ArthurPooh wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 12:25 pm
Does it contain anything that already wasn't included within Moldbug's article that started the whole "Bitcoin as a store of value" argument?
I didn't know the name Moldbug until you just mentioned it. Is it this article?
Jack Jones wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 4:12 pm
Interesting property of Bitcoin is that, like other commodities, as the price rises, more miners come online because it is now profitable where it wasn’t before. Likewise, hard to access gold becomes more worthwhile to dig up.
However, with Bitcoin, the miners are competing for their share of daily supply. More miners coming online doesn’t lead to more Bitcoin on the market.
In contrast, when more gold miners come online, the supply of gold increases.
I believe this is a unique property of this commodity. The price is all about the demand.
I have a question about supply (I know you wrote about demand above, not supply), Jack.
Couldn’t one just keep dividing bitcoin ad infinitum and have it be worth more? I mean, gold can get pretty small, but once you get to a gram it becomes unattractive to own beyond that. Even fractional coins are a worse deal than one ounce coins.
Being intangible, Bitcoin can just keep dividing, right? Like a company adding more shares with a stock split.
Or is that fallacious thinking?
EDIT: I see a similar question was asked on reddit and the OP was roundly mocked. The OP asked how being infinitely divisible is not equal to infinite supply. I think the devil is in the details.
One of the early responders sarcastically quipped, “If I have a pizza and I cut it in two, I have two pizzas.”
Of course the total bitcoin is not going to increase, ever. However, I don’t think you can really compare it to physical items. You can’t increase the calories in either of those two slices of pizza. Bitcoin is abstract, however, and the value is perceived. The value of those new pieces of freshly split bitcoin could still go up.
Jack Jones wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 4:12 pm
Interesting property of Bitcoin is that, like other commodities, as the price rises, more miners come online because it is now profitable where it wasn’t before. Likewise, hard to access gold becomes more worthwhile to dig up.
However, with Bitcoin, the miners are competing for their share of daily supply. More miners coming online doesn’t lead to more Bitcoin on the market.
In contrast, when more gold miners come online, the supply of gold increases.
I believe this is a unique property of this commodity. The price is all about the demand.
I have a question about supply (I know you wrote about demand above, not supply), Jack.
Couldn’t one just keep dividing bitcoin ad infinitum and have it be worth more? I mean, gold can get pretty small, but once you get to a gram it becomes unattractive to own beyond that. Even fractional coins are a worse deal than one ounce coins.
Being intangible, Bitcoin can just keep dividing, right? Like a company adding more shares with a stock split.
Or is that fallacious thinking?
EDIT: I see a similar question was asked on reddit and the OP was roundly mocked. The OP asked how being infinitely divisible is not equal to infinite supply. I think the devil is in the details.
One of the early responders sarcastically quipped, “If I have a pizza and I cut in two, I have two pizzas.”
Of course the total bitcoin is not going to increase, ever. However, I don’t think you can really comapre it to physical items. You can’t increase the calories in either of those two slices of pizza. Bitcoin is abstract, however, and the value is perceived. The value of those new pieces of freshly split bitcoin could still go up.
Yogi Berra: “You better cut the pizza in 4 pieces, because I’m not hungry enough to eat 6.”
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 9:05 am
Of course the total bitcoin is not going to increase, ever. However, I don’t think you can really comapre it to physical items. You can’t increase the calories in either of those two slices of pizza. Bitcoin is abstract, however, and the value is perceived. The value of those new pieces of freshly split bitcoin could still go up.
Not Jack, but I'll have a go at answering.
The reason divisibility is an important in money is because if the value of the smallest unit of account gets too large relative to the value of the goods and services the money serves as a claim on, then the unit of account is no longer appropriate.
I see this as a feature not a bug so as the demand for the units of account increase, being divisible allows it to continue to function even for small transactions. The important thing is that on the ledger 1 bitcoin will always be 1 out of 21 million units. When each satoshi (1/100 million of a bitcoin) becomes the relevant unit to track $0.01, it is because the dollar has inflated and not because of the divisibility of bitcoin.
