I remain critical of bitcoin as energy wastrel, data-inefficient storing vast amounts of pointless information, can be stolen or lost by the simple acts of somebody else seeing the code or losing a computer with the code stored in it, slow to transmit a payment and expensive to transmit a payment, will be superseded by a better designed unit of value [not a dopey blockchain theory but an identity-based unit of value], now stored and run by huge electricity-hungry high-powered processing factories that can't hide in a pocket, attic or cave so the CIA can stop bitcoin any time they like, it has swarms of same-idea competitors such as DOGE, Casper, ethereum etc.
I remain critical of gold as a stone-age object that's expensive to mine, expensive to store and protect, heavy to move, easily stolen, and produces no value while it's sitting in your hole in the ground of choice. It's dug up from distributed storage in the ground, processed at vast expense, then stored again in concentrated form in another hole in the ground that needs guarding forever. And can be confiscated by crooks or governments any time. And you can't carry 100kg of the stuff as carry-on luggage.
Right now I'm betting that USA via DOGE will rescue US$ from imminent hyperinflationary calamitous catastrophe because killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is a very bad idea for Americans. Unfortunately about half of them would rather eat their piece of goose now and to hell with the future. They've become habituated to Magic Money Tree [MMT] theory that they can have free stuff by dilution, forever, at an increasing scale. They can collect 3% royalty perpetually, but they got greedy and revved up to 10%, and even 20% per year.
I have not yet got my prototype Unit of Value created, but it remains mathematically perfect.
There are many units that have been created to define reality - metres, lumen, rads, radians, degrees Kelvin, seconds, etc. They are objective concepts that individuals can use to see what's going on. But there's no unit of value that can't be messed with by governments, thieves, miners and that doesn't erode with time. Bitcoin, gold and US$ are all attempts to create a unit of value. In the absence of the real thing, people make do with them, or paintings, other collectibles, silver, platinum, other countries' currencies, other block-chains, land, shares or something.
At the moment I'm holding US$ and NZ$, but that's transient until I can get out of them.
The way Aotearoa-Zimbabwe is going, it might even be better to go to Zimbabwe, Crimea or a lovely Greek island. Hundreds of thousands have fled. About a million NZers, 20%, have gone over the decades - though many were people who got in here, got the passport, and always planned the stepping stone to be just a route into Oz or elsewhere.
Mqurice |
