I want to address this statement found in the crypto trading thread, but I'm posting here because this topic has nothing to do with crypto or trading. Bitcoin intrinsic value is a topic worthy of its own thread.
So the poster (who is likely trolling) who stated that "Bitcoin demand is not based on intrinsic human needs or instinctual desires" doesn't yet have a fundamental understanding of what money is or the role it plays in our society. Let me make an honest attempt to address this.
Money is a shared idea, a spontaneous and emergent form of information technology that humans created to optimize skill specialization within the colony. Rather than individual humans surviving by themselves, like a tiger, they were more successful in groups, like lions. Eventually the groups grew larger...the groups realized they were more efficient if certain group members specialized their skillsets. In small groups, there is no need for the technology of money, but when your herd grows into the thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, you need a system of trust through which specialists can store value across space and time. This initially manifests as barter of goods and services, but the computational challenge of arbitraging every different asset class against each other is inefficient. Trading your apples for a sheep and 3 spears and some bread and a mule and some oranges only takes you so far. Eventually all elements of this society will normalize their barter around some scarce asset that is hard to produce more of.
Money ultimately wants to become one thing. It's the natural end state of this technology. Everything that has value today but is easy to produce more of will inevitably lose its value. What remains as money is the only bubble that doesn't pop.
Human society over the centuries standardized the idea of money around gold because gold was the scarcest element that was impossible to destroy and difficult to make more of. It wasn't perfect on the inflationary front, but it was the best we had. Because of this scarcity and common understanding as "money" it became a great store of value over time.
So before we go any further, let's circle back to the spurious subject of this post. "Bitcoin demand is not based on intrinsic human needs or instinctual desires." This statement is fundamentally wrong and lacks an awareness of what money actually is. Forget about "Bitcoin" or "Gold" or "Dollars"...humanity demands "Money" because it's the only way we know how to store value across time and space such that we can maintain skill specialization that our society depends on. Your strawberries that show up at HEB depend on farmers and truckers and financiers and grocery store owners and architects and construction workers...it's an unimaginable amount of decentralized complexity that allows strawberries to show up on the shelf for you to buy and eat.
Can we agree that humans do demand money by the sheer nature of how we have evolved? Without money we cannot function as a society. Yes we can still survive as individuals off the grid, but we cannot survive as an engineer or an accountant or a football coach if money is not present in our society.
What the debate really is about is *what* is the best money. Most people today are trained to believe dollars, or fiat currency in general, is the best money. It's all we've ever known frankly. It's so deeply rooted in the software programming in our brains that to break the spell is almost like escaping the matrix.
I'm not going to convince most of you that Bitcoin is the right or best money (even though it is), but that's not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to shift and progress the conversation around Bitcoin on this forum to a higher intellectual plane. If you like your steak in the Matrix though, I certainly don't blame you. That's the option most people take.
PS the hostility of this board towards Bitcoin in general is baffling. Aggies are conservative, freedom loving people on average. Bitcoin represents freedom money and a better future for our kids and grandkids. You may not see that yet, but it's absolutely the case. Fiat money is the root of many, if not most of the societal ills we see today. Wake up Aggies!
Goodnight!
So the poster (who is likely trolling) who stated that "Bitcoin demand is not based on intrinsic human needs or instinctual desires" doesn't yet have a fundamental understanding of what money is or the role it plays in our society. Let me make an honest attempt to address this.
Money is a shared idea, a spontaneous and emergent form of information technology that humans created to optimize skill specialization within the colony. Rather than individual humans surviving by themselves, like a tiger, they were more successful in groups, like lions. Eventually the groups grew larger...the groups realized they were more efficient if certain group members specialized their skillsets. In small groups, there is no need for the technology of money, but when your herd grows into the thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, you need a system of trust through which specialists can store value across space and time. This initially manifests as barter of goods and services, but the computational challenge of arbitraging every different asset class against each other is inefficient. Trading your apples for a sheep and 3 spears and some bread and a mule and some oranges only takes you so far. Eventually all elements of this society will normalize their barter around some scarce asset that is hard to produce more of.
Money ultimately wants to become one thing. It's the natural end state of this technology. Everything that has value today but is easy to produce more of will inevitably lose its value. What remains as money is the only bubble that doesn't pop.
Human society over the centuries standardized the idea of money around gold because gold was the scarcest element that was impossible to destroy and difficult to make more of. It wasn't perfect on the inflationary front, but it was the best we had. Because of this scarcity and common understanding as "money" it became a great store of value over time.
So before we go any further, let's circle back to the spurious subject of this post. "Bitcoin demand is not based on intrinsic human needs or instinctual desires." This statement is fundamentally wrong and lacks an awareness of what money actually is. Forget about "Bitcoin" or "Gold" or "Dollars"...humanity demands "Money" because it's the only way we know how to store value across time and space such that we can maintain skill specialization that our society depends on. Your strawberries that show up at HEB depend on farmers and truckers and financiers and grocery store owners and architects and construction workers...it's an unimaginable amount of decentralized complexity that allows strawberries to show up on the shelf for you to buy and eat.
Can we agree that humans do demand money by the sheer nature of how we have evolved? Without money we cannot function as a society. Yes we can still survive as individuals off the grid, but we cannot survive as an engineer or an accountant or a football coach if money is not present in our society.
What the debate really is about is *what* is the best money. Most people today are trained to believe dollars, or fiat currency in general, is the best money. It's all we've ever known frankly. It's so deeply rooted in the software programming in our brains that to break the spell is almost like escaping the matrix.
I'm not going to convince most of you that Bitcoin is the right or best money (even though it is), but that's not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to shift and progress the conversation around Bitcoin on this forum to a higher intellectual plane. If you like your steak in the Matrix though, I certainly don't blame you. That's the option most people take.
PS the hostility of this board towards Bitcoin in general is baffling. Aggies are conservative, freedom loving people on average. Bitcoin represents freedom money and a better future for our kids and grandkids. You may not see that yet, but it's absolutely the case. Fiat money is the root of many, if not most of the societal ills we see today. Wake up Aggies!
Goodnight!
