> Gold is a tulip. ... The only reason we think it’s valuable is it’s sufficiently rare for other people to think it’s valuable.
Absolutely not. Gold has a variety of functional uses in electronics. It's used for its physical properties in a lot of spacecraft. And until dentistry had modern options gold fillings were common (not even that long ago- my own mother has a couple gold fillings).
I don’t know why people are so keen to dismiss aesthetic value of gold as somehow not being relevant as a functional use.
We don’t just use gold for jewellery because it’s valuable, we also use it for that because it looks good. Better than many other materials we could use.
Now you could argue that we only think it looks good because it’s valuable, and maybe that is how it came about, but I think it’s been embedded into the culture deeply enough that gold as a material looks great to us on it’s own merit at this point.
Aesthetic value is real value, as we can tell due to peoples willingness to pay for artistic objects even if made from cheap materials.
That's a good point, and I think there are many civilizations that have used gold only for its aesthetic value. The Incan empire had ornaments, statues, etc., in pure gold, yet they didn't use it as currency. One of the emperors gifted the Spanish conquistadors a big room full of gold, as a token of friendship. It all went downhill from there.
That's because aesthetic value is intertwined with the value coming from "it's valuable". If aesthetic value dominated, fake gold would be much closer in price than it actually is.
The value of gold being embedded in society is similar to the value a dollar bill derives from being embedded in society. It's valued because it's valuable, which really means it's a reflection of values coming from other sources, and not something on its own.
I'm hardly an expert on gold aesthetics, but I would have guessed you could get all or nearly all gold's aesthetic properties from other cheaper materials. Like what's the cubic zirconium of gold?
Gold is a noble metal; bts low reactivity and stability make it excelent as a material to have in constant contact with the body.
I am allergic to most metals, and only highest purity surgical stainless steel, surgical titanum, and noble metals can come in constant contact with my skin without generating rashes. I can only wear piercings made of surgical titanum, gold and platinum.
Gold is extremely ductile, malleable, and is very easy to amalgamate, alloy, and mix with other metals.
This and other minor properties, plus the aesthetic factor, is what makes it the best material for jewelry; it's extremely easy to work with, it's safe to use, it won't react under normal circumstances, degrade or get ruined by time.
I don't know any alloy that has similar properties that isn't either super expensive, has a different color, or io hard to worx with.
Gold is useful, but most of it's value doesn't derive from its industrial uses. Only 11% of gold production goes to non-jewellery industry.
Furthermore, it's non-industrial value doesn't derive from its industrial use: if industry could switch to something else overnight (like fillings did), gold would still be a value store.
> presumably predominantly decoration and wealth storage.
People without access to banks wear their wealth on them. That seems super risky but you see it every day on the street. I suppose they have no alternative.
I have seen in photos that when my parents married my mother was draped in gold, which she never wore again. As a kid I once was with her when she visited her safety deposit box and I picked up one of the bangles which immediately bent out of circularity. It wasn't designed to be worn, or at least to be worn once, very carefully.
Jewelry stores in the US don't seem to sell by weight. I remember jewelry stores always pulling out the scale and calculator to tell you the price -- it must have changed every day.
They also adorn their children. I asked why families living on the street would spend so much to give a child a gold earring. “So if they get lost the person who finds them knows someone cares about them and wants them back”
Gold as an asset reminds me of those NASDAQ-listed companies that assert they will never declare a dividend. Any intrinsic value their stock might have is simply the belief that someday, somebody else will buy it.
> Any value my money has is simply the belief that someday, someone else will accept it in exchange for something else.
Yes of course but cash is quite liquid while a share is not. In other words, that dollar will be accepted by the butcher, baker, or cabinet maker while demand for that share of coinbase fluctuates wildly.
It would be remiss not to mention Gold makes incredible jewellery. And jewellery - or the act of decorating ourselves to distinguish between one another - is an innate part of all our cultures.
An item can last longer than a lifetime, be passed down generations, melted and reformed into something new whilst being the "same" material. These are astonishing properties. Tulips and currency both rot, but at different rates.
