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Comment by yieldcrv

16 days ago

I have counterpoints to that, but my main disagreement is where you draw the line. This feels arbitrary. You look at present energy expenditure as waste, if the asset itself is not consumed for an equally arbitrary reason that you approve of, or generates an even more valuable asset or ongoing revenue stream. I view it as all intertwined with commodity economics whether prices are cyclical, seasonal, or permanently bullish. Low float assets aren’t controversial, a small trading or consumed supply dictates the value of the entire supply, for balance sheets, lending, securitization and more.

Thanks for explaining your preference.

> I have counterpoints to that

How? Efficiency of scale can never drive marginal coasts below 0.

> You look at present energy expenditure as waste, if the asset itself is not consumed for an equally arbitrary reason that you approve of, or generates an even more valuable asset or ongoing revenue stream.

I think you’re missing my point, a gold ring may be purely decorative but people actually want the ring. A gold bar sitting in a safety deposit box for decades is there purely an investment, the nature as a physical piece of gold is essentially irrelevant the person wants is a store of value not gold. At that point why not simply leave the gold unearth and use the potential location of a mine as a store of value?

IE, for a 50 gallon drum of oil to be sitting in my basement it must have already been extracted from the earth. We don’t extract oil as fast as possible and store it because the ground itself was already storing it instead people pump faster or slower in response to market conditions that’s efficient unlike silver, gold, etc sitting in a vault.

Thus using mined gold as an investment is simply inherently wasteful, a pure dead loss for humanity.

  • If people could use oil as an investment they would. It’s perishable and toxic to store.

    I understand your position. It doesn’t matter that you overlook key economic relationships in environmentally friendly methods, and you don’t recognize how illiquid balance sheets drive markets through lending and collateral or consider that utility, the goal post moves to disliking the extraction method occurring at all.

    I recognize that my counterpoints are all capitalist rationalizations and can be used to rationalize anything.

    So I’m just watching at this point.