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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. Bitcoi
by 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 agoThe 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 agoBitcoin could be similar to art in those terms. A van Gogh has value and isn't practical for consumer transactions. Your argument has painted itself into a corner and the next step is to knock a hole in the wall.
- awt 8y agoSaying Bitcoin is like one thing does not preclude it from being like other things. Never the less, it's not necessarily useless just because it doesn't have the use some people mistakenly thought it had.