Comments
Transcript
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MCVery complicated way of using semantics to say that gold is only useful in physical form & that Bitcoin is a digital system of various parts which empowers a network that allows the world to seamlessly transact value with without the same points of failure that gold entails. The mental gymnastics Roy employs is strong, imagine if you showed AGBell a cell phone, he would of also told you all the reasons it's not the same. Again, I like gold, in its physical form custodied by you but it can never be an effective global medium of exchange because it's non divisible nor verifiable over digital transmission networks. This is a huge advancement.
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OTGuys Roy doesn't get it. It is frustrating to constantly see people that don't get Bitcoin. Fine put these videos of people stuck with something that isn't censorship resistant, is hard to transfer, it is hard to store, it is hard to verify, it is hard to divide, it is hard to protect and so many other things. It failed as money. It failed get over it. Put some decent content on people from the Bitcoin industry
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MOReal vision can we have Roy Sebag and Saifedeen Amous debate each other. I find both of their arguments towards gold and bitcoin intellectually satisfying, and it would be amazing to see how both of them counter-argue each other at the intellectual level on the merits and the inferiority of both bitcoin and gold.
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CTAsking horse salesmen if the newly invented automobile makes sense doesn't result in a very good show. And it will misguide everyone to follow the Luddite way.
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CTIt's time to move your Gold portfolio to BTC, at least a good part of it. Bitcoin is superior in too many ways and has already 11 years of achievements. Gold is much older, but it is now losing its position as a store of value king. Time will show, the next decade will be the decade of Bitcoin.
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JAAs far as the first point about universal laws vs man made ideas/trends, I would have to put bitcoin closer to a mathematical discovery that is quite universal. To the last point about using 5% or whatever of the value to run itself each year, I would say first that I think this is not ideal and I hope all crypto can go to a proof of stake instead of proof of work at some point and stop using all that power. However, he gave no numbers for gold or any other currency. When I was first learning about bitcoin, I was bummed about how much power it used until I was thinking about it one day while walking through a giant HSBC skyscraper and looking around and thinking how many billions of dollars do our current financial institutions siphon off in order to keep our systems running? All of that is powered by interest on the fractional reserve system, which would probably be quite hard to track, but if you just look at how many people are employed and work in nice offices... add up the cost of running every bank and ATM...
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mnWould be great to get Sebag and Antanopoulus to discuss this.
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DLWhen did reality become embeded in theology or mathmatics. He could have shortened that whole first 5 minutes into "Algorythms tell us all we need to know about human cycles and what is real and what isn't." I had to recheck the title of the video I was watching. Bitcoing is a real cryptocurrency tradable and useable on a technology that will replace the infastructure of the current foundation of technology and he wants to talk about what is real and what isn't? I know this guy is WAY smarter than I am, but I haven't even finished the video and I doubt the point you are making now will entangle well.
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MYContents are traditionally high quality on this channel, however this one contains a lot of logic that I find dubious at most, then I saw "Roy Sebag, CEO of GoldMoney, talks with Stephan Spears of McEwen Mining" Seriously? If you want a real discussion, you wouldn't ask a Hilton hotel exec to talk about AirBnb, you wouldn't ask a Walmart exec to talk about Amazon, why is this conflict of interest not mentioned more clearly?
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JHWorst video on Real Vision. Spooky how many falsehoods this guy propagates per sentence. Anyone who watched this video is owed their time back and if you absorbed anything he said you just lost 30 IQ points.. He doesn't use the word corporeal enough considering how common that word is in a native speaker's vocabulary. Raoul, please contact me if you want someone who can explain this complex topic, or better yet get 100Trillion on, you know who I'm talking about.
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MRmy question is about GoldMoney - does this use some of the technology of Bitcoin to transfer ownership of the gold that is held? My simple view is that a gold backed digital currency is the best of both worlds. I would have liked Roy to talk some about the company in which he is involved. I thought his arguments were logical and on the intellectual side. I would like whatever I use for a currency to be immutable, easy to use and universal (world wide). Bitcoin seems weak on immutable and strong on ease of use and universality. I would think that GoldMoney has all three.
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mnBig fan of Sebag. But it seems like he fundamentally is confusing the difference between btc the asset and BTC the system/network. Also moving from the corporeal to abstractions is a fundamental evolution of humans..
