Unless this alerts people to the risk of losing a private key and they decide owning Bitcoin isn't a great place to store wealth.

Unless they then do the most minimal amount of research and realize that unlike any other store of wealth, they can redundantly back it up in multiple locations.

You can even split up your key in an M of N format so that a) no single compromised location causes loss, and b) some number of storage locations can be lost without losing your key.

Can you do that with gold? Land? Art? Cash? Bonds? Stocks? All of these rely on either securing a single location where the wealth is stored and moving to another place is either expensive, risky, or necessarily impossible (land/buildings), and/or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.

> or they rely on trusting some custodian to preserve your claim on that wealth.

Is this going to be one of this discussion where people try to pretend banks haven't existed for centuries and work very well for pretty much everyone?

This argument always baffled me as pro crypto person. There is a subset of religious crypto zelots that see banks as evil incarnate.

Banks are example of what more-less people want from their currency. And crypto should be taking notes from CENTURIES of experiences. And not just shun it all and start from scratch.

Loosing keys to wallet is huge problem for ubiquity of crypto, and as a currency of the future it might be fatal flaw. If someone steals my IRL wallet, I call bank to cancel my cards and cry a bit about lost cash and hustle of getting all ID's etc back. If I loose crypto wallet, its gone all of it. Without proper precautions of multiple wallets and safeguards you risk loosing all your wealth in accident or robbery without much to do about it.

I'm not saying it's not possible to back up the key, I'm saying if a billion dollars disappear overnight because one person was stupid, we don't know the way people would react to that. May be they would value Bitcoin more or maybe they would value it less. It's not apparent less supply equals more demand in this specific case.

You're presenting this like it's a secret thing that lost private keys are irrecoverable.

It's not a secret. Immutability is one of the key features and regularly advertised part of the system. So much so that when that irreconcilability is violated (e.g. rolling back the DAO hack in Ethereum) it's seen as a negative.

There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.

> There might be some morons who didn't do any research before investing, but they won't be a huge loss if they sell out and stay out.

I think you're underestimating the size of this group.

I mean many people have been moaning about a wealth tax. This is similar to a 100% tax on wealth with automatic airdrops.

If everyone's net worth goes up, it's about the same as no change at all.

Every _bitcoin holder_, it's not like a country experiencing deflation.

How so? Prices aren't set by the amount of BTC in the wild. A currency has no inherent demand. No btc holder can offer any more btc for goods than before.

Prices are set by the order books, including how many that are willing to sell and to what price. If a large amount of coins are removed from the market, and the buying pressure stays the same, that will lead to higher prices.

If they weren't being sold then, again, the amount available to buy is unchanged.

not really sustainable though is it?

Why not?

The currency is digital. If the current smallest unit is worth too much, then we can just increase the decimal places.

Bitcoin is not like gold where its limited supply makes it infeasible as a currency for a large number of people because the size of the coins for everyday purchases would be too small to physically handle (hence the concurrent use of less value dense silver).

Bitcoins can be split down to 8 decimal places.

Given the current loss/mining rate its totally possible for BTC to become difficult to operate, but its also possible for the mining cap to be removed or for coins to be split further.

8 decimal places are already bordering insufficient: there are real world currencies whose unit costs less than 1 satoshi. See https://www.fiatmarketcap.com/

Yeah, but in how many of those currencies are people actually using base units for transactions? I'd wager they're all trading notes denominated with thousands or millions of units for a loaf of bread, like the Zimbabwe trillion dollar note, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7832601.stm

Also, there is already a trick on the lightning network to trade sub satoshis without requiring a hardfork, probabilistic payments, https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/7.pdf

The currency is deflationary but you don't have any fundamental issues until you have issues subdividing the currency, but given that the protocol supports dividing down to 0.00000001 BTC that's not a significant issue (and I'm sure the community would patch that long before it became a problem).

Completely sustainable, because coins are very highly sub-dividable.

Same as the rest of the coiner nonsense

I don’t see why unchecked and uncontrollable deflation of a “currency” wouldn’t be sustainable.

Some libertarian crank (I forget who) said that the best charity a person could do is to cash out their fortune and burn the paper dollars. This is a deflationary event and does just what you mention--gives everybody a little gift. Somehow a cynical suggestion like that is considered serious now. Because it is high-tech I guess.

Na, that's stupid with cash because we can arbitrarily print more of it. Any cash burning event would be of marginal collective contribution.

It actually matters with bitcoin because of the hard supply cap. Every lost coin shrinks the pie.

It doesn't matter with any currency. You don't price things by how many dollars exist. You price things at what people will pay. If the billions weren't being spent, its about the same as if they're never spent.

Printing money and giving it away causes inflation because people can use it to buy things but having money printed but locked away does nothing. If this money was locked up then its not much of a change.

“We” can arbitrarily print more Bitcoin or dollars. In either case you just need consensus among the correct group of people.

Technically true, but the big difference is that if someone hard forks bitcoin to start printing more, holders will see their coins fork with the chains. You'll have both the old, hard money and the new diluted money, and the market will decide which one is more valuable. This doesn't happen with fiat.

Which one would you choose?

infact "we" can just seitch to any other infinite coins cause again, theres barely anything but grandfsther clauses tying bitcoin to any realworld value

It does not give "everybody" a little gift, only people who already have money (since their existing money is now worth X% more). People with 0 still have 0, and people in debt have to work even harder to pay it off. Something that disproportionally helps rich people is the opposite of charity.

Even if they didn't, the rest of the world could probably peacefully agree to a hard fork in which those coins stop existing.

One of the disadvantages of crypto, I suppose, is that people could gang up and hard fork against any arbitrary billionaire even if they were alive.

Why would anyone do that? The stolen coins would become worthless as the other 49% of the network flee to a platform that doesn't come with the risk of arbitrary theft.

> One of the disadvantages of crypto, I suppose, is that people could gang up and hard fork against any arbitrary billionaire even if they were alive.

This isn't unique to crypto. People have literally been ganging up against powerful individuals since pre history. Hell, it's common in the animal world. Young male lions often gang up to oust the old alpha and take over his pride.

And beyond that, our current legal system can go after any arbitrary person much more easily than it would be for the entire world to consent to hard forking to target a single individual.

If we know anything about Bitcoin is that hardforking it doesn't work and you end up with coins that are worth a couple percentage in value compared to the original chain.

I'm pretty sure that's less likely in crypto than in real life.

If I say hard-fork enough, maybe I sound like I know about crypto things.

You don't know what it takes to do a fork of bitcoin. Many have tried, none have succeeded.

That's how existing countries and currencies already work, too.