Bitcoin Forum

https://i.imgur.com/kEG4Q.jpg

EDIT: I made it so the 3 heaps are currently "worth" about the same.

EDIT:

• 1: 17 BTC
• 2: 2 oz of silver4
• 3: a 50 EUR bill

assume these are currently worth exactly the same in USD. I want to know which one you trust the most intuitively to keep it's value. Will reset poll.

2

3

Intuitively, I don't really know how much the others are worth

The 3 options are currently of equal value.

1 for me, btw.

1 is gold?

I'm a fan of Silver. It's a bit more risky than gold in my opinion, but it historically has had the longest track record of being valuable compared to the other options.

heh, why is fiat winning? people are zombies following a hunger for paper money.

I tell you why fiat is winning: It's still in the heads. It's indoctrination, we're brought up this way. When you constantly put value on everything using FIAT to compare, at some point, you just internalize Value == FIAT.

This. The poll asked for intuitively, and intuitively I see the value in a 50 euro bill. (I expect this to be less for americans though)
When thinking about it, there's actually only about 15 BTC there, which is about 30 euro. So yeah, BTC is still worth less.
The silver thingeys (Canadian?) I have no idea about.

Edit: Oh? They're all worth the same? Are you sure about that?

3.

1 looks too 'plastic' and 'fake' at first sight (probably due to the hologram).
2 doesn't look familiar at all, so it would be impossible for me to estimate its value.

3 has the additional advantage of looking more 'polished'.

Those are Silver Maples I think... Can't really see what weight. I assume 1 oz coins. Each worth about 13 BTC.
http://coinabul.com/index.php/silver-sorted-by-weight/canadian-silver-maple-1-oz-silver-coin.html

oh god, I should've used a 100 USD bill. it's a fifty EUR bill, man.

I tried to make all options "worth" about the same using todays prices. because I was trying to find out, what people expect to be most sucessfull in terms of actually keeping it's value in the furue.

it's 17 BTC, 2 oz silver (maple leaf) and 50 EUR

How do you use those bitcoins?

Not many prefer the extra weight and "jingliness" of coins over an effectively weightless piece of paper.

The investor in me wants to hold all three with a bias toward silver (2) and Bitcoin (1) a close second. Most of the people I know would gravitate toward the fiat paper bill (3) with its clearly visible denomination of 50.

I can use fiat to buy milk and eggs.  When I can use something else, I will.

Those are "casascius physical bitcoins".

You can exchange them physically for goods/services/favors.

Also: you can redeem them at mtgox, for example. They have a private key to 1 bitcoin hidden behind the hologram, more info: http://casascius.com

You do know that 50 euro is actually 70 dollar, right?
Anyway, Europeans have actually had a currency change in 2002. For me, the Euro was worth more than the old currency, i.e. everything looked cheap. This takes a while to get used to, but eventually you get an intuition for the buying power of the new coin. The "looks" don't really matter, I think, just the familiarity with the worth, which grows after a while.

There's a private key under the hologram. You can import that into your wallet, or into mtgox. Or you can spend the physical coins again, of course.

Because I can actually pay with it in shops, contrary to silver and bitcoin?

Isn't it what money is for?

I will try to use silver at my local farmer's shop soon and tomorrow I will try to pay a ride in silver. Let's see how that goes ;)

Yes, but also: store of value.

1 - cause once redeemed i can recycle the plastic and buy any other two options whenever i want :P

3 because I don't want to look like movie character carrying a sack of gold.

How about:

4)  A bitcoin debit card
5)  Use the NFC chip in an Android phone to do transactions like Google Wallet.

both great ideas. Implementation is hard, however (not technically, that's rather easy)

1 - cause with 1 coin from 1, I can soon buy option 2 and enough of option 3 to wipe my ass with until the end of time.

nope, 1 are bitcoins. if you'd want gold, please pick 2, silver.

*buys 1 bitcoin
I hope you're right :)

yeah, awesome that too  ;D

I've been thinking about how to "bring money online", because everything was going "online" back in the 90s with tremendous success. Nowadays it's hard to imagine our global society without the internet.

