What is Sound Money? Hint: Not Bitcoin!

by Chris Black

Bitcoin is for people that don’t know what life was like before the Internet.

I could care less if the entire internet went away tomorrow.

In fact it would be better for everyone if it did.

Before the internet, business got done and everything worked fine.

It is naive to think that commerce would die without the web.

Sound money requires a stable value.
The rate of exchange for items must not vary from day to day.

Bitcoin changes in value every second, and can move thousands of dollars in minutes.

Nothing is denominated in Bitcoin, therefore there can be no set value.

Bitcoin then fails as sound money.

The ledger is worthless.

Once an exchange takes place, why do I care who owned my unit of currency before I did?

Let alone a few million owners before me.

Why should I care where that unit goes after it leaves my ownership?

The entire purpose was to facilitate an exchange.

Imagine if you had to write your name on every dollar bill you used, and everyone else who touches it.

Eventually a dollar bill would have a few tons of paper attached to it.

The ledger fails as a medium of exchange, just like the blockchain.

The blockchain would grow to consume the entire world’s digital storage space very quickly if every global transaction was recorded on it.

I’m still waiting for all the banks to be replaced like they told me they would in 2011.

Still waiting for everything to be on smart contracts like they told me in 2014.

Crypto was supposed to be a disruptive technology that would change how everything was done.

Everything in the world was supposed to be on the Blockchain by 2015 back in 2013.

Nothing promised by crypto has materialized.

The tech has failed.

Email and the WWW went from a niche tech to an indispensable part of 1st world life in less than five years.

The smartphone practically wiped out the flip phone in less than three.

Crypto morphed from a tech to transact outside the system, to a tool of that system as a speculative asset to extract wealth from others.

A speculative asset is something where it’s only value is derived from someone else paying you more than you paid.
Beyond that, it can’t be used for anything.

I’ve never heard anyone gloat that they used Bitcoin as a means of exchange.

They sure gloat about buying at $22k and that it’s worth $44k now.

It isn’t worth anything until you sell.

If I have something you need and all you have is Bitcoin, Bitcoin is worth whatever I say it is.