The value of it is relative. In happy times, sure, not worth so much. Bartering to get yourself out of trouble...a Rolex tells the time and opens cell doors.
Indeed, not a lot of gold gets traded, compared to what is mined. People joke that the metal is dug out of the ground just to be buried back (in vaults).
So food is tulip. Steel is tulip... everything is tulip? It's not the existence of utility that matters but the degree. Gold is much more useful than tulips.
The value of gold is detached from its utility, just as the value of tulips during tulip mania were detached from their decorative value. The value of steel, on the other hand, is not detached from its utility value.
gold is a reliable hedge and store of value that survived 5000 years: longer than any empire, longer than any bond issue, longer than any real estate holding, longer than any fiat currency.
Even more relevantly, gold was a relatively dense solid substance that didn't corrode or otherwise degrade. It was an excellent choice for currency, once you could get enough of it to avoid problems of currency supply.
off the top of my head, gold is non corrosive. it doesn't react with anything.
I'm convinced the great filter has something to do with the availability of gold to a species. There are all manner of gold based alloys that we haven't researched and There are all sorts of technological innovations locked away from us simply because gold is too expensive.
case in point, a boat hull coated in a gold alloy could be non reactive. no more need for antifouling paint or sacrificial anodes.
Generally alloys can selectively corrode, so with a combination of gold and iron the iron may still be attacked. But certainly some gold alloys provide improved hardness without being very vulnerable.
For a boat the gold coating would need to include all metal parts in contact with the water (rudder pins, prop shaft, etc) and it would be an interesting experiment to learn whether it really prevents fouling (I can imagine that wear and damage to the coating might provide cervices for growth to anchor)
I'm likely one or two generations younger than your mother and I have a gold filling.
I got it intentionally when I needed a crown on a back molar, to remind myself of where I came from: my grandparent's generation had to sell their gold fillings for safe passage from harm.
That's where but for the grace of an uncaring universe go I.
100% not - but it sure does bubble up in price (due to speculation).
Gold is malleable, and non-degrading.
It can be readily converted between blocks for storage, and other forms required for function purposes.
It does not degrade - it will not react with water or air (or the water there-in); it is an effective indefinite store (until, that is, it gets stolen).
Honestly, there is no one left who doesn't know the Tulip story at this point. It's not some niche historical thing. A vast, vast majority of everyone tangentially related to crypto or finance and the HN crowd know what it is.
The answer even according to this framework is pretty much a blanket "yes, unless it helps you buy illegal drugs", considering that's the only thing you can really purchase with cryptocurrencies that has any value outside of the network.
This is not an issue for America of course as folks who move away without renouncing will continue to owe taxes to Uncle Sam for the rest of their natural lives and if they do renounce, they have to pay taxes on all of their assets as though they disposed of them at the time of renunciation - plus paying a significant fee.
It could be funny if it wasn't sad, how worried some seem to be with how bad those people miles above their tax bracket are hit by taxes. I would have expected the "tax the rich" slogan had more popularity but no... so they either consider themselves in that rich group, or think they're gonna get there soon (hello ponzi). I can't figure any other explanation, maybe a few millions make you a philanthropist saint deserving a special untouchable statute?
Re: Axie Infinity and Play 2 Earn games, it was explained to me that there is a significative number of people (many in the Philippines, apparently) making a living out of this. That is, their time is sunk into this game not because they enjoy it or derive any pleasure out of it -- from what I've seen, it's not an enjoyable game and wouldn't exist without the money reward aspect -- but because it's a way to earn a living.
Are these people enjoying the game? Doubtful. They found a way to make a living. Is this a "productive" way to earn a living? Also doubtful. But is it any different from professional poker players (other than poker is probably a better game than Axie Infinity)?
I know it rubs me the wrong way. I don't know what to call it though -- tulip, scam, ponzi, or just a wasteful use of human time that could be better spent in more pleasurable activities, if money wasn't an issue.
Poker is gambling - winners make money by taking losers' money, that is well understood.