When even 1 satoshi is too large in value to appropriately track the value of goods and services then the divisibility of the ledger can be increased if needed and the blockchain reaches consensus to do so.
glennds wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 10:50 amGiven his age though, I think he might have a hard time getting comfortable with the complexity of the technology and the opaque aspects of crypto in general.
I'm MUCH younger than Harry Browne, and I have a hard time with those things too. I don't think it's an issue of being "comfortable": Bitcoin relies on people believing that this string of ones and zeros has value in the real economy while some other random string of ones and zeros does not. With gold, it's gold. It's just there. It is what it is.
I don't know many things more transparent than bitcoin...
You guys need to check out on-chain analysis.
Trying to tell people that they can run away with their wealth and start over or can be wealthy in some post-apocalyptic scenario is much harder to do when you're asking them to say "I have a very big number in my possession" as opposed to "I have a lot of gold in my possession". They're just not the same thing at all.
I have an counterargument to the whole Bitcoin Standard narrative that I have never seen stated online and yet it seems like it should be fairly obvious. Warning: this will be somewhat long (if still shorter than the Moldbug article posted above) and I will talk about gold. A lot.
First, let's state the case for Bitcoin in the fairest way I can: what Bitcoin Standard/hyperbitcoinization advocates believe is that Bitcoin is going to become a new global monetary standard.
This belief stems from an application of Moldbug/Austrian theory of money: namely, that different types of money compete on the basis of their utility as a store of value. Therefore, a monetary good needs to have a limited supply, and any introduction of new units of such a good inherently dilutes its monetary value. If we call this trait (an inverse of the rate of growth in total supply, i.e. how much new units are added over time) hardness, then we can see a clear hierarchy of potential "moneys" based on their hardness. The theoretical expectation is for the hardest currency to eventually dominate a given economy (if not the global economy) and for all competitors to lose their monetary premium and thus most of their value.
On the bottom would be currencies issued by governments that literally print new banknotes to pay their bills, like Zimbabwe. Then there would be regular crappy non-Western scrip where inflation in the low teens is a norm either because of trade policy or the need to pay off internal clients. "Hard currencies", such as the US dollar, the euro, or the Swiss franc would rank even higher, but any money controlled by an entity with an express inflation target cannot be too hard. Gold would be an actually hard currency - no one can create it out of thin air, but it can be mined, and a rising price makes exploiting more and more deposits economically viable.
Bitcoin, with its perennially fixed supply, is the hardest monetary asset ever invented (This is not actually true, but for the sake of my argument I will assume it is). Thus, with time, this theory would expect it to become a global reserve currency and thus absorb the large part of value currently tied in fiat currencies and precious metals (along with partially monetized good such as stocks or real estate). And thus everyone who has bought Bitcoin for a ridiculously low five-figure dollar price will enjoy unlimited Lamborghinis while everyone else (with a possible exception of Volkswagen AG shareholders) will lose their savings, with holders of gold and fiat hit the hardest.
However if you read the paragraph about the "hardness" of currencies, you have already noticed a weakness in this narrative. Namely, if the hardest money always wins, how come the gold standard has ended in the first place? Gold is surely harder than US dollar, and it certainly was so in the 70s. Why hasn't the fiat experiment died after a couple of years of unprecedented inflation?
Let me quickly dismiss one explanation: government coercion. Bitcoin advocates will argue that gold is inherently vulnerable to confiscation and cite the forced sale under FDR along with other similar measures around the world as a proof. I do not believe this claim can withstand a close examination. I live in a country where quite recently it was a capital crime to hold any amount of Western currency. People still did and there was an entire black market where USD was the only accepted means of exchange. According to many estimates, a large fraction of American gold was not surrendered to the government, and this confiscation wasn't backed by firing squads anyway. In modern times even North Korea has failed to stop foreign banknotes from circulating within its economy. There's hardly a government of this planet that could stop its subjects from transacting in gold if they so wished; and a majority of them do not even try to do so anymore.
