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Is anyone here actually BTC positive? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/bitcoin@lemmy.ml
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I have been using crypto since 2017, made plenty of dumb trades which caused me to lose out a lot. Currently my portfolio is about 80% BTC and while the new USA admin seems they may do more damage than good to the crypto space I'm still positive about Bitcoin.

This sub seems like a meme or anti-btc sub mostly. Anybody here who isn't that way?

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

They clearly do expect to make a profit, otherwise they wouldn't stake. But rent is only one part of profit and in this case, where the activity does require some amount of effort, skill, and risk, and is subject to competition both from other stakers and from other chains, categorizing it as rent is an error.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    Economic rent is when the owner of a factor of production is paid more than the costs of bringing it into production. It doesn't imply literally zero skill/effort/risk.

    I'm suggesting that it's better to set those profits on fire than it is to give them away below cost, just for owning something.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    That's a greatly oversimplified definition that would capture essentially all productive activity. If I paint someone's house and charge them more than the cost of paint, am I earning economic rent? As the owner of my tools and my own labor, the answer according to that definition would be yes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    In your hypothetical, you're paying the cost of bringing the painted house into production with your labor, not getting paid just for owning something.

    A closer comparison would be landlords who claim "being a landlord is a job" because they pay themselves to paint the house (or other property management).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Being a landlord can be a kind of hybrid, it depends. If you just own land and collect rent while doing nothing to provide value to anybody then yes, all you're going is gatekeeping access to something that you didn't make which is basically the textbook definition of economic rent and it's parasitic. Using your labor and capital to build or maintain an improvement (like a house) and then leasing that out isn't economic rent, it actually is a real job just like any other, but only for the portion of the income that is due to the improvement; the lion's share of the income is almost always due to land ownership so it's still parasitism but with a garnish of legitimate work.

    I don't think reading only the first sentence of the Wikipedia/Mirian-Webster definition in isolation is very helpful, you really have to dig deeper if you want to have a good sense of what economists are really trying to communicate with the concept of economic rent.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    With all due respect, I have read quite a bit and was trying to inform you. We seem to agree on how landlords are parasitic, but not on how being a staker is essentially the same thing.

    Yes, it takes some know-how, and they have to set it up, but at the end of the day, that cost is significantly less than the income the rent seeker receives. There is no mechanism to reduce their profits, especially not approaching zero.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I can appreciate that your intentions here are good but I remain convinced that you've got the economic aspect of this quite wrong. If the rewards of staking were zero the network would be at risk because nobody would be willing to do the necessary work of securing it. This is in stark contrast to land, which would be just as capable of productive use even without a rich person to own it. Validator slots are freely available to anybody who is prepared to do the required work and dedicate the required capital, and they are subject to unrestricted competition from other stakers and other networks, their profits do not come from any privilege given by law or unnatural strategic advantage. The full cost of staking is surprisingly difficult to determine, it's potentially much more than just the cost of hardware and electricity given the risk involved, not just from slashing but also from holding a volatile asset, in addition to the sacrificed opportunity cost of the staked capital. The rewards of staking would fall to less than half of what they are today if the percentage of Ethereum staked were to get anywhere close to 100%, and if the price of Ethereum were to fall in the future they could well already be effectively less than zero.

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