Nick Szabo  🔑

Gold lack of volatility is derived from the laws of physics. Gold never "emerged as monetary good".... It unveiled itself as a commodity-money that lasted longest, was hardest to earn, and paid for its movement. Volatility comes from nature. The rate of decay/diminishing utility

Wrong.

The process of "unveiling itself", or reducing the uncertainty & increasing the shared knowledge about its nature & utility, that gold undoubtedly underwent in its early decades is just the process Lewis is referring to in Bitcoin. volatility = f(uncertainty, exchange).

That may be so but this doesn't change the basic fundamentals of WHY gold over everything else. The WHY is due to natural law, physics, chemistry, crustal abundance, geology, whatever you want to call it. The measurement of volatility = the measurement of relative decay.

And I would argue that there is no written proof that gold ever needed "time" to emerge as a monetary commodity. What we see is a simultaneous ascension of commodity and money. Therefore, your postulate that "gold undoubtedly underwent in early decades" is speculation Nick.

:) That's the problem though isn't it? Don't you find it a bit perplexing that we have to rely on theoretical postulates ie: "Deep History" by Lord-Smail or Graeber, to believe in this "ascension" theory of commodities? You sort of have to believe in the whole "Standard Model"...

1/2 Would it not be equally logical to postulate that: Gold has always been the premier commodity money since the at least the dawn of written history? And that the ratios between geology and free markets have reconciled since? Gold/Silver Gold/Copper etc. Bitcoin is something..