Quote from: itod on February 26, 2015, 11:30:11 PM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on February 26, 2015, 08:23:31 PM

Quote from: Andre# on February 26, 2015, 07:30:12 PM

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.

WU is another one too. Takes forever to not only fill forms out to send, but to receive also.
Then we are not even going to touch how much it cost to send money via WU.

With BTC, its only a matter of a few pennies to send money anywhere.

The only thing really making it perfect is having instant access to be able to cash out like WU, and the ATMs for BTC are popping up every day. I guess if I had the time I could drive to a bigger uban area to get to an ATM, but ATM, still can be a pain.