silver. Give me equities. Give me digital gold.

Anything but that toilet paper that currencies like the EUR and the USD are.

I could be wrong I don't fully understand how it all works, but I feel that if the US government decided Bitcoin was a huge threat and people were abandoning the USD that they would just ban it. Yes I know there can't really stop people from having it. But if they made it illegal in the US and threatened sanctions against any country that allowed it and essentially made it impossible to use it for anything other then holding on to it what value would it have? If you can not trade it in any major country would it still hold value? I am curious if that type of situation is even possible? I agree with you though I like Bitcoin though I don't own any. I like the concept that one can own it and the political landscape of ones country can not destroy the value of what you own..Anyways any thoughts I am curious to hear.

Banning it makes no difference other than possibly slow down it's adoption. Does banning the purchase and sale of drugs stop people buying and selling drugs?

And as bitcoin is digital, it makes it far harder to stop as I can send it to anyone else via an encrypted digital communications channel that the state is unable to read.

And there will always be one country that doesn't ban it, and thrives from the use of hard money, rather than monopoly money tokens that are fiat currencies like $£ etc.

What is far more likely is that other major countries see bitcoin's potential as future global reserve asset and stock pile it. If they are right, then the USA will be left "holding the bag" of worthless US dollars, and be left with relatively any bitcoin either i.e. it will be broke. The USA will forsee this, and you'll end up with a mad rush to buy bitcoin before other nations do. Nation-state FOMO.

But why did the pound (or the dollar which replaced it) emerged in the first place?

People realized what you are saying 400 years ago. It is not a deep or new insight just because bitcoin emerged. Just because tech allows you to create a store of value doesnt mean people needed tech to produce their own stores or value in the past.

We already had the Free Banking system where anyone could print their own store of value. Guess what happened?

Whether it was France or US or British India the same story plays out. All this has already happened.

Read some history of money.

There is a reason central banks and centralized currencies emerged world wide. The Free Banking systems failed.

https://archive.is/kNRh2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com