I did not succeed in finding a way to solve double-spend without having to say: "well, everyone will just have to trust me". So I knew the problem was hard and I actually wondered why no trustworthy banking authority would facilitate this. How naive of me.

When I saw Satoshis solution, I immediately knew that this was it! The solution to online money I'd been looking for back then. It dawned on me that it was probably also a good time to introduce a new global decentralized digital money.

The reason why bitcoin is taking its time to take off and adopt wider use, is because powerfull forces are working against it and the time is not quite right yet. But it will be right at some point and these powerfull forces will be overwhelmed by an even more powerfull force: the force of us people in unison.

We'll see, interesting times indeed.

Regarding bitcoin: in my mind, everything is working according to plan.

I'm not sure about the silver, that could be worth a lot, too.

I'm sure however, about being able to buy enough FIAT currency to wipe my ass with for just 1 BTC at some point. Looking forward to that.

Because of the three, it has had the least fluctuation in value over the last 3 months.

lol, if you compare bitcoin to namecoin, it doesn't fluctuate much either.

"Fluctuation" implies 2 objects. What are you measuring fiat fluctuation against?

It could be measured in groceries buying power. As in, non-currency objects. In that regard he would be right, I believe.

Yes, I can easily calculate that, but my mind works in euros. I see that 50€ bill lots of times so I know how much it's worth. When I see a bunch of coins I need to think: "So they currently are worth around $3.2, and there are X coins in the photo so I would have N dollars and then in euros I would have...". My intuition skips the math and goes to "Hey, there's a 50€ bill here!".

(emphasis mine)

Since I bought some silver coins yesterday, I started denominating everything in terms of silver coins: case of good beer: 1/2 coin. 700km ride: 1 coin. weekly grocery shopping: 1 coin. domestic flight: 3 coins, night at hostel: hmm, probably 2/3rds of a silver coin.
I've been doing it with bitcoin, too, but only since I received my casascius physical coins. I think the physical coins are a genious idea, because you actually start to "think" about bitcoin as money. Here I am, actually standing there in the shop, calculating the cost of cheese in BTC.

That's a fun thought experiment, but I see the BTC price at the moment still as rather volatile. If you get used to something now, it might be totally different next month…

Yeah, that constant change takes getting used to, still fun.

I like reversing the BTC/USD rate to a USD/BTC rate in my head, and trying to get the same emotions on a massive upswing as I get with a massive downswing. It makes no sense that these would give different emotions. Bloody psychology :)

That's how I see it.  Whenever the price rises I start freaking out as my fiat based income plummets.  BTC please stay low until I retire!!

He can't read this, but BTCurious is correct. Volatility matters in terms of what you can buy with it. Alternatively, you could just compare it to USD, and see the same result.

This is why the poll is not representative. Half of the world thinks monopoly money is involved :)

Well, no doubt 1 for me. Too bad Casascius raised his price recently, I just wasn't there in time to get more.

Brass is awesome, my favorite material for money. Then I love the holograms, they just catch the eye. And finally, actual data I can look up on the outside, the serial numbers on Euro are crap compared to the public/private key combo. If you replicate these, and someone spends them, the people holding the replicas can notice it themselves, not just someone at the central bank years later!

Also, silver is playing the bubble game and EUR is being maintained by destructive idiots these days, look at the dropping value.

I live in Europe, but hold more money in BTC than in EUR or silver (zero on silver, I wanted put options on it but the trading service screwed up, damn, missed that nice 10 USD drop). Sure, I need some USD for speculation security, but I guess it's obvious what I think of EUR and silver these days.

My Chinese grocery store accepts the Maples at Spot+$2.50 any day of the week.  Wouldn't spend them for $5  :'(.

My grocer will give me $37 worth of groceries for a Maple.

Contact me and I'll be happy to pay you bitcoins for all your silver...  ;D

I think this holds for a lot of paper money.  I must admit I wasn't able to picture a USD note so I googled for a picture and the notes really don't look valuable to me (even though I know they must be).  GBP, EUR, and JPY notes look valuable because I've had experience trading them for goods and services.

Coins on the other hand look valuable even when they are not familiar (particularly if they contain more than a tonne of gold (http://www.thehindu.com/multimedia/dynamic/00820/29TH_AUSTRALIAN_COI_820588e.jpg) :D).

