I need to have others who are informed to help a plebeian newbie comprehend the arguments for and against Bitcoin.
Specifically, I hear Dave @ X22 advocate for it (and make seemingly-excellent arguments in favor), and GhostEzra strongly insinuate against...
(And yes, I’m doing more research, of course. And yes, it’s my job to come to my own conclusions...)
Just thought I’d throw that out there, so I can accelerate the learning curve?
Gracias.
Bitcoin is backed by the energy used to secure the network/produce it.
People like to claim that bitcoin is a big waste of energy, forgetting the fact that 85%+ of mining is done on renewable energy, and often based in areas that allow it to run off of an energy surplus that would otherwise be wasted.
Forgetting the energy footprint of the banking system WORLDWIDE. All of those offices, skyscrapers, local branches, all of the security trucks, lights and air conditioning systems. Need I go on?
Go right ahead and convert your energy (proof of work) into fiat dollars. Of which, 40% of the total supply was printed within the last year. You're storing your energy, your value, in something that loses value something that can be printed to infinity. I'll be collecting my portion of the 21 million bitcoins. A supply which cannot be inflated.
I challenged you to go to tradingview.com or satflo.com
Lookup your asset of choice: Dollar, Yen, SP500, NASDAQ, Gold, Silver, etc. Compare it to the value of bitcoin over the course of it's ~12 year existence.
Here....I did some of the legwork for you: https://www.tradingview.com/x/O1KuwYrz/ BTC compared to the dollar, S&P500, Dow Jones Index, Nasdaq, Gold, Silver, Nikkei 225, & others.
That couldn’t be farther from the truth...
This statement is an attempt to apply to Bitcoin the labor theory of value, which is generally accepted as false. Just because something takes X resources to create does not mean that the resulting product will be worth X. It can be worth more, or less, depending on the utility thereof to its users. In fact the causality is the reverse of that (this applies to the labor theory of value in general). The cost to mine bitcoins is based on how much they are worth. If bitcoins go up in value, more people will mine (because mining is profitable), thus difficulty will go up, thus the cost of mining will go up. The inverse happens if bitcoins go down in value. These effects balance out to cause mining to always cost an amount proportional to the value of bitcoins it produces[1]. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value (unlike some other things) This is simply not true. Each bitcoin gives the holder the ability to embed a large number of short in-transaction messages in a globally distributed and timestamped permanent data store, namely the bitcoin blockchain. There is no other similar datastore which is so widely distributed. There is a tradeoff between the exact number of messages and how quickly they can be embedded.
While some other tangible commodities do have intrinsic value, that value is generally much less than its trading price. Consider for example that gold, if it were not used as an inflation-proof store of value, but rather only for its industrial uses, would certainly not be worth what it is today, since the industrial requirements for gold are far smaller than the available supply thereof. In any event, while historically intrinsic value, as well as other attributes like divisibility, fungibility, scarcity, durability, helped establish certain commodities as mediums of exchange, it is certainly not a prerequisite. While bitcoins are accused of lacking 'intrinsic value' in this sense, they make up for it in spades by possessing the other qualities necessary to make it a good medium of exchange, equal to or better than commodity money. Another way to think about this is to consider the value of bitcoin the global network, rather than each bitcoin in isolation. The value of an individual telephone is derived from the network it is connected to. If there was no phone network, a telephone would be useless. Similarly the value of an individual bitcoin derives from the global network of bitcoin-enabled merchants, exchanges, wallets, etc... Just like a phone is necessary to transmit vocal information through the network, a bitcoin is necessary to transmit economic information through the network. Value is ultimately determined by what people are willing to trade for - by supply and demand.
Basically again air. Because simply we do not now control the network thus we do not own the money that bitcoin represents. This and this alone should show you that bitcoin will not be the one via a blockchain. It’s air that people agree is worth x and nothing more.
“it’s air that people agree is worth x”. You just described every stock and centralized currency in existence. Look up decentralized finance. It lacks the corruption of centralized finance.
https://www.danheld.com/blog/2019/1/5/pow-is-efficent