Comment on Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet
dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 months agoWhat if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?
A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.
I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?
Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?
“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.
“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.
As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track, but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Welcome to currency exchanges.
If you want to buy a sandwich in Indian Rupees… you either find someone selling sandwiches for Indian Rupees, or you have to exchange them to whatever the seller will accept (USD? CAD? AUD? EUR?..)
Yes, FOREX has some swings, it’s not for everyone. Bitcoin may swing more ore less than other currencies, depending on the day.
If you travel around, you’ll find countries where sellers do exactly that: they pull out a smartphone, check the spot price, add some margin, and tell your the price in USD for whatever you’re trying to buy.
Alternatively, you can swipe a credit card that will do all of that automatically. BTW, there are BTC backed credit cards too.
That’s how money works: you kick it all the way around the street, over and over, changing from can, to stone, to ball, to… etc. Those who manage to start with a can and end up with a Lambo, win. Those who end up with a single grain of sand, lose.
knokelmaat@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Your last paragraph is not how money should work at all. Money should represent value that ideally doesn’t change, so that the money I receive for selling a can is worth a can, not a Lambo an not a grain of sand. What your describing is closer to speculation and pyramid schemes (NFTs for example).
Either try and explain to me how BTC could be an ideal currency that fixes the problems in existing currency, or try to explain me how it’s really cool as an investment thing to siphon money from others, but don’t try and do both at the same time.
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Money represents human desire and trust. A can today doesn’t necessarily have the same value as the same can tomorrow; maybe someone came up with 1000 extra cans, maybe someone licked that can (ew!), maybe deliveries have been cut for the week and it’s the last can of soda in a hundred mile radius.
A can is worth “exactly” itself, only in the moment of a single transaction.
A can is worth “about the same” amount of a given currency, only when there is a steady delivery of cans from a steadily working factory producing millions of cans from a steady supply of raw materials with a trust in an expected steady production rate, against a trust in an expected steady demand, with a trust in the given currency’s expected steady exchange rate for other products.
At any other moment, a can’s price can change wildly.
Welcome to money.
That is doubly wrong… but let’s focus.
BTC is not an “ideal currency”, just another currency. It intends to fix only one problem: to bypass banking dependence. For other problems, you’ll need other currencies.
To “siphon money from others” is an inherent quality of all money; if you don’t believe me, try getting some money (with any value) without “siphoning” it from someone else.
knokelmaat@beehaw.org 3 months ago
Thank you for taking the time to respond. With siphoning money, I mean not giving actual value in return. The NFT market was a clear example of this: get some hype going, sell the promise of great gains on your investment, once the ball gets rolling make sure you’re out before they realise it’s actually worth nothing. In the end, some smart and cunning people sucked a lot of money from often poor and misinformed small investors.
I think I have an inherent idea of value, as in: the value it has in a human life and the amount of effort needed to produce it. This has become very detached from economical value, as there you can have speculation, pumping value and all that other crap. I think that’s what frustrates me about the current financial climate: I just want to be able to pay the people who helped produce the product I buy fairly with respect to how much time and work they put it. Currently however, so much money is being transferred to people “just for having money”. The idea that money in and of itself can make more money is such a horrible perversion of the original idea of trade…