An article by the Business School folks at Imperial College. In the past, wealth meant owning ‘tangible assets’. Gold, land, cattle. There have always been other, less tangible assets, like ‘intellectual property’, but these were usually part of a larger tangible asset arrangements (a company’s patent portfolio protecting its manufacturing, for instance). What does it mean when the value of these intangible assets becomes large in proportion to other assets? I am not sure.
We need to change the way we look at the economy, says Imperial professor
Another part of this is bitcoin. Below is an article about the massive energy consumed by bitcoin mining.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/
People keep trying to equate this to, say, gold mining, which also takes lots of energy. But after you mine gold, you have, well, gold. After mining bitcoin you have data. Not without value, but certainly less permanent. Yes, gold can be “lost” is shipwrecks and such, but what happens to bitcoin that are similarly “lost”. What do we make of bitcoin wealth vs gold (or other hard asset) wealth? Are they the same? Given the choice of one or the other, which would you prefer?
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