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SCSeveral Pro-Bitcoin, "he doesn't get it" replies. Be nice to see comments like theirs addressed. What we need is a Bitcoin debate/round table, where someone like Roy can make these claims, and then discuss with someone who thinks the opposite.
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DPThis whole argument is just Peter Schiff plus jargon - both fail to understand digital-only utility while it continues to spring up around them regardless.
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DSThe price of gold is psychological; not scientific. I own gold as I believe the price will go up as fiat currency is debased. This has nothing to do with entropy. Like Kant let's let science and practical reason be separate. DLS
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KBThe energy going into Bitcoin is spent generating Proof-of-Work, not bitcoin, which is a "natural" construct insofar as math is natural. That is to say, there is no possible way of generating PoW other than through the expenditure of energy, and once it is created it is a permanent existent, just like gold. Even if the network were to be shut down tomorrow and all the mining rigs turned off, the PoW that acts as the foundation of the system would still exist (and could be used to reboot the network). In other words, the ledger or blockchain does not require constant machines running to maintain its integrity, the integrity of the ledger is permanent, machines are only required if changes or alterations to the ledger are required. This isn't much different than gold. Once gold is mined, it exists as part of the overall gold supply, but in order to move it (i.e., make changes to the "ledger," so to speak) requires resources and energy.
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CLRoy, how's GoldMoney financials doing?
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LCThis is true. BTC is subject to soft fork threats by its own development team.
ROY SEBAG: Yeah. So, the way I look at the world in terms of an economy is I actually like to use the word 'cooperation', human cooperation. And at the end of the day, the reason I think that we're able to make predictions and cooperate is because the laws of nature, laws of physics, whatever you want to call them, are immutable. They're irreversible, and they're immutable. And they never change. And because they never change, we're able to essentially observe, measure, predict, and repeat various activities between each other as we seek to cooperate and achieve prosperity.
Now, in that regard, there is a fundamental distinction between the things that are external to my mind, that are corporeal that I can ingest through my sense perceptions, that I can see, that I can touch, that I can hear, that I can taste, and things that are entirely an abstraction, where I'm employing my memory, the interior of my mind, and perhaps a language like mathematics to communicate something to me or to you. And where this ultimately manifests is in the relationship between the thermodynamic relationship of energy and entropy.
And so, what we find is that things that are from the mind that are abstractions, or of memory, generally don't last. Their ideations, their trends, very academic term, but logical pluralism, there is no definite truth. Whereas things that are of nature are the load stars, they're the Polaris that allows us to cooperate. They're the sun, so to speak.
Now, when it comes to the difference between an element which is corporeal, and something like Bitcoin, what you essentially have to understand is that the element doesn't need anything other than the laws of physics to exist. Whereas Bitcoin is an abstraction. It's a system where humans come together and decide to allocate resources towards the reification of this abstraction so that it continues to perpetuate into the future. If humans do not cooperate towards that goal, that abstraction ceases to exist.
Where this really comes together, is if you consider that the economy has these corporeal elements like Legos. And we take these building blocks, and we build modular systems of cooperation to use them. But these building blocks are always fungible. And they can always be moved from different activities that we do. Now, our goal when we cooperate is not to just exchange bitcoins or exchange Legos with each other, it's to use the Legos to build a resilient, prosperous society. So, when you look at something like gold, it's definitely a Lego in the system. But it's a Lego that I can use for different things to do different things. I can move it around.
The fact that it's a Lego is based on the laws of physics. With Bitcoin, what I have to do is I have to go somewhere in the corner and take a lot of pieces of Legos, just to maintain a new system of Legos to do new things with it. And that's where the fundamental distinction is between the natural order of the natural world and things that are abstractions. And when it comes to Bitcoin, that distinction has become quite difficult for many people to appreciate, because of a combination of the language that's used to describe what's happening with Bitcoin, misnomers such as mining, ideas such as forgibly scarce, scarcity. And I think that where you have to really understand this is that Bitcoin is not being mined, it's being powered into existence.
