General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs Bitcoin any different from the gold pieces that my 9th-level Ranger collected?
Granted, that was 20 years ago, and the value of a gold piece has risen since then, but how does the pretend money known as Bitcoin differ from the pretend money that my Ranger scooped up after routing a nest of kobolds?
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Ponzi schemes to ever hit the paranoid-libertarian types. They are all so fucking' smart.....
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Normally, a currency is backed up by something that's a stable long-term-investment, like state-issued bonds or a gold-stash.
But as far as I understood it, Bitcoin is just a new intermediate in the flow of money, not a new currency itself. An amount of currency A is transformed into Bitcoins, then transfered, then transformed into currency B. Therefore it's more of a good than a currency and therefore its value is regulated by supply and demand.
If a currency has no real-life counterpart, no insurance, no back-up, then it's pretend-money.
randome
(34,845 posts)Unless you count running a computer algorithm to be 'work'.
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