I lived without a driver's license for a good chunk of my adult life in places where you could shop relatively nearby. There's a few trade-offs people don't realize about.
1. Prices are higher since there aren't economies of scale.
2. Selection is much worse, and since product doesn't move the same way, it's going to be stuff that'll keep, so less fresh food, more processed foods. Packaged foods tend to be salty, oily, and sugary because those are the foods that can sit on a shelf unrefrigerated for a long time.
3. Since you can only buy what you can carry every step of the way, you tend to buy less stuff, so instead of stocking up on bulk goods you'll end up buying small amounts. This has 3 effects: First further driving up prices, second increasing waste since you're buying more packaging for less product, and finally increasing dependence on making sure you can immediately get to the store because you only have a small amount of food at home at any one time.
4. Sometimes (only about 11 months of the year) the weather sucks and you've got to go out in extreme cold, or extreme heat, or rain, and you don't have much of a choice since you don't have any food reserves to speak of.
Honestly, having a house with a yard and a decent car in the driveway is actually nice. I'm not opposed to communities where people can live the 15 minute city lifestyle, but I think the concern people have is that these elites want to use pretty words to cram us into sardine cans and take our freedom to live the way we want to live away. Some people *want* the sardine can life, but other people want wide open spaces, a yard, a garden, a swing set in the back yard and the garage stocked with a workshop.
1. Prices are higher since there aren't economies of scale.
2. Selection is much worse, and since product doesn't move the same way, it's going to be stuff that'll keep, so less fresh food, more processed foods. Packaged foods tend to be salty, oily, and sugary because those are the foods that can sit on a shelf unrefrigerated for a long time.
3. Since you can only buy what you can carry every step of the way, you tend to buy less stuff, so instead of stocking up on bulk goods you'll end up buying small amounts. This has 3 effects: First further driving up prices, second increasing waste since you're buying more packaging for less product, and finally increasing dependence on making sure you can immediately get to the store because you only have a small amount of food at home at any one time.
4. Sometimes (only about 11 months of the year) the weather sucks and you've got to go out in extreme cold, or extreme heat, or rain, and you don't have much of a choice since you don't have any food reserves to speak of.
Honestly, having a house with a yard and a decent car in the driveway is actually nice. I'm not opposed to communities where people can live the 15 minute city lifestyle, but I think the concern people have is that these elites want to use pretty words to cram us into sardine cans and take our freedom to live the way we want to live away. Some people *want* the sardine can life, but other people want wide open spaces, a yard, a garden, a swing set in the back yard and the garage stocked with a workshop.
These old buggers don't care what they're doing to the next generation of democrats by being this petty. They'll be dead soon anyway.
...But man, I wouldn't want to be a Democrat. At this rate, they'll all be in jail soon the way they're sowing these seeds.
...But man, I wouldn't want to be a Democrat. At this rate, they'll all be in jail soon the way they're sowing these seeds.
That's an excellent point. It isn't like the sane among us are willing to turn back the clock -- we want to improve our environment, but we aren't willing to kill all the humans to return to a pre-Anthropocene period, and even if we did kill all the humans you can't put that genie back in the bottle, the world is already changed.
It seems much more mature to, instead of thinking of what genocide we can commit to undo human existence, we figure out the best ways to be better stewards in a world we have changed and will likely change more in the future.
There are a lot of species that thrive in partnership or cohabitation of environments with humans, and we could maybe do some things differently to increase the number that can thrive in the environments we create.
It seems much more mature to, instead of thinking of what genocide we can commit to undo human existence, we figure out the best ways to be better stewards in a world we have changed and will likely change more in the future.
There are a lot of species that thrive in partnership or cohabitation of environments with humans, and we could maybe do some things differently to increase the number that can thrive in the environments we create.
Every industrial scale power generation technology has an environmental impact. I've been saying this for years, and people don't get it because they don't realize the scale of what's required to replace existing technologies.
