Bitcoin Forum

Isn't that basically what bitcoin is?

We can hardly buy anything with it. We just give it value for the sake of giving it value.

Matter of fact, let's do just that for the heck of it, see how far we can go with it. I'll pick up a rock and call it Akorn and put it up for $10. I'll buy it back for $10 and let's see how much it'd be worth by the end of the year.

That’s more or less what they did in the Yap islands, where stone disks known as Rai are used as a currency, where the value came not only from the size of the stone, but from the age and dangers related to the mining procedure in nearby islands, and transport (no fungibility there).

Back in the days of University, I recall reading that the richest man on the island was one who claimed to have a massive stone as such, but that it sank during transport. Regardless, people believed him, and trusted his word, making him one of the richer men of the island at the time.

Trust is the centre core of Rai, just as bitcoin, but bitcoin also has Bitcoin, which is the network that gives support to bitcoin, providing a basis for a whole array of development and business that run on top of it. Bitcoin (capital B) give bitcoin (lowercap b) a whole more, and makes it far better that Rai …

See: https://flockeo.com/en/yap-the-island-where-people-pay-in-stone-money/

Wait, there's difference between bitcoin and Bitcoin? I thought that it was all for formality and sake of being grammatically correct? Also, this old stuff in regards to putting value is old school, that's the basis to almost anything, gold doesn't have a value, we just love shiny things so how is it different to bitcoin? Are you bitter OP that you never bought bitcoin at a low price that's why you are saying this?

All lower-case 'bitcoin' is a bastardization used by far too many newbies who think that all crypto coins are called "Bitcoin". Rather like calling all facial tissue 'Kleenex' or all soda pop 'Coke' (both all too commonly heard in the US). Of course that is WRONG because those words/names are very specific variations of things. Capitalized "Bitcoin" is the 1 specific coin represented by BTC and BTC.

I consider the naming confusion just a consequence of being the 1st or most popular coin (or facial tissue or soft drink).

What are you trying to prove by comparing Bitcoin to a rock? There are obvious differences between your made up rock and Bitcoin. Bitcoin has the a Blockchain which is different to the current fiat currencies which do not have a public ledger which means Bitcoin is more transparent than other currencies. What does your rock offer that is better than fiat?

Pointless comparison in my opinion. Can we use rocks as payment methods in certain sites? Can we use rocks to complete financial transactions anonymously without any sort of government interference?

If you think you've got BTC all figured out, you are delusional op. I advise doing some research before blurting out wild, nonsensical statements here and there.

Exactly. He forgot about the unique and creative technology powering Bitcoin which many world governments openly appreciated over time.

well getting marble. or quartz has value. because its not just laying around on the ground for anyone to pick.
there are costs to quarry certain stone and so certain stone has different value due to this.

the more it costs to quarry. the more value it has

if gold was as easy to mine using a spoon and a coffee filter in everyones back yard for ~$2
gold would be selling from spot to speculative high of $2.01-$5

instead because of excavators, labour, diesel and sluice machines. gold sells at spot $900-$2000

bitcoin costs thousands to mine
it costs $~25k in china/iceland to mine.. and over $50k in germany/japan

so right now bitcoin is mid value, good purchase for some regions, as its cheaper to buy than to mine right now

as for the demand side.
well yes less merchants use bitcoin as of 2015. yes bitcoin had more merchants 2012-15 than it does now.
but the general population of users has increased since 2015.
its now moved from a attain bitcoin to buy things. to retain bitcoin to invest/lockup/hoard to then maybe use on other networks as collateral

Speaking of the Yap stones, nice little article about that here (https://www.sciencealert.com/the-original-bitcoin-still-exists-as-giant-stone-money-on-a-tiny-pacific-island). They call it the Original Idea of Bitcoin  ;D

Here's a teaser from it,

Isn’t that idea the same with the paper bills that you are using right now? We just ‘trusted’ the central authority that issues the paper bills that it is worth something, and that it can be traded into other things. Trust is technically the core foundation of value, as we ‘believe’ that something is worth anything based on our own perception. I can’t seem to find substance in this analogy of yours, OP, because if we go by with this analogy, we would question a lot of things as to why they have X amount of value today.

