r0ach
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January 30, 2017, 09:48:40 AM
Last edit: January 30, 2017, 12:29:23 PM by r0ach

There is no gold settlement... bitcoin is the only one. You try to goto fort knox to prove you own a rightful piece of that pie after paying for its claim. Good luck!

Bitcoin as a settlement layer would mean you'd always be dealing with derivatives of bitcoin in order to do day to day transactions that increase it's counter party risk even higher than it is now, and everyone knows bitcoin's counter party risk is already higher than metals in the first place.  There is no situation ever in which bitcoin has less counter party risk than metals, especially when you're using bitcoin derivatives.  

A normal human actually can be their own banker with metals, but with bitcoin there are a million external counter party risk factors that can implode it - like whatever a random bitcoin dev decides to do after waking up in the morning.  Then the fact that if people are going to claim bitcoin is never actually "finished", it's a centralized technocracy by default on the software side and centralized by economy of scale on the mining side.

Can you make money with bitcoin?  Sure.  But don't pretend it's actually solved any problems to make metals obsolete.  Contrary to popular opinion that bitcoin "works" because it's existed for 8 years, this is misleading.  You can start timing the date of whether bitcoin works or not from the point where all micro-transactions are forced off-chain and all on-chain transactions are settlement payments with derivatives of those settlements (such as LN) being used for commerce - with block reward also gone, surviving off transaction fees.

Bitcoin can currently derive price entirely from just being a wild speculative gamble, but the closer you get to the endgame, the more the price will be derived from if the economics and use case makes any sense - and whether economy of scale makes it completely centralized or not.  As I said above, I don't think it has a valid use case as a store of value or settlement layer, so this means it's only hope is LN + vast amounts of transactions and then it's value I guess would be held up by acting as some type of paypal-like processor.

As everybody knows, gold and silver don't really require high transaction flow and turnover, but bitcoin's price is entirely high transaction flow based.  This is why bitcoin as a settlement layer without derivatives of those settlements that are also deemed to be "trustless" has never made any sense.