If there was a greater understanding of this fact, then we could potentially make better choices between universally imperfect technologies.
If there was a greater understanding of this fact, then we could potentially make better choices between universally imperfect technologies.
What you said above seems completely divorced from reality.
It's divorced from the reality of how bitcoin are created, how typical users would acquire bitcoin, how bitcoin would typically be used, how currency markets work, and perhaps most importantly what's required under the law at the end of the day.
Bitcoin are typically created by miners. These are people or companies running computer systems using either GPUs or ASICs that complete the equations that run bitcoin behind the scenes. There are two methods for the miners to get paid: For a little while longer just mining pays in bitcoin as the supply grows, but in addition you can attach fees to a transaction that the miner can collect. The miners then convert those bitcoin into fiat currency because they are in the business of making money. More on that in a moment.
It's possible to mine bitcoin yourself, but the amounts you'd need to live a life or run a business aren't possible to mine without an unreasonable investment in mining hardware and at that point you're just a miner. Typically, end users of bitcoin will trade their own fiat currency for bitcoin using an exchange. This is not unique to cryptocurrencies; if I were to take a trip to the US, I would have to use a currency exchange to convert my Canadian dollars to US dollars similarly.
You can't just pretend that bitcoin don't have value relative to other currencies, because currencies other than bitcoin aren't traded for in order to get rich; People around the world buy Canadian dollars, for example, because they want Canadian oil, or metals, or wood, or pulp and paper, or food products, or to stay in Canadian hotels or eat in Canadian restaurants or to hire Canadian engineering firms or contractors or to buy Canadian houses or to pay Canadian taxes. The worth of that dollar is in the goods and services you can buy with that dollar. You can say "oh, the value of a bitcoin relative to the USD doesn't matter" all you want, but if I can sell my bitcoin for enough to buy a new Tesla one year and I can sell my bitcoin for enough to buy a used Toyota Corolla the next, that's a real difference in what's sitting in my driveway, and you'll care how much you're getting paid in how much stuff you can buy a lot.
Since Bitcoin isn't a currency, it isn't a good store of value, isn't a unit of account, isn't a method of exchange, you can't measure the purchasing power of a bitcoin, because you can't buy most things with bitcoin.
You might be able to find a land lord who is willing to transact in bitcoin, but your power bill is in dollars, your water bill is in dollars, your heating bill is in dollars, your phone bill is in dollars, the car dealership takes dollars, the insurance company takes dollars, and there isn't an alternative there. Virtually every grocer on the planet takes fiat currency and not bitcoin as well. You might be able to find some farmer somewhere who is willing to transact in bitcoin, but if you go to Sobeys or Safeway or Superstore, they want dollars. Even bitcoin miners deal in fiat currency because you need dollars to pay employees, to keep the lights on, to buy GPUs, and so on.
Even vendors who "take bitcoin" don't actually price anything in bitcoin because as the data already shows, the purchasing power of bitcoin is wildly unstable. What they actually do is convert the price of the thing in fiat currency to the equivalent number of bitcoin bought or sold on an exchange. When Tesla was selling their cars for bitcoin, they set the price in terms of how many bitcoin would buy against the car's price in US dollars the moment you started the purchasing process, and you could only press the purchase button for a short time, I think it was maybe an hour before the process reset and you'd need to get a new quote for purchasing the car in bitcoin because the price of bitcoin is highly unstable and they didn't want people getting a discount by preparing to buy the car when bitcoin was higher and finishing the purchase when bitcoin was lower. It's notable that they only continued this process until May of that year, so about 3 months total. They made an excuse about the environment, but I'm pretty confident the real reason they stopped is that bitcoin is a terrible method of exchange; Even with their pricing process being what it was, they couldn't immediately accept the bitcoin and convert it to fiat since it takes so long to process a bitcoin transaction.
Given all this, you have to judge its value compared to currencies whose buying power we know because despite their faults, they are a store of value, they are a unit of account, and they are a method of exchange.
