No, I'm disagreeing with you... pointing out that the "lack of utility" arguments for gold or bitcoin are a canard.
Another way to present that... would be to note that parallel purpose in my own history, from 25 years ago... trying to be the first to use computers to do innovative things in finance, using computers to bring change in the same way computers were doing to every other sphere of human endeavor.
Disintermediation... is only a part of it. Disintermediation enables avoiding intermediaries when the value they contribute is negative... not an addition of value... but the taking of a tax and a toll... which they can make to be whatever they want. When transactions don't need an intermediary... they can't tax you or impose tolls on transactions that avoid the toll booths.
Another part of it... is that automating trading means vast improvements in speed, quality, and quantity of trades that can be executed... with each costing vastly less to execute. There is a real improvement in efficiency in result of adopting computers in banking and stock trading... instead of using pencils and ledger books, or paper share certificates being shuffled around.
Obviously, the same is true of all other transactions... cash is less efficient than digital proxies of cash.... which doesn't make cash less useful at all... just because we can increase its efficiency by adopting a digital proxy for the physical items...
We do that already with dollars. I hardly ever use cash. I use digital dollars. My stock trades are digitial ledger entries, not based on moving paper share certificates from one folder to another...
What I'm saying is that the impact of the transition to digital technology... is transparent to the "underlying value"... whatever it is. That's the laughable part of the sudden "realization" recently that that is true enough... that ANYTHING can be similarly represented... so the NFT craze, as a narrow new part of the idea of tokenization, is only the recognitition that as... "hey, that's true... anything can have a digital representation"... and gain the same increase in efficiency that comes paired with the new paradign.
That is no less true of dollars, gold, silver, bitcoin, real estate, stocks, stars, planets, pork bellies, electricity, Teslas, mining companies, real or crypto. The only thing it is NOT true of... is those things that are prohibited from such by law... including sex, babies, drugs, illicit weapons, etc., which WAS also the problem I ran into... because they made what i was trying to do illegal, by rule...not because it was bad... but only to cheat to avoid surrendering a competitive advantage to me ?
Does that explanation work for you ?
What it says is that in the degree it remains true that gold and bitcoin are remain somehow disadvantaged by progress in digital exchange... the reason for that is not "technical"... but "competitive"... which is not intending to use that in the free market sense ? Why does it make sense that you can buy a tokenized grey pixel as an articistc statement... but you can't buy difital gold that way... when you CAN buy prepaid dollars on a debit card, or prepaid telephone service that way ?
A free market is one in which there is no fraud (thus, trust), no monopoly, and no obstacles to participation.
That I encounterd obstacles to participation in plans... delayed progess for a quarter of a century... at untold cost to the world's populatoin... given 25 years of forced inefficiency... and only more tied to the purpose in the forced inefficiency... intended to funciton in maintaining frauds and monopolies that worked in throttling participation to limit the benefits available to only a small number ? |
