james22

Give it 5 years. If bitcoin hasn't convinced you by then, I'll buy you a beer (assuming I can afford to).

Promise? Who will protect the gullible lurkers? There is no more obvious investment today that offers a lower risk and higher reward than bitcoin.

Because as investments they are identical. And when you can see how identical investments have performed from similar points in their adoption (spectacularly), you've no excuse if you miss out.

There's many ways to invest, sure. But just like missing out on the Mag7, in retrospect, bitcoin (like AI) will seem obvious. Unlike something like Monster Beverage (MNST), for example.

Bad money drives out good if they exchange for the same price. Bitcoin trades at a variable exchange rate. In the absence of fixed exchange rates or an enforceable government mandate to accept bad money, instead of bad money driving out good, the presence of good money signals the death knell of the debased currency. https://medium.com/@jdh/bad-money-da6bc05a5d9

I'm using the definition of money as the: commodity in an open market which best satisfies the properties necessary for useful exchange, not as currency.

Yes. Its specific attributes make it a better form of money than gold.

Starting fisking, but I'd only be repeating myself. Bitcoins have value because A) they are useful and B) they are scarce. Combine those two attributes in any asset and you will discover it has a price. The moment the first Bitcoin was traded to someone in exchange for something else, an exchange rate (market price) was established. Subsequent exchangers agreed or disagreed with that rate, and made further trades accordingly. Bitcoin thus spontaneously developed a price, as do all things in an open market if they are sufficiently useful and sufficiently scarce. . . . Economists need only observe metals to start understanding why Bitcoins have value. After all, any strong advocate of gold or silver as money should hopefully understand why these metals should be money. The answer is that these metals tend to be chosen in an open marketplace as money, because their specific properties make them useful as a means of exchange. It is the properties of gold and silver — unique to these metals — which make them excellent money. They are scarce, fungible, uniform, transportable, have a high value-to-weight ratio, are easily identifiable, are highly durable, and their supplies are relatively steady and predictable. Contrast other goods like chickens, or seashells, or sand, and you discover that none of them are as good on the above attributes as precious metals. Chickens can’t well be cut in half or recombined, seashells are not uniform, and sand is too plentiful to be used as money. Why not other metals… why don’t we use iron as money? It’s not scarce enough — you’d need carts of it at the store to go shopping. As any Austrian economist can tell you, money is merely that commodity in an open market which best satisfies the properties necessary for useful exchange. Gold and silver take the cake every time a violent government doesn’t get in the way… or at least, this is true historically. But, this doesn’t mean that gold and silver are “perfect, infallible money.” Indeed, there are practical problems. One can’t easily divide and combine silver coins to make change. One can’t easily send large values of gold across distance without hiring security and waiting for transport. One must pay storage fees, or risk theft at home. And, while difficult, it is possible to make fake gold and silver ingots and pass them off in trade as real. So then it follows that if gold and silver are not perfect money (though admittedly the best we’ve had), perhaps mankind could discover or invent something that was even better. This is the Bitcoin experiment — the question of whether Bitcoin, with its specific attributes, is an even better form of money than what the marketplace currently enjoys (or in the case of state fiat, is forced to use). If the Austrians are right, and a marketplace tends to chose the medium of exchange which best works as money, and Bitcoin’s specific attributes make it excellent money, then perhaps the marketplace will, over time, increasingly use it for such. The answer so far, is yes. Bitcoin is finding more and more niches for early adoption, which further supports its market price, providing confidence to holders that it will retain value, and this further lends Bitcoin to be used for still more purposes. . . . Many have made the argument that “nothing backs Bitcoin.” And this is true. Bitcoin cannot be redeemed for any fixed value, nor is it tied to any existing currency or commodity. But, neither is gold. Gold is not backed by anything — it is valuable because it’s useful and scarce. Cars are not backed by anything, they are merely useful as cars and thus have value. Food is not backed, nor are computers. All these goods have value in proportion to their usefulness and scarcity, and one merely needs to see the usefulness of Bitcoin to understand why, without backing from any government nor corporation, without being tied to any fiat currency or existing commodity, it commands a price on the market and rightly so.

Number go up.

Exactly. You can’t truly call yourself ‘peaceful’ unless you are capable of great violence. If you’re not capable of violence, you’re not peaceful, you’re harmless.

