wedrifid comments on Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks - Less Wrong

6 Post author: lsparrish 19 April 2013 06:13PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 22 April 2013 02:58:54AM 2 points [-]

Let me rephrase: The problem is that Bitcoins will have an advantage over the average productive investment, e.g. stocks (sort of), as a store of value, since Bitcoin has all their average expected growth with none of their added volatility.

I like the rephrasing. To expand on what seems to be a generalisation of this problem: Any cryptocurrency sibling of bitcoin that relies on cryptographic mining as a basis will either have this problem or will result in (value of currency * inflation rate) additional resources wasted on computation each year.

I believe (tentatively) that the above is an unavoidable result of the cryptographic and micro-economic principles that such currencies rely on.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 April 2013 03:27:53AM *  2 points [-]

I like the rephrasing.

Note, I wrote this in reply to the original version of the grandparent, which is as quoted in the parent. This is confusing since it is a bug/feature of the lesswrong system that Eliezer's edits to his own comments do not get marked with an asterisk like others.

I do not endorse the current version of the grandparent, in as much as it overstates the position and seems to verge on encouraging magical thinking about how a currency can extract value from a system.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 April 2013 04:12:29AM 0 points [-]

Reclarified?