I'd rather my paycheck be denominated in ...
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- What's the highest dollar price will Bitcoin reach in 2024? Posted on March 20th, 2024 | 68 comments
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Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the "GOLD" option guys. Probably the only "currency" which is outpacing inflation by many miles
€ (euro) (Score:5, Insightful)
Swiss Francs baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the world's most stable and strong currency.
Australian dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
Australian dollars for me, thank you.
BitCoin! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is BitCoin? This is slashdot after all.
Re:Swiss Francs baby (Score:3, Insightful)
5000 years (Score:2, Insightful)
I would suggest that things that actually have a practical value (food or oil for example) are a better store of value.
Five thousand years of history prove you wrong.
Gold has one very practical value in that it has a peculiar color and is corrosion resistant. That, added to the fact that it's relatively but not too much scarce, is what made it the currency of choice for all recorded history.
Don't let the few past decades, when politicians have used inflation so heavily to fund their follies, deceive you. Inflation has existed before, but in the end it all comes back to gold as a measure of value.
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the "GOLD" option guys. Probably the only "currency" which is outpacing inflation by many miles
And just like the NASDAQ in 1999 and housing prices in 2006, it can only go up in value, right?
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but gold is not the end-all utopia the guys on the radio are hawking it to be. Guess who is making money off of gold right now...it's the guys selling it and dealing in the stocks. It ain't the guy with a couple of Eagles in his home safe.
We had the Great Depression on the gold standard, remember.
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason it has any value at all is because society at large agrees that it has value.
But that's true for most things including gold, US dollars, Apple stock, rare stamps, Van Gogh paintings, numbers in your bank account stored in some computer somewhere, numbers in your WoW account stored in some computer somewhere.
What would have inherent value to a human being would be stuff like good water/drinks and food.
Once you get beyond the necessities for survival it goes to "if enough people think it's valuable, it's valuable" and "your mind makes it real".
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
Money replicator.. Isn't that called a bank?
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no.
That people had to sweep it off the streets isn't a valid argument; if I pour saffron on the streets, someone would have to sweep it off too, but that doesn't show that saffron holds a negative value, only that saffron on the street does.
Failure to realise a value isn't a liability.
People didn't throw the money away because holding on to it was a liability (i.e. it was worth less than zero), but because converting the close-to-zero value into gain wasn't cost-effective for them.
It's an asymptotic function:
x = money in circulation
f(x) = monetary value
lim f(x), x -> infinity = 0
0 is never negative, even for large values of x.
Re:€ (euro) (Score:4, Insightful)
Would that be Greece, Spain, Ireland or Portugal you're talking about?
Re:Swiss Francs baby (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obvious Missing - GOLD (Score:5, Insightful)
With gold, the downside risk is even worse than with the stock or housing market. A house is always worth something because it can generate income from rent. The same is true with stocks--the businesses on the whole will generate some profit, giving them some intrinsic value.
Gold generates no rent, no profits, no nothing. Unlike investments that generate money, gold has no intrinsic value; it is traded on pure speculation (industrial use is an insignificant part of the market).
In 1980 gold lost half its value basically overnight. There is no reason why this (or something worse) can't happen again.
Re:Swiss Francs baby (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you regard Bloomberg and Businessweek as bullshit and unreliable too?
Euro Volatility Signals Weakness as Confidence Falls [businessweek.com] (Jun 2010) "The biggest currency fluctuations since the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. are signaling waning confidence in the economic recovery and prospects for a rebound in the euro. The euro’s 15 percent plunge against the dollar this year sparked a 6 percent loss for bets tied to foreign-exchange price volatility, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc indexes. That’s the worst performance among four currency strategies tracked by RBS" ... “The sources of concern won’t go away anytime soon” ... "One-month implied volatility for the euro versus the dollar rose to 18.6 percent on May 21, the highest level in 14 months. It also exceeds the 11.4 percent average in the past year. The measure will average closer to 15 percent in the future"
Perhaps Reuters is bullshit too: volatility in the euro market [reuters.com]
Check the 1-year graph on the EuroCurrency Volatility Index [cboe.com] (which, incidentally, is even not showing the full picture as this is dollar-tracked, while both USD and EUR are falling together relative to other currencies.)
And the volatility and crisis are far from over, they're still unwinding.
Seriously, Euro-zone volatility and currency weakness have been one of the biggest things in global news for going on a year, I can't begin to imagine how anyone could miss it unless they literally never read the news.
Re:€ (euro) (Score:5, Insightful)
You can still have a bank account if you are poor. No-frills, ATM only accounts are easy to get, have no minimum balance and no fees. If you can't get a bank account, it is most likely not because you are poor, but because you do shit you shouldn't, like write bad checks, or falsify personal information. Hell my (recently evicted) broke-ass, ex-roommate had a bank account, despite managing to overdraw it and other stupid things.
It really isn't that it is expensive to be poor, it is that it is expensive to routinely make bad decisions.