Also, this would not explain why governments themselves would not adopt a gold standard, especially if their own fiat currency has already failed. Many countries have dollarized their economies; the euro, and the Aussie and Kiwi dollars have also been used by some small states outside of their proper zone. Yet not a single of over 200 jurisdictions that exist in the world have decided to switch to a gold standard despite the enormous competitive advantage that it could bring to their financial sectors and wider economies. Argentina has a new president who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist and quotes Rothbard from memory and even he aims to replace the hyperinflated local peso with the USD and not gold.
And this is also reflected in individual people's reactions to a failing currency. When the Zimbabwean dollar has started demonetizing, a large variety of foreign currencies came to replace it: not only the usual suspects of USD and the euro, but also the exotic (from an African perspective) yen and soft local currencies like the Botswanan pula and South African rand. Everything in the kitchen sink, but not gold. Why?
In my opinion, the answer lies in the fact that fiat currencies, while much softer than gold, have a very important advantage: they are convenient to use as a means of exchange. Gold is just too valuable for most transactions, and also not trivial to authenticate. Even under a gold standard you wouldn't buy groceries with Krugerrands. And smaller coins/pieces of gold are just too hard to authenticate.
This is why the so-called classical gold standard was actually a gold certificate standard. The majority of transactions were settled with paper claims on some amount of gold, with the precious metal sitting undisturbed in some secure vault. Eventually, the paper gold has partially uncoupled from physical gold, becoming a valuable currency in itself and allowing the issuing governments to significantly inflate the monetary base. This is why a libertarian weirdo like Harry Browne could make bank when the dollar has finally uncoupled from gold - at that point only weirdos still perceived the dollar as a gold certificate (that has now gone into default) and not a monetary good in itself. (This is also the reason why pre-modern economies had silver and non-precious metal coins circulate among with golden ones)
This issue with gold is also why Javier Milei won't introduce gold standard in Argentina. In practice, such a move would amount to an introduction of a gold-backed Argentinian peso - and who would want that? If the next president was a Peronist, a history of classical gold standard would replay itself with 10x speed: at first, the certificates are freely exchangeable for gold, then only in large amounts, then everyone is required to surrender their gold and only foreign governments can obtain physical delivery, then maybe a haircut or two or ten, then a total uncoupling and a return to fiat. In contrast, if you dollarize an economy, it's much harder to reverse, because dollars are perfectly holdable and storable and spendable even in small amounts. Not even NKVD death squads can fully stamp it out once it has taken hold.
To sum it up, I postulate that a perfect monetary good would not only be extremely hard without any dilution, but also perfectly spendable and divisible. Basically, a fiat currency issued by a government that cannot dilute it. For Argentina's purposes, the US dollar is close enough. This also explains weird monetary phenomena such as Somali shillings continuing to circulate for years after the final collapse of Somali government - sure, you couldn't pay taxes with them at the moment, but the printing presses have finally stopped, creating a "hard" currency.
Conversely, save for a simultaneous total collapse of all fiat currencies, gold standard could be reintroduced by a government that is both internally secure (the money printers cannot seize power), externally safe (no one can just invade and steal all the gold) and widely perceived as such. How many of such countries are there? I can think of two: Switzerland and Japan. Not surprisingly, their fiat currencies are already hardest in the world despite all the efforts by respective central banks to devalue them.
Okay, so what all of this has to do with Bitcoin? What I suggest it has the same problems gold standard had, only more so. Gold might be awkward in small transactions, you won't buy a six-pack of beer with Krugerrands, but a house, a swath of land, a business? Perfectly sensible. With Bitcoin, large transactions are as inconvenient as small ones, just way scarier.
Of course, in a partially Bitcoinized economy one might not need to use BTC in actual transactions. A bimonetary standard is perfectly possible. This is how people in many developing countries manage their finances: local currency for spending, Western currency for saving. The same system could work with gold: you transact with USD, but any money that isn't needed right now goes into your gold stash. Here's Moldbug's store of value/bubble that doesn't pop theory in action. This was also what broke the classical gold standard: even if most transactions were done with paper, there had to be a way to get delivery of physical gold if the peg was to be maintained. Convertibility either keeps such a standard honest or destroys it.