In Play 2 Earn my understanding is that it's not gambling, instead money "magically" appears from merely playing the game.
The only way for this to be sustainable is if the output from playing the game is something that someone else finds valuable and can't be automated (otherwise why not automate it?) like Mechanical Turk or the various captcha-solving services.
I don't believe this is the case, so the only other answer is that the buy-ins from newer players are used to reward existing ones - aka a Ponzi. Alternatively, it could be that the system isn't even a Ponzi and is instead bankrolled by the parent company which itself is bankrolled by clueless investors not realizing the above (Play 2 Earn will only work if the entire system produces an output that someone else values enough to pay for and can't get said output elsewhere for cheaper).
Poker is actually not that much different than what you describe. My father played a lot of poker in card rooms. He talked a lot about losing strategically to the fish, to keep them coming back. Without the fish, there generally is no poker ecosystem since money generally follows the button, and without particularly weak players money just tends to change hands. And since there is a rake at most tables, you need a constant influx of money just to support the play.
There is common wisdom that the rake can kill a local poker ecosystem. There can be a lot if good games for weeks or months, then all the weak players can’t sustain any longer, and all the medium players start losing and lose interest, and there’s no one left to win money from and games get harder to form.
How can money appear "magically"? Not even crypto just "appears", and a fiat much less so. Somebody is pumping money into that system - casual gamers, no idea.
AFAIK most players quit after the price tanked. Axie was only employing people for a few months.
You need to ask where the money to pay those players comes from, and the answer is a mix of speculators and new players buying in to the game. So it's just another tulip/ponzi mix.
Certificate transparency only uses a blockchain if you redefine a blockchain to mean "any use of a merkle tree", which is all certificate transparency logs are.
What a blockchain normally means is something that has added some sort of attempt at solving the two generals problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem), as the original bitcoin whitepaper outlined.
That is to say, blockchains have a consensus mechanism to resolve multiple writers, with some of those being potentially untrusted.
If Certificate Transparency is a blockchain, than so are the zfs filesystem (which also uses a merkle tree internally), git, and dynamodb.
Is it even a blockchain in the cryptocurrency sense of the word? It's a chain of trust where every addition cryptographically signs the previous entry (to prevent the database from being modified retroactively) but as far as I know there's no "mining" process nor decentralization - the log is still controlled by a central entity.
Not sure if the parent author meant a specific company or was just referring to the general domain of certificate verification. There are certificate verification projects in the blockchain space that go beyond what you describe.
The parent post capitalized Certificate Transparency, so they probably meant the Certificate Transparency project, as described here: https://certificate.transparency.dev/
I hadn't seen any of these blockchain projects that try to provide a similar audit log for issued certificates that you reference... mind naming them? Particularly any that can actually be used?
Adjustable rate loans and all kinds of investment products don't make good financial sense, but that's not the same thing as a scam. An ARM is not fraudulent, it's just dangerous, in the same way that credit cards are easy to abuse but aren't scams or ponzi schemes.
ARMs are not fraudulent because the terms are clearly disclosed. If someone chooses to borrow money and agrees to unfavorable terms they have supposedly made an informed decision. ARMs are not Ponzi schemes, and there’s no rug pull or fake valuations. They are just bad financial decisions for a lot of people.
Even so, finding examples of scams or fraud or risky investments that aren’t crypto doesn’t validate crypto. People are capable of all kinds of scams and frauds. Crypto is just a near-perfect vehicle for scammers.
The ARMs in the 1980s in the United States were well-documented and the potential interest rate increase was both "rate-limited" and capped. They were not fraudulent.
The terminology here doesn't work. If you're calling something a "tulip," you're calling it an *unsustainable* bubble, because it comes from Dutch "tulip mania." But to take an easy example, gold isn't an unsustainable bubble. Neither is art. Not like Dutch tulips. It's too late to successfully redefine what "tulip" means.
Even if you use a different word, the category doesn't work. The fact is, bitcoin and ethereum are each sui generis.