 Yeah but they tricked us by pegging the value to a rock and then pulling the rock out from under it later!

You can hardly buy anything with gold, probably way less than with Bitcoin, yet it's still worth a lot. Bitcoin is a digital token that is secure in a way that no other digital asset is - Bitcoin does not rely on any third parties that must be trusted or can be ordered by government to freeze your money. Even if everyone who currently does stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment, it would still be worth a lot, because it's no longer solely a currency.

In principle, you are right. From that perspective, Bitcoin is not much different than rock except that, unlike rocks, the supply is limited to 21 million.
Let me know if you come across some rocks with a very limited supply. Oh wait, we already have rocks that fit that description; they're called diamonds! So how about we start comparing Bitcoin to diamonds?

Sure, let's do it! Can you send your rock to my rock collection? Can you send a hundred rocks? How about a thousand?
(by the way, I live on the other side of the world)

You are saying rocks have no value? Lol. Of course they have a value. Even a common rock has a value, but less than a cent because it can be found anywhere. So no. No one is going to buy your "Akorn" for $10. Why would they? They could literally pick a rock for almost free of cost (minus a little labor lol). But lets say, you found a piece of meteorite (meteorites are rock too ;) ) and you want to sell it for $10. Someone is going to buy it and then sell it for $100. The more demand for your meteorite, the higher the price will go. Meteorites are hard to find, hence expensive.
So if bitcoin was like picking up a rock, it would be dirt cheap. But guess what, they aren't dirt cheap. Now, why is that? You will know if you try to learn about bitcoin and how the system works.

Exactly, we need to find out what type of rock the OP is talking about, is it Igneous,
sedimentary or metamorphic? I would hate to spend $10 on a rock and to find out that
its the same as the rocks in my back garden.

Thing is I cant just pick up a random Bitcoin in my back garden...

Where has the OP been? It is really difficult to not find out about the basics of Bitcoin.
I dont pretend to know everything about Bitcoin even my web pages are basic in their
information but I do know what gives Bitcoin its value!

As mentioned above its the cost of mining a Bitcoin, its the power of the network,
its the security of Bitcoin, it has never been hacked, its the limited supply and there are
a thousand other reasons why Bitcoin is where it is.

head over to @michael_saylor on twitter to get those thousand reasons....

If that rock is made of gold, silver, platinum, or diamond, I'll buy it from you for $10, assuming that it is fist sized or larger.
If it's a meteorite, geode or fossil, then I'd like to inspect it first.
The offer is also on the table for any other rock that has a present market value well above $10.

Lol! Probably that's your perception towards bitcoin! But it doesn't mean that you are correct. Now when you say that people can't buy anything with bitcoin, I would point you towards an website,

Coinmap.org

You will find a map based list of merchants and ATMs worldwide that transacts in bitcoin. Also did you ever heard of purse.io website. You can buy anything from Amazon using bitcoin. So your point is invalid!

That's not why people are buying it though. Also note I said "hardly". I didn't say you can't at all. Gold, fiat...their value is in what they can do for you. Bitcoin can hardly do anything for you.

bitcoin is far more than just a rock. We have so many rocks lying around but we don't have bitcoin being given away for free or we can't find it lying around.
Even if we somehow magically give the rocks a value, where would you store so many rocks ? In your backyard ? But what if you don't have a backyard ?
Also, if your rocks somehow has a value, the government will dive in claiming it is government's property and then will regulate it.
You will have to get the rocks from the government and then later use it for trading products.
Whereas bitcoin cannot be controlled by the government and is be stored on the blockchain.
But yeah the fiat money used to transact with bitcoin is still regulated in many countries since it is controlled by the government.

Now do you know why bitcoin is simply not just a rock ?