However, Bitcoin isn't like gold or dollars at all. Keeping a bunch of coins or banknotes at home or at some secure location is perfectly straightforward. Sure, there is a risk of theft, but it is a risk that a vast majority of people can understand and manage. Self-storage of Bitcoin is a security nightmare. If someone gets your key (even if it's a Latvian gangbanger who has sent your grandma a phishing e-mail) it's gone. If you forget the key, it's gone. If you want to exchange it for actually spendable currency, better not mistake a single digit in a receiving party's address, or it's gone. Even the current BTC holders, who are younger, more tech-savvy and less risk-averse than the general population, mostly store it at exchanges even though the exchanges have a well-earned reputation of stealing their customers' money.
Thus, a Bitcoin Standard, just like gold standard, would be actually a Bitcoin Certificate Standard, or a Claims on Bitcoin Standard (perhaps it didn't fit on the book's cover), but even more so. In practice, almost all bitcoin would be held in a few secure facilities that would be either controlled or easily pressured by authorities (and I hope they don't get hacked. Physical currency has an inherent limit on theft risk, because you can only carry so much of it). Most transactions would happen off-chain. Moreover, since hardly anyone would actually want to take a physical delivery of bitcoin (it would be extremely risky and expensive even gov-to-gov), there would be a much wider leeway to inflate the number of claims on it.
So we would back on fiat in no time, just with few more stupid, unnecessary steps. And apparently even impoverished Zimbabweans can understand this argument in their bones, even if their cannot articulate it in as many words as I have. And perhaps I could just have said "no one will store their savings in something they can see or touch, that requires a PhD in network security to use, and that will go poof if you make a single mistake".
Does the Bitcoin Standard book address this argument at all?
If we ever get to a bitcoin standard, it is going to be a gradual process of increasing adoption and some things that don't look likely today could look more likely in the future.
If you really believe that governments were only able to move away from the gold standard due to it being more convenient as a means of exchange then that could turn out to be a bad assumption. Some forms of exchange today are already incredibly convenient (credit cards) and some methods are still very inconvenient (cheques, bank wires, etc). There is a point where more convenience doesn't really matter and that bitcoin transactions only need to be as convenient as fiat but be preferable in other ways (ie. settlement time).
The pain points for bitcoin that you refer to are all likely to be solved in the future.
Let me paint a picture of what bitcoiners are thinking about today (somewhat simplified).
You have a "deep storage" multi-sig wallet that you almost never touch that you treat like a vault, the keys held by multiple professional trusted third parties that will only provide access to you.
You have a self-custodied wallet that you treat as an account for the purpose of making and receiving large transactions on chain. This wallet will be important to you, but it's the amount you're willing to trust yourself with for the convenience of not going to your multi-sig.
You have a layer 2 wallet that you treat as a chequing account and using it you can transact with anyone who is also on layer 2. Overtime adoption, trust, and user experience on layer 2 will improve.
You have a hot wallet that is just like your every day wallet. You hold some wrapped bitcoin in whatever form is the most accepted and these will be issued by trusted third parties but everyone is likely only holding small amount or for a short amount of time. Some hot wallets could be designed to send and receive payments as convenient as fiat.
All these ideas might even be integrated into a single product/wallet app with regulated/recommended pre-configurations. I can imagine that one day everyone will have some form of digital wallet and that will be the norm.
Thanks for the thought dumps in the last couple of posts. I enjoyed the reads.
425's post left me thinking about why would it be Bitcoin that people save in? I can only think of it as a last ditch effort for savings in a country where you have no legal rights to your savings.
The better options in countries where the government is trusted would be the stocks, bonds and gold we already have.
This did make me think about the situations where you don't have the trust and infrastructure. I can see how a stable coin that is cheap to transfer could thrive for short term holdings and if you had no other savings option then Bitcoin could be your long term savings vehicle. I just don't know that it has to be Bitcoin in this situation. I don't see a reason that another cryptocurrency couldn't fill this spot besides it being what people decide to use.
