The most likely success story for crypto is it will be only for banks while regular people will be banned from owning it. There is simply no way a government will allow irreversibly hackable assets in the wild. There are no limits to the damage entities can do with anonymous GDP-scale wealth.

Actually Iran is using cryptos right now to circumvent some bans from the US government. Certainly Iran would not be in favour for banning crypto.

As Raoul Pal mentions, this is the state of game theory. One country might ban, another might adopt. If you can't spend (or exchange for fiat) the cryptos in your own country, you might move to another country.

I don't believe Bitcoin will be banned ... at least not while Bitcoin is still a relatively small asset class. Especially since institutional investors are now entering the crypto markets. And perhaps at some point, if enough institutional investors have entered the crypto markets, governments might hesitate to ban crypto, as it could destroy a lot of wealth in pension funds, etc...

Those are his main points. And I think they are both wrong. The gold example is from ancient times without KYC/AML and absolute surveillance. There is nothing substantial you could possibly do nowadays without proper invoicing and inventory tracking. Regulators will notice instantly.

The tech behind bitcoin isn't really that advanced and hiding from the government was never a focus. The tech used by regulators has evolved significantly from the times of previous "defeats". People don't realise how much work goes into tracing payments worldwide. Remember FATCA took only two years to deploy worldwide along with a roadmap to tighten control over the next decade.

I would also point out that the market expectation clearly isn't aligned with currencies being 'in trouble' - very low inflation in general right now.

So yes, a bet on crypto is a bet against the market consensus, sort of by definition :)

I need to read up on TIPS, haven't heard about that before. Yes, gold is a decent option as well. However I view Bitcoin as digital gold and it has a few nice properties that gold doesn't have (of course gold has some good properties that Bitcoin doesn't have). One of the aspects of Bitcoin that I appreciate the most, is that it's very easy to carry around with me, for example when travelling on an airplane to another country. The same is not true for gold.

> I would also point out that the market expectation clearly isn't aligned with currencies being 'in trouble' - very low inflation in general right now.

Inflation is actually really high, but its mostly hidden in rising prices for stocks and real estate.

Sort of. There's inflationary forces (fiscal / stimulatory policy) battling deflationary forces (mainly technological innovation), mainly netting out to a low inflation rate at the moment, as defined by the CPI.

Assets that are not affected by the deflationary forces (such as land, and some types of housing), do tend to increase in value, though some of that is increase is just due to interest rates being so low (since for most consumers the house payment is more important than the absolute price; when interest goes down, prices normally go up).

It would be interesting to do a graph of interest-normalized house/asset prices over time.

As for the portability of Bitcoin ... OK, but then Bitcoin > Bitcoin ETF, if your goal is to transport and spend it outside of online brokerages.