Our beloved Mr. Selgin is back fighting the good fight against orange windmills.
In the Boston Globe this week he was ranting against the bitcoin reserve— reasonable, in itself, since it's far from obviously a good idea that a bloated, deficit government ought to amass a sovereign wealth fund of any kind (#877076).
Unfortunately, the SBR is mostly a pretext for Selgin to shit on bitcoin, Bitcoiners, and some lofty legislation discussed—and then pick a Twitter fight with Pierre Rochard (life here never ceases to be interesting, eh?)
(there was some assessment of Selgin's intellectual development by Josh in the What Bitcoin Did episode recently on monetary economics — highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YruuCoFfL-k&ab_channel=WhatBitcoinDid)
So, what's Selgin bringing?
- good news, he says: "The good news for bitcoin fans is that bitcoin became spectacularly popular: By the start of this year, the once-worthless digital ledger entries were fetching more than $100,000 each."
- bad news, apparently: "instead of taking the place of paper dollars and bank deposits in routine payments, bitcoins are mostly being hoarded, or “HODLed” in bitcoiner argot, leaving the dollar as secure as ever."
This strikes me as odd.
- why disregard the (censorship-resistance) payments that are made globally just because millions of Americans mostly hodl their coins?
- In some fundamental sense, the hodling of others is what allows those first people to have a market to sell into when they need to transact—how much bitcoin payments could the network process if there were no hodlers, no institutional capital, and its market cap was a pittance? (=not much: this is why honey badger should care about price).
All Bitcoiners want, as far as Selgin sees it, is having the government pump their bags. No assessment of the myriad of opinions, no admission that maybe, just maybe, it's better for bitcoin (and the world) with a government having skin in the game than a government hostile to this revolution and industry.
- https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/nic-carter-is-wrong-about-the-us-strategic-bitcoin-reserve
- https://bitcoinmagazine.com/politics/i-dont-support-a-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-and-neither-should-you
- https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/what-goes-into-a-reserve-most-people-wont-see-a-difference
Whatcha Stackers think of his peculiar finishing sentence?
"don’t count on not having to invest more in cryptocurrency, even if you don’t know a protocol from a hole in the ground."
non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/EZPyh
