For the record, every explanation of Bitcoin I’ve heard seems to end with to “Oh, I guess you’re just not clever enough to understand it.”
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I see this as a jab at Bitcoin. If you listen to Bitcoin enthusiasts enough you will hear some version of “the government doesn’t want you to know this.”
Dad-gum gummint!
It’s also a jab at many other things, such as the price of
artworks.
A penny is only worth a penny (etc) because everyone says it is. I don’t think it is quite the same thing as artworks (or houses, or cars), which are things bought with the medium of exchange… a penny is a token representing a root unit of the medium exchange itself. Mind you, logically a penny can’t be worth $20, as $20 can be defined as 2000 pennies, which is a bit circular. A pile (or change jar) made up of 2000 units worth $20 dollars would be worth $40,000. Which I suppose is economic bootstrapping of a sort.
In theory it could be a jab at any good that you think the market has overpriced due to collective hysteria. In practice, I think this is a jab at BitCoin, partically because it’s in the news, and partially because the (faux) complaint about “the government” doesn’t fit for artwork.
Of course I’m reminded of “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does he have?”
Instead of investing in something ethereal, I’d rather spend my money on something solid, with a guaranteed return, like tulips.
“If you listen to Bitcoin enthusiasts enough you will hear some version of ‘the government doesn’t want you to know this.’”
In practice, Bitcoin is akin to cash you can spend anywhere (not as in “everywhere you want to be”… that’s Visa… but in the sense of “I’m over here, and the person I’d like to exchange economic value with is somewhere completely different.”) Cash is difficult trace effectively, and is thus used fairly heavily in commerce not sanctioned by government. Make it so that the buyer and seller don’t actually have to meet to exchange little bits of paper, and the usefulness of Bitcoin in transactions not sanctioned by government increases. As a secondary concern for government, transactions that are difficult to track are also difficult to lay taxes upon. I happen to live in a modern paradise that doesn’t believe in sales taxes, but untraceable transactions can potentially trip up income-based taxation, as well.
All that said, I DON’T think it’s a tag on Bitcoin, except as “Bitcoin” is symbolic to all cryptocurrency. It’s 100% true that something has value precisely to the extent that someone else will give you something in exchange for it. This is notable particularly in collectibles markets. There are a small number of Beanie Baby plushies which have some value in excess of the extent to which they will make a crying toddler quiet. A folded up set of papers with Superman printed on them is worth several million dollars, while another folded up set of papers, with exactly the same pictures of Superman printed on them, is worth about a buck. Little bits of paper with pictures of sports participants printed on one side can reach seven figures, or be literally impossible to give away. Or watch what happens when a painting is discovered to be a forgery. Literally nothing about the painting changes, but its value evaporates into nothing.
“I’d rather spend my money on something solid, with a guaranteed return, like tulips.”
You and the squirrels, who ran around digging up every bulb my mom planted in her yard.
But there ARE people who try that argument with gold, as if gold has value in it that is of a different intrinsic nature than little bits of rag paper with dead Presidents’ faces printed on them. For some reason, they tend to advertise fairly heavily on talk radio stations that are of a different political outlook than my own; so much so that I tend to take hearing an ad for “investing” in gold as a STRONG sign that I should change the station ASAP.
Maybe A&J need money for something ; J is writing down a budget and A is just goofing around, doing with pennies what happens with bitcoins : big and sudden changes in value that can solve your money problems if they go the right way. A knows about it : he’s obviously quoting from an ad in the 4th panel, for added fun. J doesn’t seem to like being put upon.
It’s more of a super-geezer thing, complaining about fiat currency in general.
Just to be difficult, maybe Arlo has collected rare (rare-ish) penny coins that are in fact worth about $20 each. Though I don’t know which those would be — the classic “rare penny” is a 1909 S-VDB, and that’s worth a lot more than $20. I’m sure Arlo is capable of doing the research, as would I be if I wasn’t trying to be difficult, though.
Interestingly enough, in the case of the penny, it is likely that the majority of the pennies in his jar are actually intrinsically worth more than the agreed upon value for a penny of 1/100 of a dollar, because he probably has mostly pre 1982 pennies, which are made of more than 1 cent’s worth of copper. It is however illegal to melt pennies down for their copper, so now suddenly we’re back to what the government does and does not want you to know, and a perfect example of fiat value, only in reverse this time.
A penny is only worth a penny (etc) because everyone says it is.
Take a look at the bulk price for copper (pre-1983) pennies.
There are also high prices for particular years, mintages, and
errors. One cent is the minimum price for a penny, but some
people are willing to pay much more for some of them.
As a side note, I see that some stores are selling $5 bags of
100 plastic pennies.
Apparently I type slower than some others here.
