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Government bonds have been around for hundreds of years but I can't buy coffee with them. Thus they don't do anything.

• herrokan 8y ago
  Government bonds aren't meant to be a currency, cryptocurrencies are.
  • awt 8y ago
    I don't see the relationship between "meant to be" and "is" here. Doesn't it only matter what it actually is rather than what some people thought it might be?
    • herrokan 8y ago
      Well, what are cryptocurrencies then? Besides a hyper speculative "asset" for gamblers of course.
• Abidarn 8y ago
  Not a great analogy. Government bonds were never meant to be a currency. Bitcoin was advertised as a currency. Yet its adoption for that purpose, despite the massive network available for its propagation, has yet to materialize.
  • awt 8y ago
    What it was "meant to be" hardly matters. What it actually is is more important than the misrepresentations presented by various misinformed parties.
    • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > What it actually is is more important than the misrepresentations presented by various misinformed parties Fair enough. Government bonds let countries deficit spend. They are also a stable store of value. These attributes make them useful. Bitcoin is neither of these. Like government bonds, it does not behave like money.
      • awt 8y ago
        Government bonds are stable if you ignore tail risk. Governments tend to collapse eventually, at which point your bonds are not a great store of value. Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions. Also, I dunno that behaving like money can be put in such stark binary terms.
        • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
          > Government bonds are stable if you ignore tail risk Nothing is eternal. That doesn’t make everything ephemeral equally risky. Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Speculative assets are volatile by design (you want them to go up). More critically, government bonds’ role as a store of value is ancillary to their core purpose: to enable public deficit spending. > Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions My cat has value and is useless for consumer transactions. That doesn’t make him a government bond.
          • awt 8y ago
            The point is not that Bitcoin is a government bond, if that wasn't obvious, but that just because some people said it's a currency and proceeded to build failing businesses on that faulty premise doesn't preclude it having actual, unrelated uses, such as a store of value with a vastly different risk profile than any other asset ever known.
            • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
              > a store of value with a vastly different risk profile than any other asset ever known For which there (a) is zero evidence and yet (b) are lots of unsophisticated investors throwing money at. This combination is well known in financial engineering circles, which has had a habit of dreaming up assets with inobservable specialness since the days of John Law.
        • Abidarn 8y ago