|
It's also important to nail down what people mean by "investment".
Are they talking about speculation or are they talking about individuals using their savings to start their own businesses, companies retaining profits to buy capital equipment, open new production lines, etc?
|
|
|
|
I will just say reality is interpreted and defined far beyond life and death; cliffs and gravity.
You're making Ayn Rand look bad if that's the best you can do in terms of epistemology. |
|
|
|
But it's still useful to show why that doesn't lead to "too little" investment from a market efficiency perspective. It's not possible to do that due to the economic calculation problem among other reasons. "Efficient" can't stand alone as an adjective here. It must be defined with regards to a goal. If the goal is anything other than a free market then it's likely Bitcoin isn't the most efficient tool. It's probably not the most efficient system if the goal is a centrally-planned economy that efficiently funnels wealth to the central planners and their cronies. This is why arguing about economic efficiency is a tar pit. Two people who don't agree on the destination will argue in circles forever about how to get there. |
|
|
|
The real question is whether THAT economy will encourage the "correct" level of investment / savings. The correct level of investment is the level which people choose in the absence of coercion. |
|
|
|
It's a massive oversimplification on my part. This is a Rand thread. Like I said, I didn't want to push it so far off topic, so if you want to find out more, the link is there for you to torrent it for free. I don't devote a lot of time to debunking "subjective reality" claims any more for the same reason that I don't investigate the precise technical details of every so-called free energy (perpetual motion) machine. All the evidence available to me is consistent with reality being objective, and every claim to the contrary I'm aware of is either untestable or simply false. So at this point I consider the burden of proof to be on the subjectivists. Empericism works reliably and consistently so I'm going to assume it to be a vaild approach until proven otherwise. |
|
|
|
If the CMU research is to be believed, and there are many flaws with their research (which they admit in the paper if you actually read the whole paper), SR contributes a non-trivial amount to the bitcoin economy. I suspect that it's close to a majority of actual commerce (not trading). |
|
|
|
There are two planes in reality, that which is seen (by consciousness) and that which connects everything together. This connective reality has certain rules that are static and those which are not. The consciousness affects this subtle layer and it's sort of a dance to see what is actually created. Cool story. How do you falsify it? |
|
|
|
What should we do then?
Develop as many trust-free services as possible so that disputes don't arise in the first place. |
|
|
|
When I mention the marketcap to one of my friends and he audibly laughed. "That's nothing... it's a currency?" I believe were his exact words. Most hedge funds won't even look at a stock with a marketcap of 120MM, yet alone a currency. So what? Hedge funds are in no way necessary to form a viable currency. Commerce is necessary, however. |
|
|
|
|
I have a standard response to anyone proposing that reality is subjective:
Show me that you can jump out of a window (or other suitably-high point) and choose not to fall.
That's it. All someone has to do is show me they can use the power of their mind to interpret gravity as not existing and I'll believe reality is subjective.
Alternately they can choose to walk into a busy highway and choose to let the cars pass through their bodies harmlessly.
Either way I'd appeals to strange quantum effects is just handwaving unless you can actually prove it in a repeatable and verifiable way. You know, science.
|
|
|
|
measuring the volume is trivial with something as small as a 1 oz bar. Just drop it into a graduated cylinder of water and note how much the level changes.
It's theoritically trivial but in practice finding a graduated cylinder of sufficient accuracy is not. |
|
|
|
So is it correct to assume that if the speculative aspect grows disproportionately to the economy, the market will correct, or else it will fail to grow (as a result of deflation)? It's not really possible to predict one way or the other. A dislocation somewhere in the non-Bitcoin economy could cause money to come flooding in (or out...) of Bitcoin. It's also possible for BitPay to sign up enough merchants and get sufficient trade flowing to backfill the missing commerce before there's a correction. |
|
|
|
It is silly but my concern is that is driving Bitcoin demand, I haven't identified the counter evidence. I did some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations recently that suggests that speculation has driven the exchange rate about an order of magnitude higher than it "should" be based on the amount of Bitcoin commerce. Assuming buying habits approximately equal to those in the larger economy and no speculative premium an exchange rate of $10 implies $1 billion/year in commerce but the available evidence suggests an actual amount between $10-100 million. That means speculative premium is a large factor in the exchange rate, perhaps as much as 90% of it. |
|
|
|
Okay so lots of people over the time have complained about how unfair Bitcoin is to the early adopters and that in fact this is such a big problem it may limit Bitcoins potential. It's not lots of people - it's a statistically insignifigant, but very vocal, minority. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110625.0A small handful of people who feel threatened by Bitcoin stir up trouble and try to create the appearance of a controversy where there is none in fact. |
|
|
|
But what are people saving for is there is nothing in the economy to spend it on except the demand created by the traders who are always trading up. Traders don't care about economics or long-term viability - they just care about not being the last bagholder. |
|
|
|
Bitcoin is what it is because of the original idea.
Can we really rebrand it, I vote we introduce some version of "currency" into the name.
There are already alternate cryptocurrencies with different rules and different names, and almost nobody uses them. I think this poll will show all the people who go on about how "Bitcoin is doomed because it doesn't have unlimited currency creation" are completely missing the point. The limited aspect of Bitcoin is a signifigant factor with regards to why people prefer Bitcoin to its competitors. |
|
|
|
How important is the fact that Bitcoin is limited to 21 million units to your willingness to use it? Hopefully this poll is less confusing than the other one. |
|
|
|
|
At the moment the act of lending is heavily subsidized by central banks. The mechanisms for doing that don't exist in Bitcoin so the subsidies also will not exist, so lending will be less common even without taking the deflation into account.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