Bitcoin, for example, differs from gold in *important* ways. There are various theories people have for why it might be able to hold value in the long run, and none of them are reducible to something that has existed before. It's a new experiment. People can argue that bitcoin won't hold value, but not by a 1:1 reduction to something that has existed before. On that note, the author is very right to point out that bitcoin is not, technically, a Ponzi scheme, and that point is much appreciated.
Just want to point out that according to the authors framework for determining if a project is a ponzi, Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and many more gig economy businesses would also qualify as ponzis since they have to spend move to get users then they bring in and have not been and probably will never be profitable
There’s a still-untested possibility that Uber / Lyft / DoorDash can become profitable when autonomous vehicles scale out and they can stop paying humans for labor and the use of their private vehicles. Hard to model the economics accurately since it’s still so early.
But in some ways, until autonomous vehicles can go everywhere, they need a blend of autonomous cars and human-driven cars to be the first stop app for rides. Then they can route an autonomous car or human driven car depending on the ride needed.
Otherwise riders will hit a wall if they request a ride outside the autonomous service zone.
Cities where they've allowed their infrastructure to stagnate due to reliance on those private companies are going to be in for a rough time when they inevitably fail or drastically raise their pricing.
What comes next when private enterprises extinguish municipal services with unsustainable business practices? Can the municipalities recover? or are we watching hostile privatization?
Not profitable is not the same thing as ponzi. Ponzi means you rely on the next greater fool to buy your bags. If uber stock were advertised in the same way crypo is then you would be right
Although it is telling that the best cryptos are compared with failing and unprofitable companies
You could save money because either investors were subsidizing it or drivers were getting screwed. The former has definitely ended and drivers are wisening up - Uber nowadays isn't significantly more expensive than taxis.
crypto isn't gold because gold doesn't need any continuous work to be done to remain a "store of value".
If every single gold miner would stop doing work, gold would still have "value". If every bitcoin miner stopped doing work, bitcoin would have zero value (as impossible to use as need miners to create new blocks on the chain).
That is why I dislike any comparison to gold and why crypto feels like a ponzi to me, even if its not technically a ponzi. To me a ponzi is a scheme that requires a continuous inflow of new money to prop up the old invested money. Crypto seems that way, we have to constantly spend money on it (via mining) to prop it up. If we stopped spending that money, it would by definition collapse to zero.
Just because there are incentives to keep on spending the money, doesn't take away from the fact that it requires it as well.
This is a terrible argument. Yes, gambling is less bad than hyperinflation. But a well-designed stablecoin like DAI, RAI, or RSV is far less risky than gambling on tulips.
As such, if a token has relatively constant supply and demand, its price should go up with the money supply.
The problem is, I agree, that the demand is far from constant. But if you hold them so that their price is not correlated among each other, it might get smoother.
Ray Dalio uses gold and a commodities index in his All-Weather portfolio, in case of inflation.
Ponzi's rely on deception, but crypto projects are the complete opposite- they are entirely public. Literally every transaction is public. So the entire premise/title of this article is nonsense.
Also the shade thrown at Cardano is ridiculous. They write "Their focus on convincing YouTube influencers to promote Cardano.." But the truth is the opposite. Cardano relies on thousands of validators to secure the network, who in turn are incentivized to market themselves. So it's not that YouTube influencers were convinced to do anything- it's highly technical people that were convinced to market the network. Big difference, and actually quite smart.
Yes, you're just not clever enough to understand all of the jargon I just invented and refuse to explain, audit every line of code, audit the organization that actually controls the project, spend a month brainstorming all of the possible failure modes and get a PhD in multiple disciplines to discover if any of my claims are deceptive.
Because the legacy banking system will just take their money. Decentralized systems are not only more transparent, they are also more inclusive. But note- dollars are far and away the largest medium of exchange for criminals. So if you want to get into that comparison, feel free.
Absolutely not. Gold has a variety of functional uses in electronics. It's used for its physical properties in a lot of spacecraft. And until dentistry had modern options gold fillings were common (not even that long ago- my own mother has a couple gold fillings).
He also skips over why it's called a Tulip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania