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BTC is digital. But BTC is absolutely not gold. Gold is a unique compound of molecules that is aesthetically appealing; it is also irreplaceably useful: without gold, nearly all existing electronic devices would not work. BTC is more “fiat” than paper money, simply because it is cryptographically finite, and “vintage,” paradoxically, not-fungible compared to current standards of subsequent DLTs.
At the moment of writing this, BTC has a USD value of over $46K, 1oz of gold is around $1.8K. When the first securities market was created to pool liquidity for the progenitor of the United East India Co. in Holland, it quickly produced an extreme misalignment of the monetary cost of tulip-bulb contracts to their average price: a high-end tulip-bulb contract reached the equivalent of $750K. The ownership of the flower was the community's representation for personal prosperity. This extreme rise in price within the first centralized contract market was considered the first asset bubble, “Tulip Mania,” and it did come crashing down. If one uses the 17th-century tulip-bulb contract prices as a comparable - the argument that BTC should be $1,000,000 isn’t too unrealistic. There are a lot more people in the world who want to own a piece of the comparatively small supply of BTC; probably fewer people and even fewer tulip bulb contracts were on the market when the price of flower contracts peaked.
Big holders of BTC, “whales,” ironically are coined with the name for a massive water-dwelling mammal that definitely doesn’t hoard or need anything except water and food, was chosen for that term. Why not elephants? It’s a digression - but BTC whales have that name because when they move/sell/buy BTC they make a “splash” of price-volume distortion in the market and cause “waves.”
BTC whales love to throw around important-sounding phrases to support their mania for BTC: the most mainstream description of BTC is “digital gold.” Despite the veracity of this article, that mania will likely fuel thousands of BTC-maniacs to send messages that will likely reach life-threatening proportions… Given that BTC is a string of numbers that work as a cryptographic mechanism on the BTC blockchain, it is hard to not use that to further the claim that this behavior is excessive.
This is not written to argue that BTC is in an asset bubble. Tulip bulb contracts didn’t have a digital cryptography network that had various additional functions. Although tulip buyers in the first days of Dutch colonialism did use their tulips to silently boast their prosperity in the same way that BTC whales are provided with a feeling of immense wealth.
The underlying point is revealed when you add humanity’s most necessary commodity into the discussion: water. H2O, A substance so important; 3-4 days without it and the human body dies. But, water isn’t what people put in their retirement accounts… That would be crazy. Water is only as worthy of denomination when it is scarce; since it is perceived to be abundant it is not worthy of trading as a marketable security contract. However, when needed and it isn’t around, the price becomes limitless. The same thing can be said about time, but that is another rabbit hole to be discussed, in the future.
It was the forum of a central, auction-style marketable securities (contract) exchange that created the platform for ego-selfish rivalries and permitted exploiters of competitive insecurities to push the risk/reward outcomes to an extreme. This hasn’t changed. But, fiat price perception does reflect functioning economies of supply and demand with the removal of the psychosis generated from centralized competitive market speculation. What is now a deeply ingrained component of measuring the efficiency of an economy and its scale, and is severely protected by governmental legislation to avoid being destructive by the manipulative nature of group price speculation, is a fundamental driver of resource misuse and its consequences.
Manias to possess and hoard things with no value will not go away so long as the practice of centralized market exchanges and collective market psychology continues. The impact of a globalized economic system that does not value the natural resources necessary for life is worsened by a short-term focus on profit; regulations that do not allow accounting for long-term sustainable resource management by requiring 3-month financial reporting to drive perceptions of success and pricing, come at the cost of human existence.
The conclusion begs a question: why has there been no major advance since the peak of the “Industrial Age,” which arguably hasn’t ended, it’s just become more dependent on electronics, and therefore gold and rare earth metals.
The price of short-sighted production and profit cycles over the past 100 - 200 years is actually the loss of funding for large-scale, advanced R&D. Thus far, only World Wars and pandemics have spurred multinational, collective cooperation. Technological leaps are the mainstay of human, multi-generational advances that raise the basic resource rights (living standard) of the human populace. Until now….
DLT-tokenization does hold the key. More to come as we start to wrangle back ownership of our fate, which lies in investing in the future, today.
The FATE of the DAO-DeFi-DLT is coming on Harmony Blockchain.
FATExDAO will take the lead by bringing true inventiveness & professional economics & transparency to DeFi.
FATExDEX will be its foundation. Our testnet and mainnet are coming shortly. Own your FATE.
Read the GREEN PAPER
DEX: FATEx.io. Twitter: https://twitter.com/FATExDAO. Telegram: https://t.me/FATExDAO
Austin B. Green, Founder of FATExDAO - coming to Harmony soon.
