The people buying bitcoin as an investment don't need to care about the asset or secure network, in fact bitcoin's technical details have actually created negatives when exchanges/vaults/services break and assets are lost.
To most buyers it's just like buying and selling stocks, currency, gold, oil futures, whatever.
1: Even if you can treat it like an asset, it's an unproductive one.
2: It's too easy to have some sort of problem and lose it.
At the end of the day, I see the long term value of BTC going to zero.
I feel lucky to have had some at one point, just to have that experience. One day, I saw that Bitcoin sitting in my wallet, and realised I didn't really care anymore. It didn't solve any problems I was having, and I couldn't do anything with it other than look at the balance or send it somewhere.
I'd rather have my future wealth come from value I create, than some asset I happen to hold.
He doesn't say anything about trading time for money. If he creates value that scales, he can divorce his time from the money he makes.
There is no dilemma here.
I do agree that bitcoin (well, blockchain in general) has useful properties for certain types of transactions or record keeping.
But I think the points of the article stand. If a currency isn't useful to buy things, or is subject to wild value swings due to speculation, then it isn't a great currency. If an asset doesn't have any real value to any customers, then it's not a great asset. Bitcoin combines both of those into, a mediocre currency and a speculative asset?
Apart from "protocol" and "secure network" ... this sounds almost how one might have described owning a tulip bulb in the year 1636 :)
> Trying to simplify it into a narrower definition of currency is like trying to fit a tesseract shaped object through a sphere shaped hole.
Which is funny because that's exactly what you did. You only compared it to store of value ("asset class") and ignored the "medium of exchange" part...which is the characteristic people are using for the comparison to fiat currency.
You can accept that BTC has a store of value and still be critical that its use for a medium of exchange is limited.
And to your point the author did assess it as a medium of exchange and deemed it a failure.
> but that doesn't mean it won't in the future or that it has other useful properties today
Just as you think it has a future, the author thinks it doesn't - hence the short position. But saying that the author didn't consider all aspects is disingenuous - they literally did, they just don't agree with you.
Also, you talked about other uses like "protocol and secure network". Aren't these just features of the technology that powers BTC (e.g. blockchain)?
Two words: digital gold
Dijkstra does a commendable job in explaining how people map new ideas to old ones and never really end up looking at things in a new way.
It is the same as paintings and other arts. It can be used for money laundry as well as investment.
It is the same as paintings and other arts. It can be used for money laundry as well investiment.
And the media, being generally too lazy to do critical investigative work into obscure tech stuff, have actually reported on BTC as if it is a real currency in the past.
Futures, stocks, etc never had the public image of a potential future currency, which is why you don't see blog posts about how "High-yield debt will Replace Fiat in a few years" or other such nonsense. The same cannot be said for Bitcoin.