Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is the Best Money that Civilization Has Ever Seen

Scott Minerd (Chairman of Investments, Global Chief Investment Officer, Guggenheim Partners) and Ted Rogers (Chief Strategy Officer at Xapo) spoke at the 2014 Nantucket Project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsE4a1TPHaE

Nice but short.

5 years from ubiquity, eh? That's a pretty solid prognostication...

Hmm... not sure how I feel about that statement. I mean, I think bitcoin certainly has the potential to be the greatest money and certainly the fairest, but as it stands at the moment with price fluctuations it's far from ideal as a money. Hopefully one day we wont need to peg it to a fiat currency.

Price fluctuations are part of free market money. The huge swings of Bitcoin will vanish over time when much higher valuations have been reached. I look forward to the implementation of the smaller denominations. Works better from a psychological perspective.

1. It is not, in any way, pegged to fiat.  A price peg is when you declare that it will always be worth the other thing, such as how the Bahamian dollar is always worth exactly 1 US dollar. The thing that is bothering you is that bitcoin isn't pegged to anything at all, allowing for such volatility.

2. We have not had real, actual money in a hundred years. Since 1913 when we started printing monopoly money called the Federal Reserve Note and making all others illegal in the US, the world has lined up (especially at the end of WWII) to do what the USSA has done and go on the funny money fiat standard.

Sure, that makes prices appear stable and lowers public confusion over pricing issues, most notably lowered volatility. This is why people accept it.

This "money" we have been using for a century now is not backed by actual fiscal worth, which varies over time, but instead by threat of violence, because no one dare accuse the USA of not paying its' debts.

My advice to you: Embrace the volatility that bitcoin, and all non-fiat money comes with. It's a GOOD THING. As adoption grows it gets far easier to live with. Best of all, when the majority of the world is holding bitcoin, it will then be the unit of account that other currencies are comparred to, so everything else will look volatile compared to it!
 

I agree. The general opinion to date is that only one end of the seesaw is moving (BTC volatile against USD). I wait and watch for a mass psychological adjustment, but as Bill Bonner says "just because something is inevitable does not mean it is imminent." Five years to ubiquity would be astonishingly fast, but it is certainly conceivable given what has happened in the first five years.