What a load of dingo kidneys.

Can i take the silver coins to the bakery and pay for my bread?
No.
So give me the 50,-

Can i take the bitcoin coins to the bakery and get some bread?
No
So give me the 50,-

My intuition says that the 50 euro is far more usefull than the other two.
It's not about indoctrination, it's about usefullness.
If i can go to the groceries shop and buy my stuffs with bitcoin or silver then i will propably value them in the same way.
But at the moment we do not live in such a world.

What a load of dingo kidneys.

So if I offer you 2000 BTC or €50, you would still take the €50, because 2000 BTC can't be used to buy bread?

Well, if i could not buy bread with bitcoin i'd be dead in a few weeks, wouldn't i?
So INSTINCTIVELY i see euro's as a bread buyer, but bitcoin not.
But then when i think about it (but that is beyond instinct) i would understand that with some effort i could get a lot more euro's from the 2k BTC.

And your question is not fair anyway, we were talking about the same ammount of value.
And then the euro wins because i can spend it immediately. It has great liquidity and is accepted everywhere around here.

Fluctuation, usually, describes a value changing over time.
So you compare it against itself at a different point in time.
For doing so you try to keep all other factors as equal through time as possible.

So fluctuation implies at least one value/level/number in a space that changes over time.

Don't exchange physical gold or silver for anything except land or seeds ever.  
Maybe food if you really have to... :-X

Yeah, okay, that makes more sense. I thought you were just blatantly generalizing ::)

I don't see an option for a chicken or small goat.  Then, I may be a little old fashioned I guess.

In case that is supposed to be a smug, or sarcastic statement:

People with guns told me.

The value of a kind of fiat is a relative quantity and so when we can only say whether or not it fluctuates with respect to something else.  If we fix the quantity against which we measure we can happily talk about fluctuation in value.  Most people would probably take some average of the goods and services they purchase regularly as their yardstick.  In this respect fiat is remarkably stable but I wonder how much of this is because everyone prices in fiat.

If your personal list of goods and services comprises completely of "silver" then you'll find 2 to be pretty stable. :)

For a consistent meaning of "answer" and an assumed uniform distribution for "random", 0% :)

To make this question more interesting you might want to make option (C) 0% and/or slightly rephrase the question.  You might also try something a little bit deeper:

If one of the following five answers to this question is chosen at random what is the chance you will be correct?
A) 0%
B) 20%
C) 40%
D) 80%
E) 40%

I take your point though, the poll could have been better worded. ;)

EDIT: This post has been edited.

yeah i think 'intuitively' was the wrong word choice...

my intuition said go for the EURO because being Aussie, it doesn't look fake to me... we're used to colourful polymer notes. it immediately looks the most valuable, because the others look like pocket change.

choosing rationally on the other hand, i'd go for the c-c-casket coins, even if i don't care to learn how to pronounce their name.

How does one pronounce "casascius" anyway?  I've been thinking "ka-sass-ee-us" the whole time.  Could it be that it's really "ka-sass-key-us"?

^This

How does one "answer" this? My head is full of fog :P It is strongly reminiscent of "This sentence is false. Is that sentence correct?". Basically, if 40% is correct, you have 40% chance. But if 20% is correct, you have 20% chance. But if they are both correct, then there's 60% chance, which gives 0% chance, which gives 20% chance. So 20% wouldn't keep looping around, but 40% wouldn't either, but they can't both be correct. Should we say there is no answer, the question is a liar paradox?
I can't put my finger on what is "wrong" with the question…

Silver all the way !

If correct is taken to mean (can consistently be correct) then (B), (C), and (E) are possible and (A) is not.  But then what about (D)?  Could it be "meta-consistently-correct" or something?

More seriously, I would simply say that there is no solution to this question (yes, there is a similarity with the liar paradox).  With a slightly different wording (not saying "... the probability ..." which implies uniqueness) there could be two different consistent solutions, 20% and 40%.  The cause of the apparent paradox is the self-reference in the question.

I like these kinds of questions more as polls, actually.
In fact, let's continue this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50355.0

The answer is part of the question, that's what's "wrong" with the question.