Unsurprisingly, he and his family were doxed by angry traders.

  • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
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    5 days ago

    No one forces you to accept an IOU, but that’s how “money” is created.

    If you want a beer and have nothing suitable to offer in exchange, you might give me an IOU, which I then hand off to someone else in exchange for goods and services, until one day someone asks you for goods and services in exchange for the same IOU that you had used to buy a beer months ago.

    These things actually happened^

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Yeah, a dollar and a crypto currency has no difference but reputation now. It isn’t backed by gold. They are both worthless gambles. The odds of variance is all your saying is different… Which is just reputation really

      • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
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        4 days ago

        Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.

        Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.

        Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.

          • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
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            4 days ago

            Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.

            • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              4 days ago

              So it disappearing would have 0 effect, and it disappearing would help the economy, don’t conflict?

              All stashing of currency is bad for the economy. If you put dollars in a mattress it is bad for the economy. I like that people automatically downvoted after, not even knowing what it was you deleted, haha

              • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
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                4 days ago

                The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.

                • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  4 days ago

                  They wouldn’t though would they. They would invest it in something else, as they already chose not to use that money for spending. (Unless they are using a visa card to spend that money). So that investment likely would be stashing it in a mattress, a bank, the stock market, collectors items, property or such. All having varying degrees of help/hurt to our economy.

                  Hell maybe they’d just bet it all on NFL games on Sunday. We don’t know what they would do with it. But we know they already chose not to spend it.

                  Most of this agrees with what you said because I thought you said they’d spend it at first before invest. I just don’t see the big deal about it. It’s just legalized gambling, I wouldn’t recommend anyone invest it it long term, but then again… Anyone who did so far made a lot of money, haha (this only applys to the major coins, the tiny ones like penny stocks are volatile as hell)

                  Edit: oh I’ve got an example. Baseball cards or what not. Someone can put 10 grand in baseball cards, and they could go up, could go down, but ultimately are worth nothing, just like Crypto. Why aren’t people just as mad at the people buying collectors items?

                  • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world
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                    4 days ago

                    Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.