Bitcoin Forum

One of the arguments for Bitcoin is as an alternative reserve currency. In fact for many people it is THE primary argument for the worth of Bitcoin.

"A distributed peer to peer currency."

However, there is already an almost perfect analog of this in the real world, by people who actually matter in finance, on a scale that actually means something. It's the SDR, or Special Drawing Rights of the IMF.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights)

It's Bitcoin for sovereign nations, and it was neither very effective or widely used.

I used to be on their forums, some lame phBB set up, they need to up their PR and I think it might work out for them.

I hope you aren't trying to make a comparison. As that would be silly.

You could also say SDR = Service Debt Repayments

It's usury and with it comes shackles and chains.

1. It's still being used
2. It can be diluted. Bitcoin can't.

1. It's hardly being used, and rather insignificantly at that.
2. Decimating Bitcoin is no different than inflation or "dilution."

Let me repeat that because it bears reiteration:

Decimating Bitcoin is no different than inflation.

No, there is a huge different. If I have 10 bitcoins, and they get decimated x10, I now have a full 100 bitcoins each worth only 10% of the original. If I have 10 bitcoins and the total number of bitcoins is increased 10 fold (inflation), I still only have 10 bitcoins, but each is worth only 10% of the original. Big, big difference.

You get a fair share during decimating. You get diluted during inflation.

Repeating a claim is not a sufficient substitute for a valid argument. I'm not even sure you know what "decimating" means.

This word, "inflation"...I do-not-ah-think it means what you think it means.

If my usage of "decimate" leads you to question my knowledge of its meaning I am absolutely certain you have no idea what it means.

Still, you choose to answer to this rather than the previous posts which countered your argument. Although, you never actually made an argument.

Why don't you tell us what decimating means, in your definition, so that we can be clear about your claim. It sounds to me like you're saying that if we move the decimal place one to the right, this is exactly the same as issuing 9*21million new bitcoins. Is this an accurate account of your meaning?

dec·i·mate/ˈdesəˌmāt/Verb
1. Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of.
2. Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

or this from Wikipedia:
Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth."

Now, you could mean "a technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal. " (also from wikipedia, but that would make even less sense.

If you destroy bitcoins, the rest become more valuable because of the law or supply and demand.

If you imply that somehow we can move the decimal. effectively increasing the number of Bitcoins by ten, then you are simply pissing into the wind. not. gonna. happen.  Can't happen in fact without the consensus of the very people who would stand to lose the most if it happened.

Don't pick on his word usage. We know what he meant. He is just waiting to start up a different straw-man argument, don't feed him. He meant something like decimalize or decimalisation.

Very briefly,

decem- : by ten

-ate : to do, to make, to cause, or to act upon; to do something with


I understand language. I don't go by the definition you just found at Google.

Told you. Now he is hoping someone jumps on the "you don't use language the way it is defined?" argument, because that could go on forever and he'll get a kick out of it the whole way.

Actually I caren't.  I've simply shown that people who rely on pithy internet searches to do all of their reasoning for them are inferior to people who reason based on fundamental understanding. That is the end of this particular argument.

Now as for Bitcoin being the poor man's SDR, my assessment still stands.

Really? That is news to me. But I guess I'll take your work on it.

Read about it. Post your arguments how it's different.

Essentially, Bitcoin acts just as SDR does between currencies, just on a mundane scale.

This is getting amusing. Pithy is actually a compliment. You would have gotten more mileage out of the word "pedantic".  You assessment never stood in the first place. Nobody who has the power to move the decimal has any incentive to actually do so.

Except it was sarcasm...

/s/pithy/s/ internet searches.

now quit being a pithant and post something relevant.

"Decimate" is derived from the ordinal, "decimus", which means "tenth".  Its meaning and original usage pertain to reducing the number of a thing, not increasing it.  So your attempting to use "decimate" to mean "inflation" was exactly wrong and they were right to call you out on it.

Those with the ability to move the decimal have no incentive to do so. The decimal won't move.

You see I have been posting something relevant, three times now actually- with no substantive response.

The suffix -ate is contextually sensitive. "Decimate" is not a concrete word.

Furthermore, "reducing" the valuation of the primary unit of exchange by moving the decimal over is exactly correct.

It will if the wet-dream of Bitcoin proponents, which is a bitcoin worth over $100, comes to fruition.

So SDR was a decentralized, p2p, deflationary, pseudo-anonymous currency?

No, SDR is a supplementary foreign exchange reserve asset, which is the primary function of bitcoin today. A reserve asset.

All that other bullshit cruft is simply what gives BTC any credibility among its small number of users.

What makes you think so?

Ok, sweetie, I'll break it down for you:

If bitcoin reaches a steady $100/BTC, and people actually expect to use it as a transactional currency, then the nominal valuation of the exchange unit will need to be shifted over to facilitate trade comfortably.

It's just very psychologically irritating to be dealing with tenths of something in normal daily transactions.

"ALPACA SOCKS, ON SALE, ONLY .003 BTC"

It's inane.

Who cares. Your whole thread is inane. people will use BTC as they are currently denominated, just like Zimbabwe used 10,000,000,000 notes. It's not going to change just because of your quibbles. Get over it.

And moving the decimal place is not the same as inflation.

This whole forum's inane, that's why I fit in so well here.

Sorry, but no.  "Decimatio" (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Decimatio.html) is a concrete word for which we have evidence of use by Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus and Livy at least.  It refers to the practice in a Roman Legion of eliminating a tenth of the soldiers in a unit.  Note that this is not the same as reducing something by ten, so even then your comparison fails.

Furthermore, the Bitcoin exchange rate floats freely.  "Moving the decimal" of Bitcoin has no devaluation effect so I'm not even sure what you are arguing.

lol...

alright.

HAHAHA.

you know what else is a reserve asset? Gold. Gold is doing really well. So bitcoin will do really good.

Note: the previous statement was silly.

PS -- Guys, it is so easy to troll you on linguistics that I feel like doing it myself. Can we try to stay on topic.

It's no big deal all all. Besides, with Bit-pay and other merchant clients, you can make all your purchases and sales in dollar terms, using up-to-the-minute exchange rates automatically factored in.  

The only thing psychologically irritating is discovering months after the fact that you spent a half a million dollars on a pizza.  

Yes, Bitcoin is just like SDR.

It's issued by a central authority.
It represents a claim for a basket of fiat currencies.
That central authority dictates to everyone what they can and cannot buy with bitcoin.
That central authority dictates with whom you can trade bitcoin.
Everyone using bitcoin obeys those rules.
A bitcoin transaction takes several days.
Nobody is using bitcoin for anything apart from storing value.
Its supply is variable.

Great analogy!

Bitcoin is actually a much better global reserve currency than SDR since it doesn't have a fixed exchange rate and therefore can't be defaulted upon.

It's SDR *for the little guy* as I said. Nation States of course use rules and regulations applicable to their real and present circumstances. Y'know, the circumstances of relevance and importance to people and organizations that actually have any bearing on consensual financial reality outside of these forums.

However, in effect the bitcoins are a very SDR-esque wanna-be reserve currency.

Analytically, Bitcoin is literally nothing more than a basket of fiat currencies, and always will be.

All the other super-fantastic anarchocryptojerkoffism is really inconsequential and over-rated in the end-game analysis. Furthermore, withjust a tad more effort than I care to put forth to take the piss out of you, it can easily be demonstrated that bitcoin has become centrally regulated ipso facto, by naturally emergent circumstances in a number of ways.

QED such as, Son.