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Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
itod
on 26/02/2015, 23:30:11 UTC
Lets see how this translates 2,600 years ago...

Real wealth is houses, land, cars, food, services, etc.  Wealth gets created and destroyed, sometimes both in quick succession, as when a cook prepares a meal that gets eaten right away.  

Gold does not create any wealth. Its contribution to productivity, by (allegedly) being a more efficient payment instrument is tiny.  In fact, the contribution of gold to world's production of wealth, so far, has been humongously negative: 100 times (at least) more wealth has been destroyed by the gold system than has been created thanks to it.

Does not translate.  The replacement of barter by money transactions hugely improved the flow of goods and services, by breaking down complicated multi-party trasactions into independent two-party steps, that could be widely separated in time and space.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has not yet brought any significant contributions to commerce.  The benefits of bitcoin are, at best, the saving of a few percent in the price of international payments. That is counted as a benefit, because otherwise the payment of those extra fees would have meant waste of work by bank staffers, for services that (allegedly) were not really necessary.  All those saved fees together may barely add up to 10 million dollars.

It is not entirely true that Bitcoin has not yet brought any significant contributions to commerce. Last time I've executed SWIFT international money transfer it was a pain in the ass. Spent half an hour in the bank and had to manually fill and sign a few forms on pieces of paper, bring the paper copy of the invoice to the bank employee, etc. Not to mention the fees, they were far from insignificant. I'm not saying Bitcoin is the similar contribution to civilization as invention of gold coins, but it is not without some practical advantage.