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102 sats \ 6 replies \ @optimism 15 Dec \ parent \ on: Treasure Of the Sierra Madre proof of work quote bitcoin
I think both are wrong. The price is where supply meets demand. Demand doesn't set the price, and neither does supply. If your ask is too high, there is no trade and similarly, when your bid is too low.
Ah, my woes with supply and demand are deep and abiding -- just ask @Undisciplined.
I think where I'm at now is that supply and demand are both terms that describe how much people value something.
What is supply but an expression of someone's demand for a thing?
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That can work. What people have are inventories and marginal valuations.
If your inventory is positive, then your valuations are your contribution to market supply.
Your valuations beyond your inventory are your contribution to market demand.
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Do you mean as in: we could be matching your demand for my gold with my demand for your sats. And of course your demand for gold needs to be higher than your demand for sats, and my demand for sats needs to be higher than my demand for gold. I could see that logic, and we could state that the XAU/BTC market reflects the demands for gold and bitcoin. Perhaps "supply" is an oversimplification.
so replacing "supply":
If your demand for gold is lower than my demand for sats, we have no trade, and vice versa. But if both our demands match, we have a trade. It just means that instead of taking the demand for sats as an MoE, we treat everything like barter.
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we treat everything like barter.
This may be a good way of putting it.
We never left the "age of barter" -- we just started bartering different things (mostly monies).
Maybe the problem of prices is that they pretend that one half of the trade is exempt from the effects of the trade. But the reality is that both the thing being priced and what it is being priced in are dynamic.
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I think that this is the reality of my personal "bitcoin standard" at this time in history (as I'd guess it is for most among us that have one.) I'm not seeing a path where everyone has this standard, so I expect this to be the status quo for the rest of my life. I don't mind living with it, despite that this view mostly has helped grifters/shitcoiners. Heck, there are days that I feel like more than half of the Bitcoin space is made up of NgU-only fiat maxis.
However, the problem with this approach is that it makes contracts hard. The final milestone payment of a BTC-denominated contract I delivered my end for is still not honored, now coming up on a year (#1014572).
This leads me to think that, if we want Bitcoin as MoE (and be able to have contracts denominated in it) then we should not treat trade against sats as barter?
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It took me awhile, but I think I see @Scoresby's point now. The price of gold had been fixed by the US at the time the movie was made. That was a Marxist act. In the movie, the idea of $20 that the character was expressing just went to explaining why gold is so expensive.
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