34 sats \ 4 replies \ @stack_harder 4 Oct \ on: The ethics of borrowing in fiat, in order to buy bitcoin bitcoin
if you have a problem with using your money to buy btc, your only other choice is to have people pay you in btc, which is fine if you can find them
i use btc as savings, i have to use my fiat money to get some as that is my savings vehicle of choice
people in poor countries also swap fiat to get bitcoin so they preserve purchasing power.
maybe on a sailor level you could argue ethics, but some guy trying to swap his pasos for bitcoin is not an enemy or abuser, he's the abused and he's swapping a weak asset for a hard asset, failure to do so would mean his own financial destruction
when talking about taking a loan to buy btc, shorting the currency basically, i think the ethics are maybe more questionable in countries with far weaker currencies, but when doing it with gbp, dollar, euro, i don't feel it's super unethical because you're evening the financial playing field IMO and the risk is higher because the time it takes to infalte the debt away is far longer
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Interesting point.
In the US, many people could potentially get a loan, and buy bitcoin with that money. But in a country with a far weaker currency, only the well-connected will be able to get that loan at a reasonable rate of interest.
Like in the example I gave in my post, with the author of the book The Hard Boiled Egg Index - Surviving Zimbabwe's Hyperinflation. He was able to borrow a huge sum of money at an easy interest rate, because he was a senior employee at a bank.
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yeah, in his case, he's doing something akin almost to insider trading.
although I'm sure growing up with the poverty of Zimbabwe,m it will reshape a person's mind., survive at all costs.
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Actually if you read the book, everyone in Zimbabwe pretty much was desperately scrambling to get their Zim dollars into something else - anything else, at all. So I'm not sure that it could be described as insider trading.
So it's a tricky situation, ethically. And he definitely had his doubts about it.
I think I'll write up a post about the book. It's super interesting, especially to bitcoin/econ history nerds
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