Burn money and take a photo of it....

[Anonymous]

One of the earliest bitcoin memes was a bitcoiner who equated bitcoin with taking a photo of a field of wheat then burning it and taking another photo then using those as cash. I heard it again recently from Ben Laurie who created lucre.

http://www.links.org/?p=1171.

Suppose I take 20 £5 notes, burn them and offer you a certificate for the smoke for £101. Would you buy the certificate?

This is the value proposition of Bitcoin. I don’t get it. How does that make sense? Why would you burn £100 worth of non-renewable resources and then use it to represent £100 of buying power. Really? That’s just nuts, isn’t it?

Discuss.

[Binford 6100]

please accept my apology for hijacking this thread but before you burn any valid paper money
you might want to get some really useless paper (old paper money) for cheap.

and burn that.

i did not get if you started encouraging people to burn money and send you pictures
or the smoke certificates for 101 pounds.

[runcible2011]

Ben Laurie sounds envious. Naaah.

[realnowhereman]

I can't believe how wrong that analogy is.

$10 of paper money does not cost $10 to print.
$10 of gold does not cost $10 to mine.
$10 of bitcoin does not cost $10 of electricity to calculate.

The smoke certificate was issued by a central authority, and there is no proof that the money was burned.

If the smoke certificate took off in popularity and became worth $100, there is nothing to stop the issuer hijacking the work of those who pushed that value into the economy and printing more.

The work done to make bitcoins generates bitcoins as a side effect. The generation work is actually to secure the transactions of bitcoin users and has value in itself. Is the work done by my browser in encrypting my connection to my online bank similarly analagous to burning money? Of course not, and therefore neither is bitcoin generation.

In short: bitcoins cost x to construct, and can then be used to represent y amount of value. Just like every other bit of paper money on the planet. The only difference is that bitcoins aren't based on debt, and aren't printable on a whim by a central authority.

[kjj]

Don't feed trolls.

[matonis]

One of the Ben Laurie followers (AnotherComputerScientist) had this to say about the Bitcoin Forum http://www.links.org/?p=1171#comments :

He’s [ComputerScientist] also absolutely on-point about the forum being a huge turnoff to people. I’m a grad student in CS (crypto’s not my area of expertise, but I try to read crypto conf proceedings to keep current), and I would be embarassed to associate myself with everyone on that forum except maybe 4 people. I’ve talked about it with a couple friends/coworkers in the dept here who I know well, but I would be embarassed to point “polite company” anywhere near the bitcoin forums.

Well then, I'm not sure if I'm one of the 4 people he's talking about, but I did reply to Ben's initial post here http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/ben-laurie-blathering-on-bitcoin.html

Then, in Ben Laurie's third bitcoin post since discovering it http://www.links.org/?p=1175 (Bitcoin is Slow Motion, 21 May 2011), I think he misses the point that on the route to deploy more resources in order to form a new 'transactional consensus' it would simply become more efficient to mine upon the existing block chains. Many of Ben's criticisms seem already to have been anticipated.

[gigabytecoin]

Fuck this guy. He is posting linkbait.

We are already seeing a lot of this, and I suspect we will see much more..

The more popular bitcoin becomes, the more popular of a target we will become for the "haters" out there who gain attention and readers from attacking already soundly proven principals that are followed by a large group.

[ribuck]

The more popular bitcoin becomes, the more popular of a target we will become for the "haters" out there...

Hate is better than obscurity for Bitcoin.

If we persistently and calmly correct the haters' errors, eventually they will be the ones looking silly.

[m4rkiz]

he is deleting comments instead of defending his view... no point of bothering with kids like that