Finally, there's the fact that you're a Canadian citizen, meaning that having a unit of account is very important because at the end of the day, you need to be able to tell the government how many equivalent Canadian dollars you made, and you need to convert some of your bitcoin into a percentage of your earnings, because you need to pay the government its taxes in Canadian dollars. Besides that, having to report income in Canadian dollars against a volatile currency makes taxation much more difficult because you not only have to record the transaction in bitcoin, but keep track of the exchange rate at the time so you can report the correct number of dollars.
Everything I wrote is cold hard reality. Sophistry isn't going to change the facts.
It's divorced from the reality of how bitcoin are created, how typical users would acquire bitcoin, how bitcoin would typically be used, how currency markets work, and perhaps most importantly what's required under the law at the end of the day.
Bitcoin are typically created by miners. These are people or companies running computer systems using either GPUs or ASICs that complete the equations that run bitcoin behind the scenes. There are two methods for the miners to get paid: For a little while longer just mining pays in bitcoin as the supply grows, but in addition you can attach fees to a transaction that the miner can collect. The miners then convert those bitcoin into fiat currency because they are in the business of making money. More on that in a moment.
It's possible to mine bitcoin yourself, but the amounts you'd need to live a life or run a business aren't possible to mine without an unreasonable investment in mining hardware and at that point you're just a miner. Typically, end users of bitcoin will trade their own fiat currency for bitcoin using an exchange. This is not unique to cryptocurrencies; if I were to take a trip to the US, I would have to use a currency exchange to convert my Canadian dollars to US dollars similarly.
You can't just pretend that bitcoin don't have value relative to other currencies, because currencies other than bitcoin aren't traded for in order to get rich; People around the world buy Canadian dollars, for example, because they want Canadian oil, or metals, or wood, or pulp and paper, or food products, or to stay in Canadian hotels or eat in Canadian restaurants or to hire Canadian engineering firms or contractors or to buy Canadian houses or to pay Canadian taxes. The worth of that dollar is in the goods and services you can buy with that dollar. You can say "oh, the value of a bitcoin relative to the USD doesn't matter" all you want, but if I can sell my bitcoin for enough to buy a new Tesla one year and I can sell my bitcoin for enough to buy a used Toyota Corolla the next, that's a real difference in what's sitting in my driveway, and you'll care how much you're getting paid in how much stuff you can buy a lot.
Since Bitcoin isn't a currency, it isn't a good store of value, isn't a unit of account, isn't a method of exchange, you can't measure the purchasing power of a bitcoin, because you can't buy most things with bitcoin.
You might be able to find a land lord who is willing to transact in bitcoin, but your power bill is in dollars, your water bill is in dollars, your heating bill is in dollars, your phone bill is in dollars, the car dealership takes dollars, the insurance company takes dollars, and there isn't an alternative there. Virtually every grocer on the planet takes fiat currency and not bitcoin as well. You might be able to find some farmer somewhere who is willing to transact in bitcoin, but if you go to Sobeys or Safeway or Superstore, they want dollars. Even bitcoin miners deal in fiat currency because you need dollars to pay employees, to keep the lights on, to buy GPUs, and so on.
Even vendors who "take bitcoin" don't actually price anything in bitcoin because as the data already shows, the purchasing power of bitcoin is wildly unstable. What they actually do is convert the price of the thing in fiat currency to the equivalent number of bitcoin bought or sold on an exchange. When Tesla was selling their cars for bitcoin, they set the price in terms of how many bitcoin would buy against the car's price in US dollars the moment you started the purchasing process, and you could only press the purchase button for a short time, I think it was maybe an hour before the process reset and you'd need to get a new quote for purchasing the car in bitcoin because the price of bitcoin is highly unstable and they didn't want people getting a discount by preparing to buy the car when bitcoin was higher and finishing the purchase when bitcoin was lower. It's notable that they only continued this process until May of that year, so about 3 months total. They made an excuse about the environment, but I'm pretty confident the real reason they stopped is that bitcoin is a terrible method of exchange; Even with their pricing process being what it was, they couldn't immediately accept the bitcoin and convert it to fiat since it takes so long to process a bitcoin transaction.
