1. Assert own position superior.
2. ???
3. Win argument?
Cute. But I have given this a lot of thought (at one point I had all my hardware picked out to buy a rig in fact... Oh so close!) and I can't see how freedom-seekers the world over could allow a future to happen WITHOUT a peer-to-peer, digital, anonymous currency.
It's too important.
I don't think you understand what a commodity is.
Because of my respect for you G, I went and looked in 4 different locations today for definitions of that word, to see if I'm overlooking any significant meaning. The majority of the (many) definitions I found are indifferent to this argument. The one meaning that bitcoin cannot meet in order to be a commodity is the requirement of it being
tangible.
It appears to be 100% correct that all commodities have always been tangible before. Nowhere can I find evidence to support any argument otherwise.
So allow me to make it here: :angrysoapbox_sml:
Commodities have been around since the stone ages. Beads, shells, gold, all previous commodities were necessarily produced with equality the world over, so they could be traded as equal units everywhere. Tangibility was something we HAD to have in that world. There was no internet yet.
But ever since AD 1991 or so when people started migrating their "lives" online, tangibility has become less important to our lives. More of our time is spent in a new plane of existence where NOTHING is tangible, just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but yet these digital "items" are IMPORTANT to us.
Whereas food {tangible} was important to us enough to trade some gold for before, Information {not tangible} is now important enough for us to do so. And do so we do. Very much so. How much has Clickbank pulled in to date?
Things have simply changed. And it continues changing in the new direction at an increased rate, as witnessed by the fact that people are now regularly leaving their freaking facebook profiles in their wills.
I assert that tangibility is no longer a hard requirement for commodities, at least in an online environment.
If something online, be it a backlink from a PR9 blog, a Bitcoin, or a photograph or other chunk of content has a certain VALUE to people the world over, then that thing should now be officially up for consideration as a commodity!
Of course the other defining factors of commodities should & would still apply. A backlink, even if from a PR9 wordpress blog, will obviously have a different value to different people and would fail the commodity requirements. Content, too, would fail the requirement as one person's trash is another person's treasure. Photos are included in that because they are just a form of content.
So Bitcoin is the first & only thing that I personally have seen that is designed to have the SAME VALUE to everyone online. If you know of another I'm all ears, but short of that we now have our first contender.
A way to facilitate this concept would be to create a new form of tangibility that applies to data, online or off. Instead of defining it by the perception of touch, perhaps this new form of tangibility could revolve around a perception of acquisition.
In this case to claim that an item is 'digitally tangible,' you'd only have to have it in your possession. (Even if just on a floppy disk or twitter stream.) If the fact that data can be reproduced destroys that tangibility in your mind, then perhaps this concept could only apply to digital items that cannot be reproduced.
Bitcoin, again, would obviously be digitally tangible in either case, and in doing so
would still fulfill every requirement of being a commodity.
Sometimes we have to think about the reasons for the existing criteria. In this case, tangibility is no longer adequate. The world has simply changed. (Or more accurately, there is now a whole new world with a different set of natural laws!)
