> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
If I wanted to do that, I would ask my bank to do it, because they're better at it.
> And it is. When you pay Coinbase, they send you BTC. Then you're free to send your BTC around if you decide the $20 transaction fee is worth it.
The response when somebody tries to do transactions off-chain:
> That's why you don't store assets on coinbase...the whole point of crypto is that it allows you to be in exclusive control of your assets. Why is that so hard to understand?
The important thing is to make sure that no matter what anybody does, they're wrong, and that way bitcoin cannot possibly have any flaws.
Could've fooled me with the whitepaper title "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Before a store of value it was also billed as a mechanism to high-fee trans-border remittances, a solution for micropayments on the Web, currency replacement for countries with high local currency volatility, etc.
You're free to snipe at it, but it's simply a financial wishing well. You throw your money in and wish for more, and maybe you get some.
The world will go along with or without you. And the more people that do, the more BTC fulfills its current purpose.
Careful, though, because if the entire world decides to do that, you could find that not having any BTC isn't a very good position to be in.
That's a straight up falsehood right there. Bitcoin was explicitly designed as a currency, or medium of exchange. It became a store of value (ha!) because it was growing in use as a currency so its value was increasing and more and more people started "investing" in it. But it's volatility and rapid rise in value diminished its value as a currency. Its present value is a collective delusion.
Read https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Read section 6, incentives. Note transaction fees. Read the conclusion. Note "We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust." None of this has anything to do with being a currency, or being low-overhead.
I'm not sure how you can say it was only meant to be a store of value with a straight face. I don't know whether to question your sanity, your reading skills, or your integrity.
I think you should spend some time reading https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf before making factually incorrect statements. Bitcoin is only viewed as a store of value today because it no longer can be utilized for its original purpose. It's a complete failure in that regard.
> The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.
I think most people who read the paper focus on the early parts, rather than gaming out the implications of the later parts.
Maybe this was the intention all along, but this idea has only recently reached some saturation among information channels.
Because I haven't heard much about "store of value" until about a month ago. Which seems to be either a shifting of goalposts which is bad, or a complete morphing of why people are interesting in crypto which is even worse.
It means, people are scrambling trying to justify why the hell they're throwing all their money at crypto.
It's called Bitcoin, not Bitgold. It was sold to the public as an anonymous, decentralised, safe, fast, and cheap way to transfer money. It has failed on every single one of those claims.
Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.
You put your money in it and let it sit. That's it.
If you don't want to do that, don't use it. But that's what it's for. Or at least what it's evolved into.
I think it can cause a gigantic speculative bubble that will put people like Thiel in control over even more wealth in the world than they already have – if BTC goes to $1M/coin, what do you think will happen? $10M? There's no upper limit.
But that's a separate issue.
Bitcoin doesn't have to do anything except what it was designed to do. And it was designed this way. Satoshi certainly thought through this scenario and specifically decided to do this, and not something else. So those who are putting money into BTC are betting on Satoshi's original vision.
Now, do you think Satoshi really believed BTC would be the only crypto? I think he knew others would spring up. He solved the byzantine generals problem with sybil resistance. Of course he knew others could solve it too, in slightly different ways.
So I think he just said "Well, let them do that." And hence, use different cryptos for different circumstances.