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Merged Bitcoin - Part 3

dirtywick said:
no jewels, pure gold. same amount, add some labor, same amount of gold but more value.

in any case, other materials can be made into jewelry or any other number of objects can be made into more valuable things through labor. but not crypto.
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So have you walked back from your argument that gold's value comes from the fact that it can be used in jewelery?

dirtywick said:
nobody uses gold as currency
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Not any more but (like bitcoin) it is still used as a store of value.
 
Value that can be increased by adding labour.

Also gold lasts forever.
We have gold items made thousands of years ago still just as shiny as when they were made.
 
Jewelry is pretty. That's why people want it. Sure. And gold does not corrode, so it's more valuable than iron, or tin. But stainless steel jewelry also exists, and costs fraction of gold jewelry.
Being usable for jewelry or being pretty has some value .. but it's not why gold is expensive. Gold is rare and non-fungible. That's it's value. Bitcoin has the same properties.
As for things increasing in value by work .. well of course, it costs something to make them. Or they are done by skilled people, who are rare, and have limited time to do things. Btw. Bitcoin too costs to create.
I could see "intrinsic value" as something which most people would find valuable .. being pretty is that. But being rare and non-fungible is also that, and for gold, and jewelry, the major component is this.
 
Stainless steel corrodes quite well. Look at the back of a well used Rolex or Omega.
 
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Dr.Sid said:
Jewelry is pretty. That's why people want it. Sure. And gold does not corrode, so it's more valuable than iron, or tin. But stainless steel jewelry also exists, and costs fraction of gold jewelry.
Being usable for jewelry or being pretty has some value .. but it's not why gold is expensive. Gold is rare and non-fungible. That's it's value. Bitcoin has the same properties.
As for things increasing in value by work .. well of course, it costs something to make them. Or they are done by skilled people, who are rare, and have limited time to do things. Btw. Bitcoin too costs to create.
I could see "intrinsic value" as something which most people would find valuable .. being pretty is that. But being rare and non-fungible is also that, and for gold, and jewelry, the major component is this.
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it’s not that it costs something to make, it’s that you can create value through labor. think about it, if you have some gold you can take it and add labor and sell it for more.

this is an asset that’s appreciated. same with many other assets you’d invest in. buy a building, fill it with people and machinery, make some stuff that’s worth money. a whole greater than the sum of its parts due to the input of labor.

but now do bitcoin. you bought one, what can you do with it to make it worth more besides hope someone else buys it for more later?

edit

btw golf itself is fungible, nothing special from one quantity of it to the next, if you buy an amount of it, it doesn’t matter which specific nugget you get at the same quantity and purity. jewelry in many cases is non fungible, depending on the labor put in.
 
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psionl0 said:
So what do you hope to achieve by regurgitating this again?


OK so nearly half the gold is used in jewelry
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Exactly, so hardly "limited". When you add in electronics, it's just over half.

(I wasn't aware of that)
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which is interesting because a) you were therefore asserting something without knowledge (what else do you assert without knowledge, I wonder) and b) it has come up in the thread before.


and this is the reason you call "limited" a lie. What does this prove? That gold is valuable because it is used in jewelry?
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No it proves that gold would have a value even without the speculation. This is not true of BTC.
 
psionl0 said:
So have you walked back from your argument that gold's value comes from the fact that it can be used in jewelery?
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This is a straw man. What we are arguing is that gold would still have value as a raw material for jewellery even without the speculation, maybe not as much value, but some.
 
jeremyp said:
This is a straw man. What we are arguing is that gold would still have value as a raw material for jewellery even without the speculation, maybe not as much value, but some.
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i think it’s also illustrative of the problems bitcoin has as an asset. like, there’s definitely some irrational behavior around gold. but there’s a long history as to why and some basis for use beyond that to justify mining and buying it at all.

bitcoin has the same problems, bad currency and irrational but without the real world use and history gold has.

yet we are supposed to accept that because gold is an exception, bitcoin is as well without anything to support that.
 
Last time I checked we all live in a material universe and are material girls (and boys).

The value of something must ultimately be related to material objects.

Bitcoin, like all other modern means of exchange, is not and never will be an asset. At best bitcoin might become a universal currency, though I doubt it as currencies have a political dimension to them that, by design, bitcoin lacks.

If by some miracle the countries of the world unite and we all agree to use bitcoin as our means of exchange then its value, by necessity, would stabilise. Until then "investing" in bitcoin is just speculation based on human irrationality and ignorance.
 
jeremyp said:
This is a straw man. What we are arguing is that gold would still have value as a raw material for jewellery even without the speculation, maybe not as much value, but some.
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Ah. So this was just an irrelevant side rail. The fact still remains that most of the value of gold comes from people buying it, storing it and hoping to be able to sell it to somebody else in the future at a greater price than they paid for it themselves.
 
psionl0 said:
When did this become a law?
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It is axiomatic. Even the design of bitcoin attempts to give bitcoin value related to material objects by making "mining" computationally costly. I.e., real physical resources such as fuel and racks of powerful computers have to be used to mine a significant amount of bitcoin.

psionl0 said:
Does this mean that fiat currency has no value since it is just a promise?
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No. Fiat currency is typically a promise from a government that ultimately controls all the land and other physical resources within its boarders. A government also forces the use of its currency for transactions within those boarders.
psionl0 said:
A digital asset is still an asset.
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Only in the same way as belief in a god makes that god exist for those who believe in it. I.e., there is literally nothing behind bitcoin of any substance. Bitcoin is just another speculative bubble. Don't be the last one out! ;)
 
While Bitcoin in most ways is not at all like Gold, Gold is very much like Bitcoin in a way that should matter very much to investors: just like most Bitcoin reside in the Wallets of a small number of individuals, physical Gold overwhelmingly sit in the Vaults of a few Banks under government control: the US has unilateral control of the prize of Gold as more than half the gold ever mined sit in the Federal Reserve in NY, even if that Gold doesn't belong to the US.
But it can't be moved against the will of the US government.
 
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Ivor the Engineer said:
Brilliant riposte.

What do you want bitcoin to be, an asset or a currency?
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That was the nicest way that I could respond to an argument as stupid as "bitcoin only exists in the minds of its believers". You are a disgrace to all engineers for making it.

It's not even original crap either. Ignorant fools have been touting the "bitcoin is imaginary" line for years (usually cheered on by a peanut gallery that regards all arguments against bitcoin to be valid).
 
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