This made me think if it would be possible for a trusted government or maybe even a corporation to create an anonymously accessible crypto bond. This would be a good savings vehicle in a restricted ownership country. I expect this would lower the required yield when issued since there is a bigger pool of buyers available then.
425 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 1:21 pm
You have a "deep storage" multi-sig wallet that you almost never touch that you treat like a vault, the keys held by multiple professional trusted third parties that will only provide access to you.
You have a self-custodied wallet that you treat as an account for the purpose of making and receiving large transactions on chain. This wallet will be important to you, but it's the amount you're willing to trust yourself with for the convenience of not going to your multi-sig.
You have a layer 2 wallet that you treat as a chequing account and using it you can transact with anyone who is also on layer 2. Overtime adoption, trust, and user experience on layer 2 will improve.
You have a hot wallet that is just like your every day wallet. You hold some wrapped bitcoin in whatever form is the most accepted and these will be issued by trusted third parties but everyone is likely only holding small amount or for a short amount of time. Some hot wallets could be designed to send and receive payments as convenient as fiat.
This is insanely complicated from a perspective of average person with negligible political beliefs. I just don't see people losing trust in fiat and banks, and yet moving to something even more online and less understandable. This entire system can just be replaced with no loss of utility by the Third World bimonetary system I've described above:
Instead of a multi-sig wallet, a stash of gold or hard currency buried in back yard, in a safe deposit box or abroad.
Instead of a self-custodied wallet, a smaller stash of gold/hard currency in easily accessible place at home, or even in a local bank account.
Instead of a layer 2 wallet and hot wallet, regular checking account and cash in local fiat.
I just don't see a value proposition of Bitcoin over the above system. All it adds is complexity, skill requirements, middlemen and failure points. Ironically it's also way easier for a repressive government to shut such a system down or manipulate it, since so much of it relies on third parties and online services. And it does require somewhat of a mass adoption, while the "Third World system" works just as well for a single person who is worried about the stability of local fiat.
ArthurPooh wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 4:52 am
Thus, a Bitcoin Standard, just like gold standard, would be actually a Bitcoin Certificate Standard, or a Claims on Bitcoin Standard (perhaps it didn't fit on the book's cover), but even more so. In practice, almost all bitcoin would be held in a few secure facilities that would be either controlled or easily pressured by authorities (and I hope they don't get hacked. Physical currency has an inherent limit on theft risk, because you can only carry so much of it). Most transactions would happen off-chain. Moreover, since hardly anyone would actually want to take a physical delivery of bitcoin (it would be extremely risky and expensive even gov-to-gov), there would be a much wider leeway to inflate the number of claims on it.
So we would back on fiat in no time, just with few more stupid, unnecessary steps. And apparently even impoverished Zimbabweans can understand this argument in their bones, even if their cannot articulate it in as many words as I have. And perhaps I could just have said "no one will store their savings in something they can see or touch, that requires a PhD in network security to use, and that will go poof if you make a single mistake".
Does the Bitcoin Standard book address this argument at all?
Unfortunately, I think this is accurate for Bitcoin as it exists today. 8 billion people won't be able to self-custody their Bitcoin. However, that doesn't mean that everything will collapse to a few secure facilities. For example, there could be a million layer 2 banks, each serving around 8000 customers.
You're right, most people don't have the skills to secure a wallet themselves. Banks will still exist to serve people, and bank to bank transactions will be made in Bitcoin.
This may seem like a fiat system, but the difference is that it is fair. No one has the exclusive right to print money, thereby enslaving the rest.
It's back to the gold standard but w/ ease of delivery this time.
You have a strong understanding an interest of Bitcoin, you should just buy the Bitcoin Standard book. It has a lot of interesting tales about moneys gone by. Also, while you're at it, I'll also plug the short book, The Natural Order of Money. In it, he argues that we need to get back to a gold standard because it ties the service economy to the real economy (food, fuel, and minerals).