JP (and probably everyone else) missed the point of my sarcasm, because the link attached to the word “tulips” was rendered invisible by the new WordPress template. My point was that neither item has any (significant) intrinsic value.
P.S. Was the reference to tulips in the thread title from the beginning, or did Bill add it later? I didn’t notice it before.
If you call a tail a leg, how many things-called-legs does a dog have?
Kilby:
I saw the link because I generally browse with CSS disabled. On
this site, that lets me see links and comment numbers. Before
Bill’s fix, I didn’t see any text in grasshopper green.
I do this not because of the CIDU site, but because so many
other sites choose bad badly. Seeing Bill’s struggles to find a
suitable scheme, I may have been wrongly blaming site developers
when I should have been blaming the templates they have
available.
If you’re running Firefox, Alt-v, y, will show you the
site approximately as I see it. (“Approximately” because I use a
different browser.)
Yes, I remember the Virtual Tulips reference there from the
beginning.
Kilby: I didn’t see the link, but the intended sarcasm was obvious. “Tulips” are emblematic of “irrationally wild market overvaluation.”
“JP (and probably everyone else) missed the point of my sarcasm”
Yes, I probably missed that sarcasm I commented specifically on.
I didn’t see any sensible commentary. I saw a comparison to squirrels.
“I didn’t see any sensible commentary.”
Well, then, there can’t have been any.
“It is however illegal to melt pennies down for their copper,”
And how would they know?
Besides, the copper in a penny is worth about 1.5 cents. So if you melt down 100, you get 50 cents. If someone is willing to go through that much trouble for 50 cents, I say let them have it.
I have a great business plan: I will lease your underused industrial copper smelter; for every tonne of pennies I buy for $3215.43 I get $4823.145 worth of copper — that’s a heck of a lot more than I get from copper ore, which contains maybe .6% to 1% copper per tonne, so maybe 1 kg per tonne, or $481.77 worth of copper (using your valuation of 1.5 cents worth of copper in a 3.11g penny). I can make ten times as much money just smelting verses having to refine copper ore! It’s a great business plan! Except that the pesky gubmint has made it illegal for me to pursue it. (There were some 1.65 trillion pennies in circulation as of 2009, or 53,000 metric tonnes — yes, probably most of that is not all copper pennies, but I’ve run out of time to do an estimate of copper pennies right now, but still, my business plan looks great except for the pesky govt. declaring by fiat I can’t do it…)
Comics I Don't Understand 
I see this as a jab at Bitcoin. If you listen to Bitcoin enthusiasts enough you will hear some version of “the government doesn’t want you to know this.”
Dad-gum gummint!
It’s also a jab at many other things, such as the price of
artworks.
On the other side, This American Life and Planet Money did a
show a while back on how Brazil fixed its economy by doing
almost exactly what Arlo is proposing:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/01/130267274/the-friday-podcast-how-four-drinking-buddies-saved-brazil
A penny is only worth a penny (etc) because everyone says it is. I don’t think it is quite the same thing as artworks (or houses, or cars), which are things bought with the medium of exchange… a penny is a token representing a root unit of the medium exchange itself. Mind you, logically a penny can’t be worth $20, as $20 can be defined as 2000 pennies, which is a bit circular. A pile (or change jar) made up of 2000 units worth $20 dollars would be worth $40,000. Which I suppose is economic bootstrapping of a sort.
In theory it could be a jab at any good that you think the market has overpriced due to collective hysteria. In practice, I think this is a jab at BitCoin, partically because it’s in the news, and partially because the (faux) complaint about “the government” doesn’t fit for artwork.
Of course I’m reminded of “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does he have?”
Instead of investing in something ethereal, I’d rather spend my money on something solid, with a guaranteed return, like tulips.
“If you listen to Bitcoin enthusiasts enough you will hear some version of ‘the government doesn’t want you to know this.’”
In practice, Bitcoin is akin to cash you can spend anywhere (not as in “everywhere you want to be”… that’s Visa… but in the sense of “I’m over here, and the person I’d like to exchange economic value with is somewhere completely different.”) Cash is difficult trace effectively, and is thus used fairly heavily in commerce not sanctioned by government. Make it so that the buyer and seller don’t actually have to meet to exchange little bits of paper, and the usefulness of Bitcoin in transactions not sanctioned by government increases. As a secondary concern for government, transactions that are difficult to track are also difficult to lay taxes upon. I happen to live in a modern paradise that doesn’t believe in sales taxes, but untraceable transactions can potentially trip up income-based taxation, as well.