The argument you make does not make sense. What exactly can gold or fiat do for you that bitcoin cannot?
Give me at least one example.

Bitcoin has a higher potential, and that also matters. If we consider Bitcoin merely as an asset that one holds and then sells for profit, it's different from a valuable rock because it's way easier to buy/sell and hodl due to it being digital, but these differences can be called non-essential. But Bitcoin is something you can send to others, no matter where they are, and you can do it without intermediaries. What's a pretty cool feature that rocks lack. Also, one can buy things with Bitcoin, and there are more and more places all over the world that allow to do that. Finally, unlike a rock, Bitcoin cannot be faked, so it's safer.

our main foundation trust is value, can you prove the stone you are going to take is valuable, and can be sold anywhere, and certainly can the stone you mean can be exchanged for fiat currency, if the exchange rate is high, we will think of an offer you, but if you can't prove it, the better offer you give, you better take back all your words..

We can buy anything with it because it has some huge value right now and more and more people are accepting it every day from the big companies to the small stores that have some big trust in the success of bitcoins. I used to but in-game items on the MMORPG I used to play with it before the NFT era. you just need to open your mind and ponder what's going on here because by using paper money, we cannot free ourselves from the bank's manipulations and we will remain slaves to their huge taxes and transparency of our transaction history.

Exactly. Even Peter Schiff, probably the biggest Bitcoin critic, admitted recently that he could have bought a private jet with bitcoin, provided he had invested when he first learned about it.  :D

fiat is not based on pure trust.
its based on laws. such as:
people are paid a minimum wage of X fiat.
people have to pay tax at a % of fiat
the country utilises only certain format of fiat

thats what gives fiat value. the laws

I think that is a bit of an unfair comparison. If you are creative enough there are actually a lot of outlets to buy things with Bitcoin and it is possible to buy most physical goods with in these days. There is less accessibility for purchasing services (like covering a trip to the dentist) but even that can be solved in a sense with access to Bitcoin ATM machines. I'd say it has actually achieved a lot in the ten years it has existed so far, considering it is a brand new payment method - not like a new debit/credit card provider who might just piggy back off existing infrastructure and has everything laid out already. Every day we see new outlets for it and that seems like progress to me - good luck trading much for your collection of rocks.

That would be still $10 in the end of the year because value isnt something that you can just mandate and if done personal then it would just only be good on that scope and i dont see about picturing out Bitcoin

on acting to be the same because value isnt something that do came from an individual but been made out by the community. It isnt just been used on online transactions but you can really buy something from it.

Adoption is on the move and we've seen big progress until this very moment which i dont really see for this comparison or trying to make some example about bitcoin and a rock named Akorn.  :D

Rocks on their own basically have no much use, plus fungibility is also an issue when it comes to using rocks, just because you called this rock precious doesn't necessarily mean that I will let you trade that for my gold collection per se. With bitcoin it's different, the common people's mistake is assuming that bitcoin's value is not backed by anything except the faith of the people that are investing in it which is of course not true. Some of us here invest for the technology. Some see it as a currency and had been using it for anonymous transactions. Plus, the argument that it doesn't do much is quite false as well, because as we speak, there are plans and are upcoming plans for bitcoin utilization in the physical and online world. This is both right and wrong. Paper bills in the past are made as a placeholder for when you don't have the gold coins to purchase goods, with paper bills practically meaning that "I owed you this much gold coins with this purchase, you have to trust me that sooner or later I will pay you with its counterpart in gold". Until some time later we find out that we can endow these bills with value themselves and not just use them as placeholders, hence why we call these "banknotes". Now going back, it is quite true that the ones who protect a fiat currency's value is its own government, but what endows it with value is the economy it is backed upon.

