Quote from: wendell on June 26, 2014, 06:02:48 AM

Quote from: Melbustus on June 26, 2014, 04:21:07 AM

Wait, are you serious? I honestly couldn't tell without reading that twice, but I *think* you actually *are* being serious...

Which is awful. Especially if you work with crypto for a living. None of this works AT ALL without scarcity. The entire point of bitcoin, and altcoins for that matter, is recording the transfer of a scarce asset. Without scarcity there really is no asset, or at least no reason to record the transfer of it, since there's no value. How do you not get that*?

You can make arguments for supporting alts in your wallet if you like, but to categorically refute the validity of digital scarcity is just asinine.

* or maybe I'm just being expertly trolled...?

Digital scarcity within the framework of a single tokenthat of course makes sense.

Well, you can't have infinite tokens (I'll acquiesce and use your word of choice for now) with scarcity within each and still have scarcity over all, if there's functional crossover between tokens. However broad a domain you're considering, there must be scarcity somewhere or else there is no value.

Quote from: wendell on June 26, 2014, 06:02:48 AM

But expecting everyone to value your assumptions equally re: precisely which token(s) are important ("artificial digital scarcity")? That is a non-starter, a fact which should be obvious to anyone who knows that human beings are not uniformly rational, nor uniformly in possession of the same set of needs and desires.

Kinda thinking you're taking my points out of context here and fighting a different battle... Not quite sure what, though.

To clarify my arguments, if bitcoin loses ultimately, and there are other coins with long-run value, that's fine. That just can't happen arbitrarily (or seemingly arbitrarily) or the world will not boardly adopt crypto-currency (or tokens...(semantics)). You are either pissed about something else, or are severely misunderstanding how *most* humans work.

Quote from: wendell on June 26, 2014, 06:02:48 AM

Let me be clear: I love Bitcoin, I hold Bitcoin, and (for now) we run Hive on it, exclusively...

Good.

Quote from: wendell on June 26, 2014, 06:02:48 AM

But I still feel that these arguments against other tokens are spurious at best. See my point about semantics.

Disagree. I don't particularly care what series of letters you use to describe a slot on a blockchain. The point is what those slots can be used for, and money is a fantastic use for them. There are indeed more uses, but it's near-ideal for money. All of our monetary constructs have boiled down to providing a memory function. On the surface it's ludicrous that hunks of metal ever held value above their industrial use, but turns out they provided the societal exchange memory function pretty darn well (until humans developed the need to transact over distance). Rai stones are obviously one of the most cited examples of the memory concept being taken to an extreme, and bitcoin is, for the way our society currently interacts, the intellectual pinnacle of this money-memory function. For now, anyways.

To realize those functions we can't have blockchains falling in and out of favor willy nilly. Luckily (in our short history) that has not yet happened, and I'm only interested in the crypto space because I'm reasonably confident it'll continue to not happen. Essentially, if bitcoin is unseated, most of the humans will have to pretty readily be able to describe why, or else confidence in the memory function will be lost and people won't use a decentralized construct for such anymore, having tested and disproved the notion that it can be accomplished without an entity demanding use of it by force.

Quote from: wendell on June 26, 2014, 06:02:48 AM

tl;dr: I am indeed trolling you, but not in the way that you may think.

Indeed.