"I made decentralized money"
"how does it work"
"we have a book that everyone has to download and is always full size, and people submit to the book and other people waste a country's-worth of energy confirming the submissions and in return they get the built-in fees attached to the submissions"
"that doesn't sound efficient"
"D E C E N T R A L I Z E D"
"You're just using buzzwords."
"D E C E N T R A L I Z E D G O L D"
"Dude seriously"
"MAKE MILLIONS BASED ON SPECULATION ALONE"
@UberActivist Also, there’s a reason actual useful currencies don’t use gold any more.
@UberActivist I mean, I know very little economics and even I can tell the cryptocurrency boosters know less.
@ghost_bird @UberActivist
Re: "currencies don't use gold any more" - This is tricky, there's more to it than that. After WW2, most countries were on either a gold, silver, or dual gold-silver standard, and that worked out fairly well.
What was less appealing was that the IMF was managing exchange rates, pegged to gold *only redeemable by the US*. This gave the US a grossly unfair advantage in the world market - essentially we could inflate our currency supply for free, but other countries had to pay IMF - and by extension the US - an equivalent amount of gold to do so.
@UberActivist @ghost_bird
But by Nixon's time, the economy was still doing poorly, so he took us off the gold standard - which made the problem *much, much worse*. Pinning the currency to something with intrinsic worth is still a good way to improve stability and confidence of a currency, but it also stops us from ignoring the real costs and consequences of our monetary policy.
@falkreon The two difficulties with this view are that there’s no such thing as “intrinsic worth” and that pinning the currency to a scarce commodity causes deflation when the economy grows faster than the supply.
@ghost_bird I'm not sold on "there is no intrinsic worth," but you're absolutely right about supply shortage causing deflation, and that being catastrophic to an instrument's usefulness as currency. This has already happened to cryptos; if I had bought my first car in BTC it would have cost less than one tenth of one coin.