Quote from: cryptodevil on Today at 10:35:23 AM

Quote from: JamesNZ on Today at 08:15:16 AM

Quote from: cryptodevil on June 08, 2024, 08:55:56 PM

Quote from: JamesNZ on June 03, 2024, 05:09:30 AM

Isn't it fascinating how you people always compare BTC units to units of something actual.

That's because it is, James. Like ALL money, each issued unit of Bitcoin represents actual work done.

Fiat currency (another form of money), however, can be issued in advance of the work actually being done, thereby resulting in there being an over-supply of units to the economy, causing inflation and saddling every participant and even future, yet-to-be-born, participant with the debt of needing to do the work it represents as a result.

Does that clarify things for you?

I already knew that the Bitcoin protocol is set to issue units of nothing after some work is done. But where did you get the idea that because of that the unit of nothing represents work? If I give you a grain of dust after you do some work for me that doesn't mean that dust is the unit of work. It just means that you were stupid to trade work for dust. In the case of Bitcoin we have even greater stupidity because work is traded for nothing.

Oh I see what the problem is. You're struggling to understand what a unit of work is in an economic sense and you're conflating money with currency.

Your trite 'payment in dust' analogy shows this misunderstanding. The 'dust' as a means of payment would be considered currency in that case because you are declaring it to be 'your money', but it fails as money because there is no scarcity and no value can be ascribed to it because no work is needed to be done to create it.

If I perform some work, say, building a house for you, my time and energy introduces additional value to the communal economy as that house will have value for many years to come. This would warrant the issuing of additional units of money to the community's collective money supply so that it is accounted for (if no new money is issued then the net effect of the value I have added to the economy is deflationary) If I want to pay my utility bills, buy a car, go on holiday, I need to offer the utility company, the car salesman, the travel company, sufficient proof of having done the equivalent value of work that equates to the price of the goods/services I am purchasing. So you need to give me a number of units of something which will maintain the same economic value as every single other unit of currency our communal economy uses (which denotes it as fungible money, one of the essential qualities of what makes something 'money')

Now, if you replace 'dust' with 'fiat currency' in your analogy, you could perhaps be a skilled forger and simply create units of currency in your back room and hand them to me, but in most fiat transactions the person paying has done some work for somebody else who, likewise, did work for others, and you all received various amounts of units of money which represented that. If no new value was added to the economy then the same monetary units all move around between people and there is no inflation or deflation.

Ideally, because I have created new value in the economy, our community central bank would print X number of new units of our money and that would be introduced into the economy, ensuring that additional value is accounted for and no deflation (and no inflation through excessive printing) occurs.

But, say central banks (and forgery) do introduce excessive amounts of new money into our communiity's economic system. Let's imagine they introduce a whole YEAR's worth of additional money into the system. Each unit of that money represents work that will have to be done to produce the equivalent value. Otherwise we're all going to see prices rise as there is more money in the system than there are things of value being created it equates to. Suddenly everything costs more but we still have exactly the same amount of value in the community's economy.

We have debased our money until we are able to balance the scales by producing more things of value into the system.

Each unit of money in an economic system represents a unit of time and energy spent (work), regardless of the token we adopt as its national currency (dollar, yen, pound, euro etc). It is how that money is created and the abuse of that process which results in the mess we see nations in these days.

This is what Bitcoin solves. It can only be produced through work which has been done, not work which is yet to be done.

Do you understand?

I understand perfectly that you said the same nonsense as before by using more words. Bitcoin is unit of nothing. Nothing is not scarce. Nothing has no value. Nothing cannot be money. No energy is being spend in creating nothing. In the Bitcoin system energy is spend on plain brute force random trial and error of finding a number that solves a hash combination. It has nothing to do with "creating Bitcoin". Bitcoin is created as a unit of nothing via simple declaration.