So, essentially, all of these resources are being channeled into bitcoin in a way that perpetuates its own existence, whereas the gold itself is indeed being mined once and then once you mine it, it lasts forever. It survives into the future, it doesn't rely on the same miner that mined it in the past. And I'm sure we can get into more details about this, but this is really what it comes down to. And I find many of the Bitcoin evangelists have a problem even getting past that point, they simply don't believe it to be true. But of course, it is true. It's just an unfortunate fact. And I can quote some more reasons why.
STEPHAN SPEARS: Okay, so we can get back to the real differences between gold mining and Bitcoin mining in a moment, and I think we should also touch on the decay aspect of Bitcoin, I think that's a very important topic. First, maybe let's address some of the claims that are made in the 'Drop Gold' campaign that gold is heavy, that it occupies a lot of space, it doesn't have the value density that Bitcoin because Bitcoin is weightless, and so forth. I think you've proven that those are verifiably false, can you just go through a couple of those, and then we'll get into decay?
ROY SEBAG: Yeah, very quickly. So, in the advertorial campaign, you see people holding gold, which essentially misrepresents the weight of the gold. Now, this is very important, because those Legos that I mentioned earlier, those corporeal elements, they have immutable properties that are accessible to us through time that never change. And so, we know that of the 90 natural elements that occur naturally, gold has the highest specific gravity, which means that it condenses into a volumetric space, and becomes heavier and heavier and heavier relative to everything else.
So, in the advertorial, you see a guy essentially carrying two bars of gold, but those bars of gold would weigh 220 pounds, and he's effortlessly walking around with them. That's impossible. No one could actually carry gold that way. Moreover, we're talking about 10, $20 million of gold that this person would be holding. So, the misrepresentation begins by saying, it's this shiny metal, that's heavy. But in reality, that value density, the amount of energy embodiment that went into producing the gold, is why it's worth so much. And in fact, no other piece of Lego in the system could do that. No other corporeal element could store so much energy in such a small amount of volumetric space. So, that's one.
And then when I actually try to figure out how much volumetric space does Bitcoin take up, I discovered that it takes up an incredible amount of volumetric space when you consider the mining rigs, when you consider the transformers, the physical space that's required to actually run these servers that are constantly solving the mathematical puzzles. You end up with a difference in ratio of 500 to 5000 times depending on how you look at it. And that's when you're comparing all the gold in the world worth $8 trillion to all the Bitcoin in the world today, which is worth about $200 billion.
So, the idea that this Bitcoin that you're using on your smartphone has no impact or footprint in the physical corporeal world, that it's purely digital is false. It's cognitive dissonance. In fact, it's taking up an incredible amount of energy, physical footprints, resources, and ecological opportunity costs because it's requiring a continued investment in the reification of this abstraction, so that the bits of Bitcoin, which are just symbols, are worth any more or act any different than any other bits of symbols that I could just write with my pen and paper.
STEPHAN SPEARS: So, what are we talking about on an annual basis, what does it cost to actually run the Bitcoin network?
ROY SEBAG: So, I was very nice to Bitcoin in this exercise. All I did was calculate the amount of energy because I always try to think about things thermodynamically. And so, if you look at the latest hash rate of the network, it's about 65,000 petahashes. It would require 6600 megawatts to keep that system going. 24/7, that results in about $7.5 billion a year of electricity at wholesale rates. So, that's essentially the cost of electricity to society, is $7.5 billion.
Then you have to look at the mining rigs, it would require about 4 million mining rigs to run at 65,000 petahashes. So, when you calculate the cost of the mining rigs, again, even if I'm being very nice to Bitcoin at $500, $600, you're talking about another two or $3 billion. And the mining rigs have generally lasted for three to four years. So, I was extra nice to Bitcoin, I use a six-year amortization schedule, depreciation schedule. And in that regard, you're looking at about $10 billion before you get into labor costs, rent costs, things like that. So, that's your decay, that's your theta bleed and option parlance.
And that $10 billion a year is owed to the miners by the owners of the coin. And so, when you look at the coin, even today, when it's valued at $13,000, that's about $220 billion of market value, you have a monetary system, which is worth $220 billion, that's costing about four to 5% a year just to perpetuate its own existence year over year. That, to me, is worse than any negative yielding building bond, because it's telling you that the only way this works long term is for the price to keep rising.