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RE: Peter Schiff Loves To Slam Bitcoin
Fiat has inherent value because it's overwhelmingly the path of least resistance to do monetary transactions in for any individual or corporation. Using Bitcoin as money in any country would be much harder in practice than using the legal tender of that country because if you were a business, A) you'd still have to do your accounting in the legal tender, B) pay your taxes in the legal tender and C) you'd have to accept it if a customer did not pay and you had to have the money collected and the customer offered the legal tender because if you insisted on getting Bitcoin as the repayment of that debt, the non-paying customer could simply refuse to pay. You'd have no legal recourse. That's what legal tender laws mean.
Ya I know what you mean.. I'm not sure that gives it inherent value though. That gives it practical utility for as long as we perceive it as legal tender.
The difference I think is that the mathematical discovery called Bitcoin inherently is valuable-- the world is better off and benefiting because we have this math of how to pass information back and forth without anyone controlling it.
Fiat essentially depends on perception, and then fades whenever that changes. With Bitcoin it's kind of the opposite-- It fundamentally is a thing that's valuable for the world, which over time dictates people to perceive it to have value.
So ya, there are obstacles and difficulties to using Bitcoin right now. But those would all stop whenever perception changed and Bitcoin was the ubiquitous/legal thing.
(We probably think pretty much the same. Just depends what "inherent value" means exactly.)
Good points. I do think Bitcoin's value proposition is stronger because of its decentralized protocol and a hard cap on the maximum number of tokens.