This is both right and wrong. Paper bills in the past are made as a placeholder for when you don't have the gold coins to purchase goods, with paper bills practically meaning that "I owed you this much gold coins with this purchase, you have to trust me that sooner or later I will pay you with its counterpart in gold". Until some time later we find out that we can endow these bills with value themselves and not just use them as placeholders, hence why we call these "banknotes". Now going back, it is quite true that the ones who protect a fiat currency's value is its own government, but what endows it with value is the economy it is backed upon.
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pre bank notes there were no money laws.
there was no minimum wage. there was no income tax

the first american income tax came in in 1861 and it was valued in DOLLARS not gold dust
yep bank notes have been around for quite a while.

before that. in the gold era. it was more like service charges not income %

at first it was its legal tender and tax payment laws enforcing fiat be circulated and taxed upon that keeps fiat relevant and important to all commerce


then. the value became based on the sweat labour value of minimum wage as the stabalising factor once dropping the gold standard. which translates to how many [loaves of bread] an hours labour is worth and the value balance there of. of everything compared to fair value of what an hours minimum labour deserves.



to put it short
if retailers in america would usually accept say.. euros.
and be allowed to freely pay employees in euros and their pensions plans in euros and the taxes in euros.. america would not have a powerful dollar.
its due to the laws keeping the dollar relevant for all transactions that keep its value

Some outlets that allow purchases using bitcoin are aware of the use of bitcoins which can be useful as a profitable investment. but we also have to see where the transaction is done. in developing countries it is still not allowed to be used as a legal payment option, only as a commodity trade.

ATM bitcoin is only as a means to get bitcoin more easily without KYC and is global. To make payments using bitcoin, anyone can actually do it, either individually or in a P2P system, without the need to give anyone permission. You have an item and I need bitcoins, set a price and make transactions between wallets. very simple.

No, it's not. Bitcoin is not just some random stuff from the internet. It has peculiar features which make it coveted.


Yes, you can hardly buy anything with it. You know why? Primarily because people would rather keep it than spend it. However, despite Bitcoin not an acceptable currency in most parts of the world, you can actually buy a cup of coffee with it, and a slice of pizza, a burger, a house, and a Lambo.

As to its value, just like anything which has value, even a rock, there must be certain features which give it value. The varying values attached to different kinds of rocks are based on how common they are, their physical qualities, chemical composition, difficulty obtaining, and so on. There is a reason why gold is much more expensive than your garden rock.


Why not start with this experiment? Let's see how this will turn out.

I don't know about you OP but that's how most currency and bartering with precious metals and stones were done back then so I don't exactly know how bitcoin and cryptocurrencies be any different than that. Also, is that even important anymore? Bitcoin's come a long way already and your type of people are still questioning it's credibility?

Well, it’s not just about picking up a rock. In the olden days there were times that rocks were used and stored by people as an asset. But the difference between that and what you have said here is that they didn’t just make use of any rock, instead they used precious rocks or stones or you can as well call them gemstones, however you want to say it.

And these precious stones were not the every day type of rock you see, they are usually scarce. Diamond is one of those precious stones that they used. Others were emeralds, sapphires, and rubies. Next are precious metals like gold. The way bitcoin is built, it is similar to these precious stones and metals. I think you should take time and study bitcoin to understand it.

I guess the question really comes down to what CAN'T you buy with BTC.
Through places like Bitrefill / BitPay you can get gift cards for just about anyplace.
Through Coinbase / BitPay you can get a debit card that can be funded with BTC and other cryptos.

There are 1000s of online stores that take BTC through various services.
And so on.

For anyone to say "We can hardly buy anything with it." means they don't have a clue.
There are even stories of people out there who lived on crypto for a year. Yes it was a stunt, but it can be done.

-Dave

I think people shape their opinions by what they see, hear or read in their environment or online - so I believe the OP can really state that it can't buy almost anything for BTC, because it may be from a country where there really isn't anyone selling something for crypto. On the other hand, it still takes a bit of intelligence to find something online - because some still don't know how to use search engines.

Not only are there people who have proven that one can only live with crypto for a while, but some also live like that for years, and perhaps the best example is “The Bitcoin Family” (https://diditaihuttu.com/).

