For those who don't know it,
“Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility” is a paper that explains why Bitcoin's value is no greater than 0 and why it has failed as a decentralized payment mechanism. Curious that I was, I bothered to read it. I came across that paper from this post:
Thankfully, Taleb put all the maths, science, and research into an easy to read 6 page, irrefutable
paper. Bitcoin is worth $0. The knowledge of that fact is simply taking a long time to sink in because there's so much fake news about bitcoin and scammers. Of course, it's now apparent that more and more of the market is catching on, which is how I know for certain that bitcoin will not be able to stay above $30k for 10 consecutive days ever again. Every year from here out will see lower and lower bitcoin prices until it reaches it's mathematically proven value of $0.
I find it fair enough to make my comments to this “irrefutable paper”.
(I had made another post in the past)
Comment 1: Why BTC is worth exactly 0
Gold and other precious metals are largely maintenance free, do not degrade over an historical horizon, and do not require maintenance to refresh their physical properties over time. Cryptocurrencies require a sustained amount of interest in them
Yes, they indeed require energy to be maintained. But, does this actually answer to your statement? How can you state that it's worthless due to its maintenance? What do these two have in common?
Earnings-free assets with no residual value are problematic. The implication is that, owing to the absence of any explicit yield benefitting the holder of bitcoin, if we expect that at any point in the future the value will be zero when miners are extinct, the technology becomes obsolete, or future generations get into other such "assets" and bitcoin loses its appeal for them, then the value must be zero now.
But, it is made in a way for miners to never go extinct. Doesn't this apply for gold too? If humans go extinct, it'll be worthless. You have to somehow provide me a proof that miners will go extinct to consider the value zero
now.
Transactions in bitcoin are considerably more expensive than wire services or other modes of transfers, or ones in other cryptocurrencies. They are order of magnitudes slower than standard commercial systems used by credit card companies —anecdotally, while you can instantly buy a cup of coffee with your cell phone, you would need to wait ten minutes if you used bitcoin.
Anecdotally, you don't have to create on-chain transactions for your purchases anymore. Indeed, if there wasn't any other option, the blockchain couldn't fit us all with 7 transactions per second on average. But, there are second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network that are, in my opinion, against the expenses of Bitcoin's transfers.
The customary standard argument is that "bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain". No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology — unless "great technology" doesn’t mean "useful". And at the time of writing —in spite of all the fanfare — we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain.
We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has.
Close to nothing? I'm able to transfer monetary units across the globe within a second (whether they're fluctuating in exchange rate with fiat or not). The technology behind Bitcoin did solve a problem, the prevention of the third party as written in its whitepaper. That was not
just a technological attribute.
