Beanie babies, no. Gold, kinda. There is a "fixed" amount of gold (not counting the whole comet/asteroid harvesting thing) but the stock to flow isn't fixed.
Because mankind has never known an asset that is both absolutely scarce and totally inelastic to demand.
Beanie babies are no longer in production, so they definitely have a fixed supply. At least "original beanie babies". Another example would be land (ignoring the moon, mars, etc). Or oil. Or rare earth metals. Uranium. etc. All have fixed supplies - though agreed on the stock-to-flow aspects. That's true. But for most assets, there's demand for a reason (except beanie babies). In Bitcoin's case, the demand is simply because people want it. Outside of a few true use cases where it's necessary (moving money across borders, evading sanctions, etc), Bitcoin's demand comes from convenience (24/7 direct access, etc) or simple desire (I want to own it because it's going up or because its cool or because I think it's the future or whatever). Unlike land or oil, there's very little absolute necessity in that. That means while supply is restrained, demand can be extremely elastic - there's not a lot to underpin its value except bitcoin bulls, which is why its prone to such big drops when sentiment falls (and such big rises when sentiment rises). Without underlying necessity, it's just a speculative asset. Nothing wrong with that, but there's no reason for it to go up forever - it will simply go up until people decide the risks outweigh the rewards.
Beanie babies are still in production, the original company is still operating, and the trademark/brand could always be purchased by someone else if the original company were to ever cease. This is not a good example. The quote was "supply cannot adjust to a massive influx of new demand" this is only absolutely true for Bitcoin and to some degree land (although real estate gets weird because you can terraform and build up, etc). And people want it because it is: Scarce Durable Portable Divisible Identifiable Fungible
I don't like smoking and don't smoke, but I've owned Altria for years. If I can make steady income off of smokers, I'm ok with that.
lol...that's what I say about TSLA. Don't care for them. Don't care for the elon fanbois. Wouldn't buy one but money is money..
Except none of things drive actual demand - they accentuate demand but in and of themselves, they are meaningless. If it did, all the other random cryptos with fixed supply would have value too as they all share those 6 features. These are nice supplemental things, but you don't want things just because they are divisible or identifiable. For example, poop is portable and can be divided - that doesn't make it something people want or more valuable than poop that wasn't portable or couldn't be divided. A student ID card is identifiable, but no one demands or collects those. Land is valuable because you need it to live. Oil is valuable because you use it power things. That's the underlying demand. Then if land is scarce, it becomes more valuable. But the scarcity is an "add on" feature of something that's already in demand for other reasons. Outside of a handful of use cases, Bitcoin's "demand" is primarily "I want it" or "I think it will go up". If people stop thinking it will go up for some reason, the value would go towards 0 because its not a commodity that's actually needed for anything (minus the limited real-life use cases it provides) - as we see with so many other cryptos that have all the same features you mention. Fortunately, as long as we have the Commodores of the world that plan to buy forever and never sell (I guess he will just eventually die with a pile of crypto?), we have continual demand. And since people lose it permanently, you have decreasing actual supply which makes it inherently deflationary. And those things make it investible. I would ask: What makes bitcoin more valuable than random shitcoin X? The answer is "people want it" or "people think it will go up". Beyond that, it has all the same core attributes you mention. People just don't want shitcoin X or think it will go up; thus, it doesn't.
You can't make "Pre-1999 Original Beanie Babies". They have a fixed supply and no more will ever exist. You can make something similar to it - but the same is true of Bitcoin. Anyone can make Batcoin or Betcoin or Botcoin and make them look just like Bitcoins. But everyone will know they are different, as with beanie babies. Or Babe Ruth autographed baseball cards.
That doesn't really explain why. Why is "absolute scarce and totally inelastic" a magic bullet? Or even ideal?
what makes the pre-1999 ones unable to be replicated? As far as replicating bitcoin, its not the network you have to replicate, its the network affect (all the mining, nodes, and structure built on the bitcoin network). you know what would be a really healthy practice for you ? go back to the beginning of this thread (2014) and figure out why you were wrong a decade ago. it cost you so much and you have learned nothing.
