Can bitcoin help solve the affordable housing problem?
https://ift.tt/32qJtza
Affordable housing as an issue is caused in part because real estate is one of the most stable stores of value that exists. This is why we have unoccupied buildings throughout many parts of the world, this video below about New York’s Billionaires row provides enlightening insight on the topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wehsz38P74g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wehsz38P74g)
Investors, or rather people who want to hold onto value, will end up buying real estate without any plans to live inside of them, because its the central governments “role” at this point to debase their currency, so there is no point in storing wealth in a government issued currency. Which means anyone who wants to maintain their wealth needs to put it in something other than the dollar – realistically speaking this means stocks or real estate. But this creates a few issues for both investment types (I wont go into detail on stocks), but for real estate the problem is that it creates a market where real estate is produced to meet the demands of these investors, for the purpose not to be lived in, but to store wealth.
To me, this is analogous to the knife money that first arose back in ancient china. At first, people must have traded actual daggers because of their utility, but eventually they were used as forms of wealth storage, so knife money… knives which have no intent (or capability) to be used as knives were produced enmass.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_money)
It’s not too far off to say a lot of housing in many parts of the world is already like these knife money in the sense that they were never built to be lived in, don’t actually get occupied, and are traded more or less to transfer wealth and nothing more. The billionaires row condos are a decent example, the condos in dubai are another. However, I really wanted to show a video on the ghost cities of china because they are exemplary of this phenomenon. They are units which I believe are unlivable due to the lack of proper plumbing/electricity/amenities and never will be lived in, but they will be traded as a form of money. The way I see it, monetary debasement is really what is at the heart of the housing affordability crisis. People don’t want to store their wealth in cash because cash is trash, so they put it elsewhere, and elsewhere very often means real estate, which creates a whole series of other issues.
So the question is, assuming that an asset that does not get diluted, does not lose value, can be stored indefinitely, can be denominated infinitely, and can be liquidated expediently is introduced into the market (such as bitcoin, but can really be anything else), will such an asset be able to outcompete real estate as a store of wealth such that the market begins to prefer it over the “knife money” real estate for storing wealth? And assuming this asset is a better battery of wealth than real estate, will that change the market dynamics so that real estate is seen less as “a store of wealth” allowing it to be traded closer to the value of “a place to live”?
I really believe that having a better alternative to knife money will mean people will stop using knives for money, if you get what I’m saying. And if you get what I’m saying, I believe that it will return the price of knives back to something used for cutting and the knives will no longer be priced as a store of value.
Lastly, given how incredibly unsustainable the construction industry is, wouldn’t that make crypto mining at least tenfold more sustainable than using construction to store wealth?
Cryptocurrency