Given all this, you have to judge its value compared to currencies whose buying power we know because despite their faults, they are a store of value, they are a unit of account, and they are a method of exchange.
Finally, there's the fact that you're a Canadian citizen, meaning that having a unit of account is very important because at the end of the day, you need to be able to tell the government how many equivalent Canadian dollars you made, and you need to convert some of your bitcoin into a percentage of your earnings, because you need to pay the government its taxes in Canadian dollars. Besides that, having to report income in Canadian dollars against a volatile currency makes taxation much more difficult because you not only have to record the transaction in bitcoin, but keep track of the exchange rate at the time so you can report the correct number of dollars.
Everything I wrote is cold hard reality. Sophistry isn't going to change the facts.
I'm pushing back hard on your statements that bitcoin is stable and that businesses can price their goods in bitcoin.
I went back and found 10 years of data showing what the price of bitcoin was in US dollars in March (in 2013 I started in April because that's when the data starts)
Month Year USD/btc, yoy % Change
apr 2013, 135 -
mar 2014, 457 238
mar 2015, 243 -46
mar 2016, 415 70
mar 2017, 1078 159
mar 2018, 6897 539
mar 2019, 4103 -40
mar 2020, 6403 56
mar 2021, 58668 816
mar 2022, 47043 -19
mar 2023, 22367 -52
This data shows something with ridiculously volatile value. It might double or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple, or octople, or it might drop by 20%, 40%, or 50%.
Central banks try to keep their currencies stuck at about 2% change. At 8%, they're in full panic mode, implementing QT and raising rates at record speeds.
So imagine now that you're a business trying to price your goods in an environment like this. One year you have to half your prices, then the next year you have to double them, then half them again, and again, and then you have to drop your prices to 1/5th what you previously charge, then the next you have to double them, then you have to halve them, then you have to drop your prices to 1/8th of what you charged, then you have to increase them by a quarter, then double them again.
How could you even stay in business in such an environment? You agree to purchase materials and the cost could double or halve from ordering the materials and agreeing upon a price to actually having the materials in your warehouse. You could agree to hire someone and each week the wage you're paying changes in purchasing power.
How do you do accounting for a year? How can you plan ahead when you don't know if a bitcoin is going to be worth $5,000 or $50,000? How much profit will you make this year? Even if you can predict that, how much value does that profit represent?
This data should be proof positive that it isn't a store of value and isn't a unit of account. You don't know how much value you've stored after 1 year, you don't know how much stuff costs after 1 year, you don't know what to charge for stuff after 1 year, you don't know what to pay someone after 1 year.
I went back and found 10 years of data showing what the price of bitcoin was in US dollars in March (in 2013 I started in April because that's when the data starts)
Month Year USD/btc, yoy % Change
apr 2013, 135 -
mar 2014, 457 238
mar 2015, 243 -46
mar 2016, 415 70
mar 2017, 1078 159
mar 2018, 6897 539
mar 2019, 4103 -40
mar 2020, 6403 56
mar 2021, 58668 816
mar 2022, 47043 -19
mar 2023, 22367 -52
This data shows something with ridiculously volatile value. It might double or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple, or octople, or it might drop by 20%, 40%, or 50%.
Central banks try to keep their currencies stuck at about 2% change. At 8%, they're in full panic mode, implementing QT and raising rates at record speeds.
So imagine now that you're a business trying to price your goods in an environment like this. One year you have to half your prices, then the next year you have to double them, then half them again, and again, and then you have to drop your prices to 1/5th what you previously charge, then the next you have to double them, then you have to halve them, then you have to drop your prices to 1/8th of what you charged, then you have to increase them by a quarter, then double them again.