All that said, I DON’T think it’s a tag on Bitcoin, except as “Bitcoin” is symbolic to all cryptocurrency. It’s 100% true that something has value precisely to the extent that someone else will give you something in exchange for it. This is notable particularly in collectibles markets. There are a small number of Beanie Baby plushies which have some value in excess of the extent to which they will make a crying toddler quiet. A folded up set of papers with Superman printed on them is worth several million dollars, while another folded up set of papers, with exactly the same pictures of Superman printed on them, is worth about a buck. Little bits of paper with pictures of sports participants printed on one side can reach seven figures, or be literally impossible to give away. Or watch what happens when a painting is discovered to be a forgery. Literally nothing about the painting changes, but its value evaporates into nothing.
“I’d rather spend my money on something solid, with a guaranteed return, like tulips.”
You and the squirrels, who ran around digging up every bulb my mom planted in her yard.
But there ARE people who try that argument with gold, as if gold has value in it that is of a different intrinsic nature than little bits of rag paper with dead Presidents’ faces printed on them. For some reason, they tend to advertise fairly heavily on talk radio stations that are of a different political outlook than my own; so much so that I tend to take hearing an ad for “investing” in gold as a STRONG sign that I should change the station ASAP.
Maybe A&J need money for something ; J is writing down a budget and A is just goofing around, doing with pennies what happens with bitcoins : big and sudden changes in value that can solve your money problems if they go the right way. A knows about it : he’s obviously quoting from an ad in the 4th panel, for added fun. J doesn’t seem to like being put upon.
It’s more of a super-geezer thing, complaining about fiat currency in general.
Just to be difficult, maybe Arlo has collected rare (rare-ish) penny coins that are in fact worth about $20 each. Though I don’t know which those would be — the classic “rare penny” is a 1909 S-VDB, and that’s worth a lot more than $20. I’m sure Arlo is capable of doing the research, as would I be if I wasn’t trying to be difficult, though.
Interestingly enough, in the case of the penny, it is likely that the majority of the pennies in his jar are actually intrinsically worth more than the agreed upon value for a penny of 1/100 of a dollar, because he probably has mostly pre 1982 pennies, which are made of more than 1 cent’s worth of copper. It is however illegal to melt pennies down for their copper, so now suddenly we’re back to what the government does and does not want you to know, and a perfect example of fiat value, only in reverse this time.
Take a look at the bulk price for copper (pre-1983) pennies.
There are also high prices for particular years, mintages, and
errors. One cent is the minimum price for a penny, but some
people are willing to pay much more for some of them.
As a side note, I see that some stores are selling $5 bags of
100 plastic pennies.
Apparently I type slower than some others here.
JP (and probably everyone else) missed the point of my sarcasm, because the link attached to the word “tulips” was rendered invisible by the new WordPress template. My point was that neither item has any (significant) intrinsic value.
P.S. Was the reference to tulips in the thread title from the beginning, or did Bill add it later? I didn’t notice it before.
If you call a tail a leg, how many things-called-legs does a dog have?
Kilby:
I saw the link because I generally browse with CSS disabled. On
this site, that lets me see links and comment numbers. Before
Bill’s fix, I didn’t see any text in grasshopper green.
I do this not because of the CIDU site, but because so many
other sites choose bad badly. Seeing Bill’s struggles to find a
suitable scheme, I may have been wrongly blaming site developers
when I should have been blaming the templates they have
available.
If you’re running Firefox, Alt-v, y, will show you the
site approximately as I see it. (“Approximately” because I use a
different browser.)
Yes, I remember the Virtual Tulips reference there from the
beginning.
Kilby: I didn’t see the link, but the intended sarcasm was obvious. “Tulips” are emblematic of “irrationally wild market overvaluation.”
“JP (and probably everyone else) missed the point of my sarcasm”
Yes, I probably missed that sarcasm I commented specifically on.
I didn’t see any sensible commentary. I saw a comparison to squirrels.
“I didn’t see any sensible commentary.”
Well, then, there can’t have been any.
“It is however illegal to melt pennies down for their copper,”
And how would they know?
Besides, the copper in a penny is worth about 1.5 cents. So if you melt down 100, you get 50 cents. If someone is willing to go through that much trouble for 50 cents, I say let them have it.
I have a great business plan: I will lease your underused industrial copper smelter; for every tonne of pennies I buy for $3215.43 I get $4823.145 worth of copper — that’s a heck of a lot more than I get from copper ore, which contains maybe .6% to 1% copper per tonne, so maybe 1 kg per tonne, or $481.77 worth of copper (using your valuation of 1.5 cents worth of copper in a 3.11g penny). I can make ten times as much money just smelting verses having to refine copper ore! It’s a great business plan! Except that the pesky gubmint has made it illegal for me to pursue it. (There were some 1.65 trillion pennies in circulation as of 2009, or 53,000 metric tonnes — yes, probably most of that is not all copper pennies, but I’ve run out of time to do an estimate of copper pennies right now, but still, my business plan looks great except for the pesky govt. declaring by fiat I can’t do it…)