So the modern version of traversing the world for silver would be energy used to mine? Like hypothetically the US building tons of nuclear power plants to "win" at mining? Of course that wouldn't add to the supply of bitcoin (harder than silver), so I'm not convinced your analogy stands. I don't know much about 16th century history, so I'm not trying to be too snarky.
You might think about the long game where no more bitcoin is issued and only transaction fees are awarded to the miners. How much energy will bitcoin consume then? There will be an equilibrium somewhere between energy prices and transaction fees.
I'm not even saying we should abolish fiat currency, or that the USD has to be fully backed by a hard asset. Individuals will hold whatever asset/currency/whatever they think will be the best choice for them.
The point is that the money supply needs to increase at or near the pace of the economy or we end up with a currency shortage, and bitcoin being harder to mine would prove that point faster than silver ever did.
Although I don't think I agree. Wouldn't a currency shortage be another way to say deflation? If your economy is producing more value than your currency represents, then your currency is more valuable.
I have also heard people say deflationary currencies inevitably lead to a catastrophic spiral where liquidity dries up because no one wants to spend (or loan) today what can be more valuable tomorrow. There's even a page on the Bitcoin wiki about it that has been there since 2010.
Also, a quick google brings me to the "Price revolution" page on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution) where it says:
"Generally it is thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World; including Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and the rest of the Spanish Empire."
In the end... I don't really know. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Yes, I mean, all the options are bad. So let’s start there :)
First, if your money supply is the actual asset (and not just backed by it) then it’s even worse, since fluctuations in overall supply of that asset can cause very large valuation changes of the money you own. E.g. if we find a silver deposit 4x bigger than all the silver we already have, then suddenly all the coins people are carrying around are worth 1/5 their previous value. So it makes the currency unattractive to hold. On the other hand, if you run out of coins then as your economy or even just population grows then everything has to get cheaper because there’s only the same amount of coins to buy more stuff. And that encourages hoarding. These two things together make for financial disaster because nothing can really be relied on. And, this wasn’t as much of a problem before countries like the UK industrialized, which led to population explosions across the major powers.
Then again after WW2, when globalized markets became a thing, we saw another wave of industrialization and accompanying population growth, to the point that even asset-backed paper currency became problematic. There’s just not enough gold on the planet to back every other economic output. There’s only about 400 million pounds of the stuff worldwide. Assuming you could even get ahold of it all, you could only use it to back about $200 billion. Between 1950 and 1971 global trade expanded by a trillion dollars. And the global population nearly doubled. And we couldn’t just say “gold is worth more now”. There were treaties in place that defined the price of gold as $35 per ounce (which led to countries like France to try and destabilize our currency by buying up a bunch of our gold, but that’s another story).
But in a fiat system by adopting the currency you add your economic output to the overall system and your currency stability is now tied up in that economic output, so—your output goes down, your people’s belief in your ability to pay also goes down. This works super well in a rapidly-growing economy. There’s always more! More money-printing, more economic output, more debt… but the problem with this is—what happens in a world where things stop growing all the time? We have a few small examples and they aren’t pretty (Greece, COVID, and coming soon—China).
While people will always need to buy the essentials, I do buy that a deflationary currency could discourage discretionary spending. Maybe people are slightly less likely to splurge on a big purchase or a nice dinner. I don't know what the delta would be in GDP growth compared to now; it certainly could be negligible.
I've got good news for those people, you can't buy toilet paper with bitcoin today. And they aren't getting paid in bitcoin today, either. And if they tried to exchange bitcoin for fiat to buy toilet paper, they'd be subject to incredible fees that would make such a transaction pointless.
Hmm.. I didn't know that. Which makes the demand purely political then. I recall IMF making the same demand from an island country a few years ago too.
The IMF feels bitcoin is a risky asset and doesn’t want to be a part of that gamble when making its loan. The IMF has a history of making lots of conditions they feel minimize risk.
To me it looks more like my bank mandating I carry certain kinds of insurance in the terms of my mortgage than a political bias, but I am not an expert.
"urged officials to limit its exposure" is what the Reuters article said, so yeah. They think El Salvador's ability to repay the loan is tied too much to BTC.
Do you mean Chivo wallet? It will probably shut down. Strike is still operating (in many countries including the US and El Salvador) and has a physical office in El Salvador.
My experience in the Bay Area - if you rent the gateway from Comcast ($25/mo) then you have no data cap. If you use your own modem and want to remove the data cap it costs $30/mo, more than renting the gateway. The data cap is 1.2TB per month in my area.
I think that is what the commenter meant: "...unless I pay a whole bunch of extra fees or accept a stupidly low monthly data cap"
(edit: I initially thought it was $15/mo for the gateway + no data cap but just checked and it is $25/mo. They are called "Xfinity Gateway" vs "xFi Complete").
Tell them it's a home office and get comcast business. There's no data caps on any of the tiers and they allow use of any modem on their approved list.
My current residential price is $65/mo for 500mbps/20mbps. Business is $120/mo for 500mbps/200mbps ($105 for first 24 months). I wouldn't mind getting a bit more sweet sweet upload. Maybe I will!
There is also "gigabit pro"/"gigabit x10" where they run fiber to your house. That is $350/month for symmetric 10gbps. Lots of limitations on availability and a big install fee, though. Gotta get the other half on board with that ;-)
I always wonder what are some ways to put 10 Gbps (well, even 1 Gbps) to good use in a home setting, beside marginally lower ping times. I'm not saying such uses don't exist, I'm just curious to know.
For me, the big win is everything being snappy and never having contention on my Internet connection. Maybe I could do with 500Mbps up and down just fine instead of a gigabit but I almost never hit the limits of my connection and that’s an amazing place to be. When I do hit the limits, it’s when I’m downloading a huge file and I’m very grateful for the speeds I have.
I’m not the first one to say this, but often it seems that faster Internet speeds have enabled completely new use-cases and applications that sometimes weren’t even obvious until a critical mass of people had the faster speeds.
If an application framebuffer is full screen and in a compatible pixel format the compositor can do "direct scan out" where the compositor sends the framebuffer directly to the crtc instead of compositing first. I know that wlroots supports that. I'm not sure how much performance it saves to be honest.
And I'll second that most commercial games do go through XWayland, though it depends on what games you like!
On the other hand there are people who are productive but kept their savings in USD and lost value.
I agree Bitcoin is not a productive asset. However, is there an obviously better way to bootstrap a new form of decentralized money?
The author of the article classifies Bitcoin as an "early bird game" which is defined as a zero sum game where early players win at the expense of later players (and for every winner there is a loser). I don't really understand it. Is it possible for a deflationary currency to keep going up in purchasing power forever? I feel like it is. The productivity of our species as a whole is not like a zero sum game (at least not until some absurd physical limits).
There are so many interesting questions about how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can work in the future! I am definitely more of a zealot at the moment!
I used to work with a Cortex-M3 port of uCLinux, but it was kind of a pain to manage. The biggest problem being every executable had to be statically linked to all of its dependencies.
You might think about the long game where no more bitcoin is issued and only transaction fees are awarded to the miners. How much energy will bitcoin consume then? There will be an equilibrium somewhere between energy prices and transaction fees.
I'm not even saying we should abolish fiat currency, or that the USD has to be fully backed by a hard asset. Individuals will hold whatever asset/currency/whatever they think will be the best choice for them.
reply