How could you even stay in business in such an environment? You agree to purchase materials and the cost could double or halve from ordering the materials and agreeing upon a price to actually having the materials in your warehouse. You could agree to hire someone and each week the wage you're paying changes in purchasing power.
How do you do accounting for a year? How can you plan ahead when you don't know if a bitcoin is going to be worth $5,000 or $50,000? How much profit will you make this year? Even if you can predict that, how much value does that profit represent?
This data should be proof positive that it isn't a store of value and isn't a unit of account. You don't know how much value you've stored after 1 year, you don't know how much stuff costs after 1 year, you don't know what to charge for stuff after 1 year, you don't know what to pay someone after 1 year.
My current prediction is that the governments need to pretend everything's fine, so the interest rates will continue to rise, but it won't matter because the federal reserve has already started the next round of QE on stealth mode.
Pfft, you spoiled kids with your full HD! Back when I was your age full HD meant you could fit 1.2 MB on a floppy disk.
The reason people invest in Bitcoin is solely that they hope it will someday reach hyperbitcoinization, or the mass adoption of Bitcoin for everyday use. At that point, someone who has a few Bitcoin would be a multi billionaire if you compare the value of all currency to the number of bitcoins. The instability of the price therefore is the intended purpose of the investment. If the real value of a bitcoin stayed the same for a long enough period, the market would likely collapse.
One thing with the whole discussion about mortgages is that it's sort of like the industrial revolution in the sense that it's all well and good to say you shouldn't use this thing, but you're competing in a marketplace with everyone else; if you take an hour to make something and they take a second you can't just sell your widget at 3000x the price and expect anyone to pay.
We live in a world with banking. Even for the people who are at the top end of the income curve, there simply isn't a reasonable option to own most homes without incurring debt. Because banking exists, leverage is a force multiplier that allows people who don't make a lot of money to spend quite a lot of money on certain things. That means that the price of certain things is simply higher than it would be otherwise, and there's nothing you can really do about that.
However, just because you can't throw out the concept entirely doesn't mean that you need to put a blindfold on and mindlessly jump off a cliff. You can run a phossy jaw factory that hurts people and the environment, or you can run your factory following good ethics and be a positive force for your customers, your employees, and your community. Likewise, you can take out the absolute maximum amount the bank is willing to give you and live with massive payments until the day you die and the house belongs to the bank, or you can choose to live within your means and buy less house than the bank says you can afford, so you plan to pay off your home from day 1 and in as short a time as possible and actually own the things you buy. From what I've seen, owning your own home in the clear is one of the most important things to being able to successfully retire.
Along the way though, you have to think for yourself because no one's going to do it for you.
We live in a world with banking. Even for the people who are at the top end of the income curve, there simply isn't a reasonable option to own most homes without incurring debt. Because banking exists, leverage is a force multiplier that allows people who don't make a lot of money to spend quite a lot of money on certain things. That means that the price of certain things is simply higher than it would be otherwise, and there's nothing you can really do about that.
However, just because you can't throw out the concept entirely doesn't mean that you need to put a blindfold on and mindlessly jump off a cliff. You can run a phossy jaw factory that hurts people and the environment, or you can run your factory following good ethics and be a positive force for your customers, your employees, and your community. Likewise, you can take out the absolute maximum amount the bank is willing to give you and live with massive payments until the day you die and the house belongs to the bank, or you can choose to live within your means and buy less house than the bank says you can afford, so you plan to pay off your home from day 1 and in as short a time as possible and actually own the things you buy. From what I've seen, owning your own home in the clear is one of the most important things to being able to successfully retire.
Along the way though, you have to think for yourself because no one's going to do it for you.
They don't even need to successfully ban cryptos, they just need to make it illegal to convert cryptos to fiat.
If they can take Dick Masterson's credit card privileges away for newproject2, I guarantee you they can take away coinbase's credit card privileges, and suddenly crypto is no longer a thing.
