And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.
This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.
What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?
The primary issue is that simply sitting on a dragon's hoard of money should entitle me to a bigger share of the world's wealth, as time goes on, rather than a smaller share.
Why bigger, exactly? What is the justification?
That's literally exactly how it works right now lol.
> Freedom to speculate.
Have you seen the options market.
> 2. People are free to speculate.
So it's a store of value that's destroyable by speculation. That's, if anything, worse than the US Dollar.
You can based the entire world monetary economy on a single point of failure like this.
But the core point bb88 was making is that it can serve at most one of those two goals: “store of value” and “good for speculation” are mutually exclusive. Something can be neither, nothing can be both.
> we can freely speculate
Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or...
This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom/bust cycles and disappear and everything would be smoothed out are a discredited zombie theory that never dies.
It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles.
Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is that you'll find smaller players doing boom / bust cycles in different industries with far less damaging effects.
I sympathise with the libertarian ideas behind BTC, but it's also the most inefficient and power hungry way of reaching the goal. This is a political problem and we need to solve it politically, not technically.
1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission.
2. People are free to speculate.
The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predictable in the short, medium, and long term, or be tied to some real world indicator, like the cost of consumer goods. Just stop with this inflationary nonsense.
Problem 2 will be partially solved by time. Relative price changes in Bitcoin are reduced each cycle, so by the year 2030 the incentive to speculate in the short term will be much smaller. We will see it more as a long term investment. Another solution is to deregulate other markets so that we can freely speculate in them and stop putting as much attention to Bitcoin, but I don't think politicians are very eager to do that, and it could also have some negative consequences.