Comment on Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 months agoWelcome 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.
Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?
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.
buy cheese from someone who takes BTC […] just kicks the can further down the road.
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…
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 months ago
I get where you’re coming from, I used to think about that too, and reached the conclusion that the only thing that has any “inherent value”, is what in the health insurance industry they call “qualys”: quality years of life. Everything else, derives its value from how it relates to people’s quality of life over a lifespan… but the relationship is not necessarily obvious or easy to quantify. That’s where money comes in, as an approximation… but it’s accuracy depends on everyone’s realization of how many qualys are they putting into, and receiving from, a given good. The perversion starts at the beginning: with some producers not realizing they’ve received too little money for too many of their qualys put into a product, and consumers not realizing that they’re giving too much money for too few qualys they’ll ever get from a product.
Ideally, these transactions would be transparent and for everyone to see, so people could adjust their exchanges accordingly… but IRL they’re a highly guarded secret by most actors, from producers trying to charge more, to consumers trying to pay less, to all sorts of intermediaries trying to insert themselves into the transactions in order to increase and pocket the difference. All of that gets compounded by the delay between production and consumption: the longer the delay, the harder for both parties to communicate, and the higher the opportunity for intermediaries to step in.
It can’t, not by itself. There need to be a series of mechanisms set in place to allow it, and some actors to set them in motion. Presently, it’s the abstraction of money as credit (aka trust), and mints creating an amount of virtual money that has an attached time limit and credit difficulty on its return, with punishments for those who fail to fulfill their trust obligations (…unless they’re “too big to fail”).
Money as an abstraction is not that bad of an idea out by itself; it’s definitely better than the gold standard, which was limited by the amount of gold extracted, while the reality of a world with an exponential population growth, is closer to a mechanism capable of generating enough money to represent everyone’s qualys. Just need to find the right mechanism, and a way to set it in motion.
Influencers, con men, and other swindlers, are a consequence of secrecy. With total transparency and full information, most of those would not be possible.
This one… has much more going on than what meets the eye; GIF NFTs are just the tip of the iceberg, both for the good and for the bad. Bare NFTs are just a tool with multiple applications, “NFTs as digital art” are a DeBeers type scam with a twist (not a pyramid scam, with NFTs the scammer doesn’t need to exit the market, ever), NFTs over ETH are a funnel to get people to invest in ETH, and so on.