If they can take Dick Masterson's credit card privileges away for newproject2, I guarantee you they can take away coinbase's credit card privileges, and suddenly crypto is no longer a thing.
Couldn't you say that for literally anything? They could ban cryptos. They could bail-in your savings and they're gone. They could confiscate gold.
In my view, if you invested your savings in tax efficient vehicles like RRSPs (in Canada, equivalent to a 401k in the US I believe, but I don't know if you can use 401ks for what I'm about to talk about), then you can get a tax refund for holding the money, potentially get growth from the money greater than the 0.01% the savings account would give you, and you can cash it out at a lower tax rate in the event you need it.
A currency needs to do three things: it needs to be a store value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange.
As a store of value, it's a pretty poor one. Something like 80% of people who invested in Bitcoin are underwater. From the peak, Bitcoin has lost half it's value even with it's latest gains, making it even worse than most of the world's Fiat currencies in terms of retaining value. It's extremely volatile regardless, so you could definitely make the argument that I'm cherry picking, but the fact is something that may go dramatically up or dramatically down at any time isn't a good store of value.
For the same reason, it's a terrible unit of account. How many bitcoins is your house worth? From day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, that number is dramatically different. Therefore, the way that Bitcoin tends to be used where it is pretended to be used as a currency is something is priced in US dollars, and the person will use their local currency to purchase Bitcoin at the equivalent value, then the recipient will convert that Bitcoin into their local currency.
Finally, it's not a very good medium of exchange. If I go to the store and want to buy something with my Fiat currency, I either hand them the currency or I use my bank card and the money comes directly out of my account. If I go to the store and want to buy something with my bitcoin, for pretty much anything that I want to buy that's not an option. I have to sell my Bitcoin into the local currency and purchase what I want with the actual currency.
I'm not the only one saying this either. A number of people who are very much into cryptos have come out and said that Bitcoin is not a currency. Some crypto companies have gone in front of the US Congress under oath and said that Bitcoin is not a currency. It's an investment vehicle, it's a property, but it isn't a currency.
In that sense, holding Bitcoin isn't savings, so investing in it with the hope to beat inflation isn't savings, it's just a other asset class in an investment portfolio, and having your money in that investment portfolio is my point.
As a store of value, it's a pretty poor one. Something like 80% of people who invested in Bitcoin are underwater. From the peak, Bitcoin has lost half it's value even with it's latest gains, making it even worse than most of the world's Fiat currencies in terms of retaining value. It's extremely volatile regardless, so you could definitely make the argument that I'm cherry picking, but the fact is something that may go dramatically up or dramatically down at any time isn't a good store of value.
For the same reason, it's a terrible unit of account. How many bitcoins is your house worth? From day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, that number is dramatically different. Therefore, the way that Bitcoin tends to be used where it is pretended to be used as a currency is something is priced in US dollars, and the person will use their local currency to purchase Bitcoin at the equivalent value, then the recipient will convert that Bitcoin into their local currency.
Finally, it's not a very good medium of exchange. If I go to the store and want to buy something with my Fiat currency, I either hand them the currency or I use my bank card and the money comes directly out of my account. If I go to the store and want to buy something with my bitcoin, for pretty much anything that I want to buy that's not an option. I have to sell my Bitcoin into the local currency and purchase what I want with the actual currency.
I'm not the only one saying this either. A number of people who are very much into cryptos have come out and said that Bitcoin is not a currency. Some crypto companies have gone in front of the US Congress under oath and said that Bitcoin is not a currency. It's an investment vehicle, it's a property, but it isn't a currency.
In that sense, holding Bitcoin isn't savings, so investing in it with the hope to beat inflation isn't savings, it's just a other asset class in an investment portfolio, and having your money in that investment portfolio is my point.
Which currency resists inflation? Virtually every one I'm aware of has been marching in lockstep towards valuelessness