Comment on SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days agoHonestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency.
BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.
For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 days ago
1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.
Now it’s thousands of dollars.
It’s also lost thousands of dollars in value.
It hasn’t even been 2 decades.
There’s never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.
While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.
And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.
They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.
So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative active.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah, and we have that…
It’s called fiat currency 🙄
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The reason for volatility is that any such concept at scale is subject to just the messiest lump of evolving opinions on everything. It will deflate, inflate, deflate wildly because it’s utterly subject to the whims of the people without any mechanism to counter a lack of mass consensus on what ‘value’ is.
We started noticing as things scaled up, there needed to be some regulatory management to counter the whimsical populace. Hard to fight mass inflation or deflation when you can’t do anything to manage the “money supply” to offset panic.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.