What is Nostr?
Father Nick Blaha
npub1pax…5ky6
2024-05-05 11:44:59
in reply to nevent1q…6frm

Father Nick Blaha on Nostr: The possibility of signifcant increase in buying power for bitcoin is not simply a ...

The possibility of signifcant increase in buying power for bitcoin is not simply a function of its speculative nature. Buying and holding bitcoin for principled reasons is actually quite difficult and represents significant risk--the factors at play are more than just personal gain and storing the value of one's labor, but also a more sound monetary asset and the separation of money and state. The possibility of significant gain represents an incentive to help motivate those who take these risks to take them both prudently and courageously, and to persevere in the face of extreme difficulty and distraction. That is no small thing. A dictum in this respect would be: Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome. Bitcoiners are serving a noble good and the possibility of monetary gain is one factor among many important factors that helps to incentivize what would otherwise be unimaginably difficult for most people.

Stated by HODL (nprofile…qw43) in more forceful terms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCLt7oUl43I

I also think the idea of intrinsic value is a distraction in this discussion. Correct me if I'm wrong: in the sense you're using it here, "intrinsic value" means "good for something other than being used as money, and therefore [more] free from speculative abuse". But the claim is that bitcoin is a new form of money that creates digital scarcity through the binding of real world energy expenditure to an immutable distributed ledger in order to secure it from attack and recalibrate the accuracy of the price signal. Digital scarcity is such a profound innovation that it's hard to make a comparison to other monetary phenomena. "Intrinsic value" is something like a skeuomorph of the prior forms of money that were necessarily physical. A skeuomorph is "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original." But bitcoin is innovative precisely because it eliminates the need to bind scarcity to physicality, offering pure scarcity in the digital realm by the capture of energy through proof-of-work.

(You can weigh in any time, mbasola (nprofile…sart) )
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