The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

Re:The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November by haywirez on Saturday October 07, 2017 @09:15AM (#15423645)

People also don't appreciate that Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, so the total numbers are meaningless. At the same time, inflation is super low and decreases over time, giving it more and more edge over nation-state currencies.

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Re:The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November by wpietri on Saturday October 07, 2017 @11:34AM (#15424145)

Isn't inflation strongly negative? In the link I posted above, Fred Wilson exhibits behavior typical of deflationary times: people hoard the currency.

That's a strong disadvantage vs nation-state currencies, which have clear inflation targets (generally in the 0-2% range) and the ability to hit them. It may be great for speculation, but it's terrible for a medium of exchange. For that, you want the value to be constant or very slightly decreasing.

And I don't think that's fixable. If the Bitcoin supply is limited but those tokens are used in a world of continuous economic growth, then Bitcoin will always be deflationary.

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Re:The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November by sidko on Saturday October 07, 2017 @10:04AM (#15423810)

Bitcoin is NOT infinitely divisible. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 10^8. There were reasons to choose this number and isn't arbitrary [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/31933/why-is-bit...

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Re:The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November by wwwtyro on Saturday October 07, 2017 @10:36AM (#15423925)

It is arbitrarily divisible. Fitting inside 64 bits is convenient, but hardly an insurmountable engineering challenge. There's libraries that handle this sort of thing with ease.

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