Nashhhh
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
But the reason you found lots of vegeterian restaurants is not surprising: you were a tourist in a touristy area, and it's mainly tourists that look for vegetarian restaurants in Argentina!
Source: I'm Argentine, and I live here. Also, I eat at those restaurants.
He'd been dead wrong before as well: just a few years before the iphone, when people wanted to see an ipod with video capability, he said nobody would ever want to watch video on a mobile device.
It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed". The next one coming is 5+ inch screens for the iphone. They'll make no mention of the fact that they criticized large screen phones before ("look, my thumb goes from corner to corner!"). Oh well.
The interesting part about your post is that it is in response to OP asking if people would be willing to buy BTC at any price (to which you responded no). But you gave the perfect example of mass psychology encouraging people to hoard an asset they believe to be safe: in this case, in 2008, it was the USD. Despite 'printing' (yes, I get it, it's not literally printing) massive amounts of USD, the world ate it up because the USD it the world's reserve currency and they (correctly) assumed that if the US is in trouble, every one else's currencies were in waaaaay worse shape. Thus the insatiable demand for something that was becoming 5x less scarce.
Now, if Bitcoin ever reaches that level of belief in its capacity as a store of value (for example, based on the fact that for the first time ever you have a currency/scrip/asset/commodity whose entire supply is predetermined, fixed and immutable politically, could you not conceive that it might to have buyers flock to it? (not asking if it's probable, only if it's possible; I'd agree that at this stage this isn't the case)
I often see this argument, but it neatly ignores, for example, the Argentine Peso, which is losing 46% of its purchasing power (last few months, annualized) vs. US Dollars (or tomatoes, or cars, or whatever you want, on average), yet taxes are just as high as they ever been (higher, in fact: 35% tax just implemented on all cars above a certain threshold, for example). So where is that value-sustaining-tax effect I hear so much about?
Come to think of it, in 1989 when the Argentine Austral's value went to essentially zero (1-1 with the USD to 1-10,000 in a little over a year), taxes weren't low... so what happened? In fact, you could still pay taxes just fine with all that worthless paper with a bunch of zeros on it. Why didn't taxes and legal tender give it value?