Same thing that makes it impossible to replicate the Mona Lisa or Babe Ruth baseballs. You can make copies that look identical, but they'll never be the original. But if you don't like the beanie baby example or the land example, you can just use any of 1000 random shitcoins that exist as the counterexample to Commodore's post that I originally replied to. That's fair - but that has nothing to do with the 6 elements that Donny mentioned that make it unique or what Commodore mentioned. The network has value - if the network creates value. The Amway or MaryKay networks have value; but if no one is buying Amway products, that value is substantially less than if everyone wants Amway products. I would agree Bitcoin's network separates it from random shitcoins, though. I never said bitcoin wouldn't go up - I don't think I've made price predictions on it because I don't think the pricing is based on anything except emotion and human psychology, which is inherently unpredictable. I evaluated its usefulness and said it was deflationary (it is), that I don't think it would function as a currency (it doesn't) or will do what its proponents claim in terms of revolutionizing the world or changing the financial system or things like that (it hasn't, as of yet). I said it was digital gold, and that's how it's essentially been used, so far. Unless you're investing in future income streams, money isn't made investing in things that are inherently good or valuable (or shorting things that are bad) - it's made by knowing how to invest in things that people want at a price below what people will pay for it. Bitcoin has been very good to me in that regard, but moreso by taking advantage of the volatility of it to generate consistent income rather than simply holding it (selling options, funding de-fi, etc). In that way, I use crypto to generate income in up or down markets. I rely more on the psychology of bitcoin than bitcoin itself and have found it far more effective than buy/hold. Back in 2014, your claim was that bitcoin would only be around today if it had utility (which it largely still doesn't and yet has value): Meanwhile, on Page 1, Commodore was arguing that one of Bitcoin's great features was that transactions are essentially free, which has proven not to be the case (and one of many reasons bitcoin doesn't function as a currency).
As I think I mentioned before, I'm not sure why anyone would really think a digital asset offers any inherent scarcity (relative to physical things that actually are scarce). Can lump in the things on top of it, though that tends to be more human behavior/psychological stuff, which...could apply to anything. It is a boring argument IMO though, so whatever...yeah OK let's just say it offers that. That doesn't seem to be helping it provide anything else of material value to society. Well unless you think that includes ways for hackers to extort companies making Marvel video games. Or you think the world needs another type of scam because the phrase "pig butchering" doesn't always have to involve pig intestines. Or maybe you're just old fashioned and like traditional money laundering, ponzi schemes, etc. Sorry I'm a little cranky. What the hell was Jock thinking? And why did Ime have him in there to begin with?
Nothing to say here except you're wrong. These properties create value, and value drives demand. Bitcoin has the best iteration of these properties on offer so far, which is why it is rapidly consuming most other asset's market cap, especially gold, which it competes against most directly as a store of value. No other crypto asset has a fixed supply because they have an issuer/are centralized. Bitcoin is unique in this sense, and it's a critical distinction. Would the student ID card be less valuable if it weren't identifiable/verifiable? I'd say yes. Would poop be less valuable if it couldn't be divided? I'd say yes. Might be the strangest sentence I've ever typed on this BBS. This is just another "intrinsic value" argument. There is plenty of value in an asset which cannot be destroyed, censored, confiscated, corrupted, or debased and can be stored secured easily, sent across the planet quickly at little cost, divided infinitely, and used as final settlement with no third party trust involved. The fact that you don't think those things are valuable is more of a failure of your imagination than it is a failure of Bitcoin. It's flattering to give Commodore so much power, but Bitcoin's value is not derived from his or I's conviction as much as it is derived from the asset's properties itself. As I said above, its absolute scarcity. 99.9% of all other crypto assets you see are effectively securities and not a commodities because they have a central control authority and an issuer. It doesn't matter if the god king who made it super duper pinky promises he will never create more tokens, the fact there is a human on the planet who can is the defining difference. You can copy Bitcoin, and it has been copied 10000x, but nobody can replicate the immaculate conception, nor can anyone ever hope to catch up to its network scale. So those copies just sit in obscurity because they are obsolete from the word go.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by "magic bullet", but it sounds like you need to spend some time considering what makes something valuable. If you don't understand why scarcity creates value, I don't really know what to say to you.
No real point discussing it further with them. These are the same people who think Instagram Threads was going to destroy Twitter because they have zero concept of Network Effect. They also view outdated means of money as primitive and societies of history were not as intelligent as modern humans.
