Is Bitcoin the Future?
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I feel as though I'm watching my own learning curve for bitcoin play out in ultra slow motion as I continue to read articles such as this.
It's incredibly painful...
More than painful for me - it's confusing - these are not dumb people making the "blockchain not Bitcoin" argument. It's almost as if they haven't taken the time to thoroughly understand the relationship between the economics and tech of Bitcoin.. which to me is baffling if you believe you're dealing with "one of the most potentially revolutionary developments of the last century." It can't be the case.
I'd venture to guess that most longer term members of this forum were able to grasp economic value-add of Bitcoin at a detailed level in less than few months time..
Thinking in terms of S-curve technology adoption, what are the qualities, dispositions, economic position(?), etc. of Bitcoin early adopters? Certainly classical economic training and technological understanding aren't the only cornerstones.
I am beginning to wonder if many of the public proponents of sound money that were promoted as alternative experts many years ago, were nothing but sales men for their own gold products. That they are not adherent defenders of the principles of Austrian economics, but instead are simple promoters and it just happened that sound money was nothing more than words that they found their target customers most responded to. Peter Schiff comes to mind.
If this is the case, then of course it makes sense to try and tie Bitcoin to gold which then acts as a conduit for your gold interests. Overall I think Bitcoin is exposing who is truly interested in changing the current corrupt system vs. who has just been promoters for their own interests (whatever they may be).
The concept of money in Austrian economics, ie. money commodity, is somewhat flawed.
Bitcoin makes every body think harder about what money really is and the more open-minded discovered the much more sophisticated concept of money-memory (which afaik, Bastiat was the first to set forth
in 1850, but the problem of a lot of Austrians economist is that they think they already know everything and consequently they are not prone to make evolved their ideas. They are unfazed if their prediction doesn't come into fruition, for example they call hyperinflation and if hyperinflation doesn't come they explain it's because the indexes recording inflation are flawed. They deal with cognitive dissonance like cult members.