21 December 2020

Bitcoin is Not an Investment or a Currency (and if you're in the mood for wild speculation, there is a much better way to do that)

Bitcoin has roughly doubled in the last couple of months.
The dollar bill is rather oddly adorned with a pyramid.


Bitcoin, by contrast, is a pyramid scheme.
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People dismiss fiat money as "just made up" as if laws, governments, corporations, marriage and markets are not "just made up." Nearly everything that defines our social reality is "just made up." There is no reason that money should be an exception and it would be terribly suspicious if it were not.

Bitcoin is not money. Can you imagine trying to price any products denominated in bitcoin, a "currency" that bounces around so much that prices would surge or fall by tens of percent any given week? No currency does that. 

And bitcoin - unlike a rental property or stock - represents no stream of income.

An algorithm doesn't make bitcoin a real investment or currency and is probably evidence of some sort of neo-techno-theology, the algorithm some modern equivalent of "In God We Trust" inscribed on our currency for minds susceptible to the allure of vaguely understood technology.

Bitcoin serves no purpose other than a vehicle for speculation. It's not an investment. Even Tesla - with its absurd PE ratio of 1,200 - is a real investment in that you're actually buying the right to a future stream of profits for a real company with a real product, no matter how wildly optimistic is the price you're paying for those future profits. All that you are buying with bitcoin is an odd hope that tomorrow someone with slightly more money than you will come along and bid a higher price than you paid yesterday. That is the very definition of a pyramid scheme.

If you want to speculate like that, do it with art instead, buying it with the hope that it'll go up in the future. At least then you'll have something beautiful to look at in the interim.

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