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Title: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: Matthew N. Wright on March 25, 2013, 04:37:50 PM My thoery:
Bitcoin is a publicly traded company stock whose owners are the shareholders. Some shareholders work at the company to create stock certificates for themselves and sell them to others. (Miners) The company pays its' employees in more shares. When the amount of shares gets to a certain amount (block halving), the stocks are reverse-split. Said stock can be purchased publicly from existing stock holders at any time and sold at will. The purpose of this utility company is to provide a space to swap share values between shareholders. Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: herzmeister on March 25, 2013, 04:58:49 PM yup, definitely can see it that way, I lately also explain it similarly where bitcoins get their damn value from. It's like stocks, but of an open source project, which is quite a novelty, which makes it an entirely new class of asset. It's a fully transparent openly developed and community-driven global value transfer system, where you can just hold some of its units of accounting which are limited in supply.
Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: acoindr on March 25, 2013, 05:11:39 PM There are similarities, but I don't think it's a good idea to try re-defining Bitcoin as a company with shares. For one thing, it's not.
Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: matt608 on March 25, 2013, 05:25:18 PM Interesting, I've thought (as most probably have) that one of bitcoin's functions is as a 'tech stock', but never that it is purely a stock. I think it ends up being a matter of semantics, yours is a valid description and is true, but things are named according to their use. E.g. A wooden table is just a flat piece of wood, it could be referred to as 'firewood', which it is, but we call it based on what it's used for. So ultimately it depends on what bitcoin ends up being used for. Right now its used as a currency and a stock, and I'll propose that it will be for most of it's existence. But it's use as a currency is using it as a stock, as you say, and I agree, so both 'currency' and 'stock' are true, but more accuracy can be obtained by using both. I use it as a tech stock and occasionally as a currency. That just makes more sense than saying "I bought a book with some bitcion shares"... because you don't buy books with shares.
Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: allthingsluxury on March 25, 2013, 05:29:12 PM My thoery: Bitcoin is a publicly traded company stock whose owners are the shareholders. Some shareholders work at the company to create stock certificates for themselves and sell them to others. (Miners) The company pays its' employees in more shares. When the amount of shares gets to a certain amount (block halving), the stocks are reverse-split. Said stock can be purchased publicly from existing stock holders at any time and sold at will. The purpose of this utility company is to provide a space to swap share values between shareholders. I see the relation. Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: Matthew N. Wright on March 25, 2013, 06:31:13 PM Interesting, I've thought (as most probably have) that one of bitcoin's functions is as a 'tech stock', but never that it is purely a stock. I think it ends up being a matter of semantics, yours is a valid description and is true, but things are named according to their use. E.g. A wooden table is just a flat piece of wood, it could be referred to as 'firewood', which it is, but we call it based on what it's used for. So ultimately it depends on what bitcoin ends up being used for. Right now its used as a currency and a stock, and I'll propose that it will be for most of it's existence. But it's use as a currency is using it as a stock, as you say, and I agree, so both 'currency' and 'stock' are true, but more accuracy can be obtained by using both. I use it as a tech stock and occasionally as a currency. That just makes more sense than saying "I bought a book with some bitcion shares"... because you don't buy books with shares. I too am unaware of any bookstores that accept the transfer of company stock towards the purchase of a book; that said, wikipedia accepts the transfers of stocks for dollar value donations, so using stocks as currency does happen, it's just more impractical with all the legal red tape. That will change with systems such as Ripple and OpenTransactions, where the "contracts" and "laws" are all based on mathematics, encryption and code itself. Title: Re: Currency? Commodity? How about a stock? Post by: joecooin on March 25, 2013, 10:53:01 PM I absolutely see it like that when trying to explain it's behaviour as an investment.
It is like the stock of a company that has a patent on a technology that has tremendious future potential. Think apple with a patent on the mouse and graphical user interface that cannot be sidestepped by anyone, anywhere forever. With the beauty that in our case the patent is not held by a corporation but by mankind. :) Joe |