@r0ach goldbugs are myopic absolutists that forever dream to live in a perfect world that can’t exist. They never think through the ramifications of what they want and compare the alternatives.

Friction always exists, for without it the past and future would be undifferentiated and we could not exist (everything would happen at the same spacetime and we couldn’t perceive any differentiation of past and future). Usury and proof-of-work are just forms of friction. What makes them somewhat less optimal is that some centralized entity is able to aggregate/leverage/funnel that friction into centralized power. Yet the power-law distribution is a fact of nature. It’s actually required (but I won’t go too deep into that because the explanation will become too abstract, theoretical, and complex).

Yet w.r.t. to fungibility and consensus systems, a centralized power may be necessary to enforce and prevent disintegration into chaotic disagreement (e.g. forkathons with competing double-spends). You may argue that gold is fungible without any centralized power, but the centralized power facet enters at the level of the alternative choices civilization has for stored monetary value representation and the wars and disagreements those choices cause. Society is unwilling to allow some lazy fat cats sitting on gold doing nothing while extracting all the production from society in the form of deflation! That is why the money supply must increase (either via creating more of the same unit-of-account or alternatives becoming available).

Money is an information system that enables cooperation and civilization. The quantity theory of money is wrong, wrong, wrong at many different levels of analysis.


The forks have not displaced Bitcoin¹ as the reserve of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, nor stopped the progression of cryptocurrency in its disintermediation of nation-state currency and banking systems.

It’s not clear yet which technology will provide transactional cryptocurrency to the masses, and whether this will be a global unit-of-exchange or will the nation-states succeed in requiring national currencies for all transactions within their borders. I posit nation-states will have to forsake control over globalized transactions, such as those on the Internet especially those involving transactions (especially microtransactions) between international parties.

¹ _{I believe Satoshi’s protocol has not been displaced. Some people are transacting on a protocol that can be double-spent back to Satoshi’s protocol in the future[next crypto winter]. Greater fools always have to be raped by the market. That’s the way markets function.}