Insane is a strong word. But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer. What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange. As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".
The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".
> But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange.
I don't consider Ether to be a currency, I consider it to be a commodity. The very fact that people bid the fee market up to high levels, despite the Ethereum network running constantly at its full capacity of a bit over one million transactions per day, is itself proof that the network is a medium of exchange that people choose to use.
> As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".
I don't believe that Ethereum is currently very useful for buying t-shirts or playing games. Most of the usage so far has been to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
> The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".
The good that Ethereum sells (service really) is the ability to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. If you don't derive value from that service, no one is forcing you to use it. Ethereum wasn't created to dethrone Visa as a payment network for t-shirt purchases at Walmart. It's fine if it isn't used for that.
My point remains that pricing a service based on supply and demand (in this case VM execution) is very much sane in an economic sense. When certain customers cease purchasing a service because the price is bid higher than the benefit those customers receive from it, that's market efficiency, not insanity.
The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".