this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The Bitcoin network initially went online in 2009. Was your friend a time traveller?
Time gets wonky when you get old. You'll be surprised too when stuff that you were certain happened at a specific point in your life, that you remember it alongside so much else from that era, seems to turn out to be a chronologically misplaced memory from years later.
Can confirm, am getting older and making the timelines from my teens and early 20s make sense is getting harder and harder.
The “2000s” also has no meaning for defining a specific time period. It should mean 2001-2010, but I’ve also never heard anyone seriously refer to 2011-2020 as the “teens” and 2021-2025 as the “twenties.” Those words are already associated with decades that we still culturally reference.
We’re a quarter of a century in and I still don’t know how to precisely refer to a 21st-century decade.
Yup, I just say the numbers (2001-2010) to make sure I'm understood properly. It's dumb.
“It was back it the early 2000s, around 2013 or so….”
A slightly different example of the wonky-ness of time is that 2016 was… Almost 10 years ago.
I'm not even old and this has happened so many times, I think about something random I think was only a thing after 2021 but turns out I had been using it since 2018.
lol That dude has no fucking clue what he is talking about just making shit up about non existent "friends". Any time someone talks shit about Bitcoin I always ask them what money is. None of them have given me a correct answer yet, most of the people who DO answer correctly already agreed about BTC except those who have never learned details about it, once they do they seem to always get real interested real fast. Either way, not exactly on topic here but damned amusing.
Ah yes, you have figured out that if you consider whatever you believe to be the "correct answer" people who give the "correct answer" likely also agree with you about closely related topics.
Except there is a correct answer to the question most people have just never even stopped to consider the question at all. So what is money? What is the inherent value of a dollar bill since that is the complaint anti BTC folks always spout off "it has no inherent value". So what is the inherent value of a dollar or a euro or any other currency?
Money is anything that someone is willing to exchange for goods and services in a stable and semi-predictable way (i.e. you need to be able to plan ahead at least long enough to know if what you get for your current transaction, e.g. your paycheck, will be able to buy you what you need to buy in transactions in the foreseeable future) and that is easier to store and/or exchange than actual direct bartering (good/service for good/service directly).
By that general definition most crypto currencies are not money because they are too volatile and transactions are too complicated and slow.
But that is asking the wrong question. The real question isn't "What is money?", the real question is "What is value?", as in why does money have value at all, what backs that value. Money only has value because a large amount of providers of goods or services with inherent value are willing to exchange those actually valuable things for your money. And the number of those can vary over time because supply or demand for a good or service increases/decreases.
Most crypto-currencies are not equipped to deal with those fluctuations in the availability of actually valuable things by adjusting the money supply. Not to mention that the required money supply also depends on the velocity of money and how much people store away in savings and don't touch at all.
Or in other words crypto-currencies are an incredibly primitive attempt to solve a complex problem with a solution so simplistic it is not fit for purpose.
See there is a correct answer and you even know it. I really suggest you research more on Bitcoin it is entirely different than all the other crypto and the rest of them I agree are almost entirely scams just to make money. You touched on the network effect being the real value in money. It has value just because enough people decided it has value for facilitating trade. Bitcoin does exactly what you desired in a money the only flaw I see in your logic is thinking that a good money supply adjusts itself based on supply and demand. Different products obviously would do that at different rates so it would have to attempt aggregate demand changes for everything to even attempt to maintain exact price levels. That is obviously impossible, they can not do it with dollars and they can not do it with Bitcoin either.
What bitcoin does have is an inelastic supply with zero inflation and most importantly no one is in control of it who can change that. Its value in fiat is currently wildly variable on the day to day basis but it is also very early in its network effect. It will stabilize over time. Either way it is off topic enough to this post I don't need to talk about it anymore. I do suggest reading up on it more though. It is definitely going to take a much bigger chunk out of all the current stores of value over time and, like TCP/IP is the protocol layer of the internet with everything else built out on top of it, there is in my mind a very good chance that BTC ends up the base monetary layer in the future with more layers built on top of it to facilitate more economic purposes. But even without replacing currency the value will continue to rise, even if through nothing more than the network effect of more and more people believing it as time progresses.
Cheers.