Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Semantics of "fiat"
by
amspir
on 08/02/2015, 14:04:53 UTC
bitcoin is not issued by government/not legal tender by government order (thinking government can be equated with mining consensus is laughable)

The meaning of the latin word "fiat" in no way implies government control.  Some bitcoiners seem to use the word "fiat" as shorthand to mean "government-issued fiat currency", which is my point.   Bitcoin is novel in that it creates a fiat currency without a conventional government.

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bitcoin cannot be created out of thin air and requires actual work (creating floating point numbers in bank computers is not work)

You realize that you just called the act of plugging in a bitcoin miner into an electrical outlet and turning it on "actual work".  That must be one of those hyper-ironic millennial figures of speech, like using the word "literal" in an exaggeration.   

The process of bitcoin mining involves having a machine to do virtual work.  The whole point of doing virtual work is to regulate the issuance of bitcoin's fiat currency and to cryptographically secure the block chain.

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i think regulators are already thinking about bitcoin as a commodity

A commodity is something with intrinsic value.  You can treat something like a commodity, that really is not, which would be called virtual commodity.  That doesn't make it a real commodity. 

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so... i think we are more or less done here Smiley

I think you meant to say "I am" instead of "we are", unless you actually meant to be condescending, or believe yourself to be royalty.