The issue has come to a head with the accession of globalist banker and Net-Zero fanatic Mark Carney to the prime minister’s office, and the alarming possibility that the Liberal Party, which enjoyed three successive terms in which to devastate the country, is poised to win yet a fourth to complete the job. Carney, who is far more crackerjack and dangerous than his hapless puppet Justin Trudeau, is just the man to make it happen. As Action4Canada reminds us, Canadians don’t seem to care that Carney is an unrepentant globalist, a member of an oligarchic class that has “been contriving to create a dystopian future through fearmongering, misinformation, unscientific data, and manipulation.” Climate change must be fought, goes the mantra, even if it means the de-industrialization and impoverishment of the market-dominated economy. The Carneyesque project entails measures such as the six-year UN/WEF plan to reduce Annual meat consumption from 16kg of meat to zero Annual dairy/milk from 90kg of milk to zero Number of clothing purchase/per person/per year from 8 items and then down to 3 items Car ownership from 190 vehicles per 1000 people down to zero vehicles That is the future that Carney is planning for Canada, which must reduce its comparatively miniscule emissions to zero even at the expense of its prosperity and possibly of its survival as a viable country. Obviously, the likelihood of planetary salvation is pitched too far into the future to provide a scintilla of evidence for the validity of the policy. But if the world were to be saved tomorrow according to Carney’s intention, Canada will have ceased to exist. The problem is that Canada’s sacrifice on the altar of Gaia would yield no demonstrable result. But Carney has been given a free ride. People are impressed by his resume, a CV, apparently, confected to dazzle a dull-witted and unsuspecting public with red ribbon appointments, accomplishments and awards. People do not seem to understand that CVs may be deceptive, for two reasons. What is not included in a CV may be just as or even more revealing than what is. Additionally, much of what glitters therein is not gold but mica. Nigel Hannaford at the Western Standard interviews an elderly female Carney voter who bears eloquent witness to this form of cognitive deficiency. “I like Carney,” she enthuses. “He has a good resume, you know. He was a banker.” Hannaford responds by asking her: “how do you feel about the fact that he wants to choke our oil industry? Or that as a professed church-going Catholic, he won't condemn abortion? That he wants to bring back the Online Harms Act? He's in thick with people who don't like people having too much freedom to travel or eat beef. He's all about making you use less electricity by making it more expensive.” Her typically Canadian reply was about as predictable as Carney’s election appears to be: “I wouldn't know about any of that. But you know, he seems steady. Makes me feel safe. He's not going to change things.” It boggles the mind. https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2025/04/18/is-canada-brain-dead-n4939030

Wait, what?

Canadian culture confuses its quirks with its character. Feeling swamped by U.S. culture, Canadians have stitched together a national identity from whatever's lying around. They try to plug leaks by restricting foreign ownership of bookstores and mandating huge quotas for homegrown cultural products. Canadians cling to this barely seaworthy raft, and are loath to untie a single plank from it. This explains the famous Canadian radio survey which asked listeners to complete the phrase, "as Canadian as ..." (looking for something like "as American as apple pie"). The winning response was: "as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances." Consider, also, the rant of Molson Joe: ”I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader. I don’t live in an igloo, eat blubber, or own a dogsled. i don’t know Jimmy, Suzie, or Sally from Canada, although I’m certain they’re very nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And i pronounce it ‘about,’ not ‘a-boot.’ i can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity not assimilation. And that the beaver is a proud and noble animal. A tuque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch. And it’s pronounced zed. Okay? Not zee. Zed. Canada is the second-largest land mass, the first nation of hockey, and the best part of North Americas. My name is Joe and I am Canadian.” This is the text from a Molson beer commercial that first appeared in movie theaters two years ago. It made “Molson Joe” a figure of Paul Bunyanesque stature in Canadian life. The public reacted to the ad as if it announced V-J Day: Schoolkids quoted it; parents loved it; Sheila Copps, Canada’s heritage minister, even showed it at an international conference on American cultural imperialism. This national bout of St. Vitus’s Dance over a mildly amusing beer commercial is a manifestation of Canada’s obsession with its own inferiority complex. Canadian Bookshelves groan with self-help books for the Canadian soul: Why I Hate Canadians; Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian; Lament for a Nation; and many dozens of others. The Washington Post’s former Canada bureau chief, Steven Pearlstein — an American — set off a firestorm with an essay noting that Canadian identity is being threatened by America’s overwhelming cultural and economic influence. This point has, of course, been made by one Canadian journalist or another pretty much every day for the last century; but for some reason, when it appeared in an American paper it was considered an outrage. Pearlstein wrote: “Over the years, Canadians might have coalesced around a shared sense of history but for the fact that they have little of it they consider worth remembering. The country never fought a revolution or a civil war, pioneered no great social or political movement, produced no great world leader, and committed no memorable atrocities — as one writer put it, Canada has no Lincolns, no Gettysburgs, and no Gettysburg addresses.” Victoria Dickenson, director of Montreal’s McCord Museum of Canadian history, mouthed the typical reaction when she sarcastically exclaimed: “Gosh, if we could just massacre some people!” Journalists swarmed famous Canadian historians asking them to preen about Canada’s morally-superior history — which, Canadians boast, is an evolution not a revolution. They noted that America — what with slavery and war and all that — had no right to judge Canada. Given all of the above, it's not surprising that when you talk to ordinary Canadians — who are, by and large, a wonderfully decent and friendly bunch — they have a ready vocabulary to explain the U.S.-Canada relationship. They talk about how America is Canada's "big brother" and how, like any younger sibling, Canada is naturally inclined to find fault with its more accomplished elders. But this metaphor leaves out an important part of the dynamic: Kid brothers normally express their objections not to their big brothers, but to their parents. "He failed his report card!" "He's guilty of 400 years of racism and oppression!" And so on. For much of Canada's history, its parents could be found in the British Empire. Canada was founded largely by loyalists who rejected America's rebelliousness toward King George; it was never the prodigal son to England, but rather the good son who never left home. With independence, the Canadians were left without a parent to suck up to and with a resented brother who was now their only real protector. Indeed, the U.S. has supplanted dear old Dad as the most important player on the world stage; this new circumstance has prompted Canadians to find a surrogate parent in the United Nations. And that's a real problem, for both Canada and the U.S.

