_{Mircea Popescu wrote:}

For the reasons noted and for many other reasons I am pretty much satisfied that Bitcoin is not nor will it ever be a direct means of payment for retail anything. You may end up paying for a month's worth of coffee vouchers at your favourite coffee shop via Bitcoin (so shop scrip built on top of Bitcoin), you may end up settling your accounts monthly at the restaurant in Bitcoin (so store credit built on top of Bitcoin), you will probably cash into whatever local currency from Bitcoin (be it Unified Standard Dubaloos or Universally Simplified Dosidoes or whatever else) but all that is entirely different a story.

Although (for the reasons stated in the blog) this will not impact the outcome of which Bitcoin fork wins, the Al Capone kingpin of Bitcoin Mircea Popescu appears to have an error in his analysis above.

Specifically he does not consider the utility of fungibility between units of medium-of-exchange.

And I posit this is a critical error in his analysis because I think the Knowledge Age will prioritize the utility of real-time, globalized exchange that does not require the tsuris of non-fungible accounts littered all over the Internet for each special case.

And because as I wrote in my prior blog as quoted below and expounded in Hayek’s refutation of The Paradox of Saving, it is impossible to have only one standard-of-money such as only Bitcoin without our own existence being impossible:

an eternal fixed standard of value is impossible wherein only goldBitcoin would be the reserve unit-of-account upon which everything else is priced, because it would require the Universe to become dependently tethered/static (zero entropy) such that nothing could ever grow faster or slower than the supply of goldBitcoin without respectively losing or gaining absolute worth. Relativity would cease to exist: ^{_{the past and future would become undifferentiated, the speed-of-light innumerable (unquantifiable), and life would not exist.}}

Every human has worth in terms of the resilience of the human race to unpredictable chaos. Mircea Popescu appears to me to be an elitist curmudgeon who fails to comprehend that top-down control over capital isn’t Antifragile. Has Mircea Popescu studied Nicholas Taleb’s work?

Larger things must grow slower and eventually stop growing and decay, just as saplings grow to oak trees but not to the moon. If the design of Bitcoin prevents that because the largest whales grow faster, then the faster growth of smaller things must occur outside of Bitcoin.