It is absolutely not worth commenting on the theory of stone compared to Bitcoin, because if someone wants to understand why Bitcoin has value, he should learn some basics - this knowledge is completely free.

whatever you want to do, then you must have strong belief, and you must be confident, you must also dare to take risks, like Satoshi who has dared to take risks, and in the end now he has succeeded, and has been able to convince everyone, For what he has tried, if you want to succeed, you have to sacrifice.

Not really, you can't use rocks for transaction, while in fact, bitcoin can be used as a method of payment, to transact. Have you tried it yet? Other than that, bitcoin is not that useless. Bitcoin has such a great technology called blockchain, and it has so many advantages. If not, people won't be dumb enough to buy it, and keep pumping it until it reaches $45k now. The fact that bitcoin is intangible might be the reason why people think it's worthless, since it doesn't have a shape, so why do people want to own it? they don't even have the real thing. However, it is what a digital currency is.

Come on. You can't compare Bitcoin with a rock. First of all, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency - nowhere near a rock. It's quite the opposite as it has no physical form.

We do not give BTC value just because for the sake of giving it value. Bitcoin has its specific characteristics that make it a valuable asset to own such as:

• a scarce, known max supply 21M
• a secure, decentralized network backed by nodes all around the world
• the ability to not depend on a centralized entity to intermediate transactions
• and more...

I do agree that a lot of altcoins present now on the market do not bring any added value. So it would be something like this "I create a number of useless rocks (altcoins) and let's see how high can they get". It's a shame as the money pumped into them could be better used elsewhere.

Uhh, OP learned how barter and fiat money works? That's cute, at least people now knows about the basics of how we put value on something base on trust. My point is that OP, you are saying that bitcoin was valued on how we deem it's value is but you forgot the fact that that's how almost anything precious has been traded a long time ago.

As if they are the first to realized it. But many have already gone to the realization and back to learn more about Bitcoin.

This is what normally what they say when people are new to Bitcoin  and have not tried understanding blockchain. Close to a scam like a pyramid scheme. But this isn't what it is when they finally see how blockchain works.

Isn't it the same as any other kind of item that you are willing to sell? It's just the price deemed to have value over an item. Just like paper money, it has value because we say it has, like $100. It's always going to be like that, and that's what humans do. The analogy is quite hard since rocks necessarily have a different function than cryptocurrencies, so it's different but has value because that values it by the demand.

Something will be valuable when everyone also sees the same value of that thing.
You may call it Akorn or whatever that is valued highly in your opinion, but when the people don't see any value in it, it will mean nothing.
That is why we need to similarize the things to be valued around the world and the same perception.

Trust wont really be that enough since there are lots of criteria's need to be considered first  before a certain thing would be having value and imagine on how monetary system had started from

those old days comparing to now which it starts out to be a barter system until those coins or money had been the start.Its a common concept and as we do go ahead or

technology do enhanced then its just normal that we do upgrade as well in terms of financial system.

If someone really buys the rock that you picked, let us know we have tons of it in our backyard, I could dump mine for $0.0001.

But try selling Bitcoin, you will see how much people would bid for it because BTC is different from what you have understood. It's not a rock that you think is wothrless. It has gone up not just for nothing. You have to learn how rare BTC compares to rocks or even compare it to other altcoins.

Who said you can barely buy nothing with bitcoin? There are many online stores that accept Bitcoin as payment method. Some of which accept only cryptocurrencies. I've also heard of coffee stores (not online) as accept Bitcoin (and some other crypto) as payment method. Bitcoin is striving to come up. And if we do our best and support it, Bitcoin and so many other cryptos will serve the payment purpose.

Edit Below:
Look at this topic and see how adoption is taking place daily: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5352765.0

maybe for now if you take the stone you quote from behind your house, and you try to offer it to everyone, I'm sure you will be laughed at, but for now try to sell a little bitcoin that is in you, with a little price cheap, of course people will not think long, and will immediately buy the bitcoins that you offer, but if it is a stone problem for now, people will not be interested in jumping in, and follow your advice..