Commodities are better than Securities as reserve assets.

It's necessary, not sufficient. Because fiat is only symbolic, it requires evidence of commitment behind the promise to make good on. A gold reserve (however fractionally sized it may be) provides evidence far out of proportion to its size because it has carrying costs. The proof of the gold reserve's value is its very existence. Why hasn't the gold reserve been sold off? What's the difference between backing ~2.5% of fiat and zero?

Funny, all the claims of betrayal. Five decades ago, historian Frank Underhill wrote that the Canadian is "the first anti-American, the model anti-American, the archetypal anti-American, the ideal anti-American as he exists in the mind of God." In a sense this isn't really true. Philosophically and politically, the New Soviet Man was a superior anti-American: He not only hated America but had a blueprint for its replacement. After all, the perfect anti-American must be pro-something else; he must offer a viable alternative to that which he detests. Canadian anti-Americanism does none of this. It is anti-American by reflex, which is to say that when America goes about its business, Canada flinches and calls this tic "the Canadian way." https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Bomb-Canada.pdf Admit it — as Canadians, we love to tweak the feathers on Uncle Sam’s eagle. In fact, anti-Americanism has been so prevalent throughout the centuries that scholars refer to Canadians as the world’s oldest anti-Americans. https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2009/10/18/bomb-canada

The only thing Central banks have of true value is their gold. (It's certainly not their credibility.) It is only their gold that allows them to print money without devaluing their currency. "Full faith and credit" alone wouldn't suffice. 50 years since the gold standard people forget the relationship, but if the world's gold reserves disappeared overnight and people remembered their government's promise to make good on the note was dependent upon them raising taxes or borrowing, currencies would inflate to the moon. No, it's fiat that is symbolic. And gold is as important today (since the end of the gold standard) as always because it's as necessary as always (even if it only partially backs fiat now).

Central banks disagree with you.

Until 55 years ago, gold enabled trade at a significantly reduced cost compared to alternatives. That directly influences prosperity and indirectly influenced evolution (https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/006145205X). Sure, neither are necessary for survival, existence, or nominal (not relative) success today. But why hasn't gold hasn't been replaced yet, if it's so replaceable? Because there will always be a role for something that holds its value over time. To date, that's been gold. It will only be replaced by something functionally superior. Hence, bitcoin.

Things is, some things shared (for example: Americans just don't think much about non-Americans) is taken as rude rather than as fact. Understanding that might help non-Americans judge the likelihood of America reversing course if they share their hurt feelings (not likely). Would it be better to pretend that wasn't the case? No. Better to not take offense when none intended.

I like you too, Reds, but nothing in this world exists without a reason. Gold's very importance means it serves an important purpose. The Satoshi Papers has a great chapter Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money (described in the Introduction which can be viewed here: https://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Papers-Reflections-Political-Economy/dp/B0F1FNGYD9/?asin=B0F1FNGYD9&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1). https://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Papers-Reflections-Political-Economy/dp/B0F1FNGYD9/

Seriously, you don't understand money at all.

LOL BDS is a terrible thing.

Source?

And going concerns will grow more profitable because of bitcoin. Funny how you guys will never share what it would take to convince you. If you'll never be convinced, WTF are you wasting your time in this thread?