If we're all being honest with ourselves, people are buying BTC now because they expect the price to go up -- not because they expect to use it as a currency in the future. I don't think we know it's a bubble. No one can really know that. I think we do know that it's being used only for speculation at the moment, which makes it a commodity, not a currency.
That's a fallacy that keeps being repeated by those who never thought this logic through. I spend bitcoins. I have been spending them for 7 years. Because the thing is no one knows for sure that Bitcoin will keep rising, or even maintain its value. Therefore spending bitcoins today is actually logically the less risky option.
In fact I can show that your argument doesn't hold in another way: if you think the value will keep rising, you should be putting all your life savings into Bitcoin at this very moment... And I know you are not doing it, because you don't know if Bitcoin will keep rising.
That seems to be latest meme for attacking bitcoin. You know what makes new want to spend my bitcoin? I have a bitcoin debit card, and i like beer. Not a beer in 10 minutes either. So i buy it. The only difference is that the money in my wallet isn't being debased while I'm not buying beer with it. So beer just keeps getting cheaper.
the transaction would likely take much longer than 10 minutes - unless you paid a transaction fee worth many times the cost of the beer :)
For example, if you transact BTC directly over the network, yea it’ll be expensive. Like 5-8%. But if I transact through an exchange, it’s more like .25-.5%. And it’s instantaneous. They’re a clearinghouse that batches transactions periodically.
Seems there’s a lot of misunderstanding about money in general, including crypto. I for one am glad awareness is raising. As I truly believe money/finance/capital is an extreme, if not the greatest, form of control.
Edit: And 5-8% transaction rates are absolutely insane for a payment system.
It's actually not even that, the miners just choose the transactions that pay the highest fees each time they create a block, to maximize their revenue, so you can choose whatever fee you're willing to pay and it might or might not be included depending on what other people are willing to pay.
Also you don't usually buy beer for 20 million, hence the rates will be in the mentioned ballpark.
Yup.
> Must be the same as leaving your coins in an exchange and converting to fiat when you spend?
Yep. I just transfer bitcoin there when I need it. These days though, I just put the cash I want for the next couple of weeks from a paycheck onto it. I actually have to move bitcoin off the exchange, because it has increased so greatly over the past few months. My beer money is increasing in value faster than I spend it.
A "unit" consists of 100,000,000 "satoshis", just as 21 million "dollars" consists of 2,100,000,000 pennies. It's just an arbitrary unit of denomination. I guess the difference is there would only ever be 2.1 quadrillion "satoshis", instead of basically an infinite number of "pennies".