Bitcoin never claimed to be and is not altruistic. And the same can be said about almost all investments, you need information early, you need to judge the information correctly, and you need to move in. Same with bitcoin.
For example, if you say that bitcoin has 7 tps and even with lightning will take decades to onboard everyone, it will become a store of value that you are supposed to buy and hold for long term. But if you point out how bitcoin has crazy volatility, it may become a currency that you don’t hold, just use to transact.
People whip up whatever they need it to be to make an argument. Sometimes we call it a currency because we can use it to buy things, other times its an investment. To reliably fit in either of those buckets is exclusive. To be a currency you need to be a store of value that is not fluctuation a lot, this means its a terrible investment vehicle.
This is like calling the web “new” in 2005-2008 (depending on chosen start date).
The “new” excuses ran out a decade ago.
It can be seen as an investment by those who bet on a rise in demand for sovereign value, and can be seen as a currency by those who doubt the ability of fiat value to continue indefinitely.
And while there are indeed large currency markets, it is not very common on a population basis due to it being very much a speculators game requiring massive amounts of leverage for the average net worth.
If bitcoins had constant or decreasing value through time then people would be more willing to trade them. This is why deflation is so economically dangerous.
It did encourage mining, but that doesn’t driving long term adoption and has nearly purely negative consequences.
The ideal long term strategy for adoption would have mining to provide a consistent reward in real terms over a long timeframe, low costs and high transaction volumes, and for unused accounts to be charged a small fee. Bitcoin failed all of those which is why it’s never had significant adoption as a currency.
Yet there is no more successful digital currency on the planet. If you think you can make one with "better" rules please go ahead!
> This is why deflation is so economically dangerous.
The idea that inflation and constant spending are the only thing that makes an economy work is faith-based, and bitcoin was intentionally not started that way. So far I'd say it has worked quite well.
Back when people used precious metals for currency many different economies would all be tied to the same shifts in value. I don’t know all the details but there’s real world support for significant deflation being detrimental not just theory.
That said trivial levels of deflation aren’t harmful, but bitcoin had very extreme deflation.
> I don’t know all the details but there’s real world support for significant deflation being detrimental not just theory.
The problem is that the "real world support" is usually taken from fiat money economies that are entirely built on inflation, and for historical examples there usually was an economic crisis at the same time that was accompanied by deflation. It's hardly conclusive.
> an economic crisis at the time
In non fiat currencies you also get deflation from economic growth. Where you can study the effect is when the growth occurs outside of a given economy. Again, outside of my expertise it’s just something I have read.
That's fine though - if you have something that holds value you can move it into whatever currency exists when you need to do that.
Bitcoin only makes one relevant promise: There will only be 21 million. And that means that the people who are born poor get a chance at building wealth by not having the government constantly reduce the value of their money. Bitcoin is an escape from the system that keeps people poor.
And take the fame. He also, as I mentioned before, may have been a candidate for the Noble prize in economics. https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/bitcoin-creator-satoshi....
I take it as a give, he is dead. He would be a candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman
But I guess your bias is because you live within this system, right?
As an example, I am against any system that takes us back to a world where governments no longer are able to use the soft power of economics to react to other countries. The alternative being that they will need to result to hard power which means physical violence.
The rest of the stuff like being a haven for criminals, grifters, and scam artists is related to but not really the cause for my bias.
Said like somebody who never had a problem with the financial system and had access to banks for their entire life. It's great that money works for you, for most people on this planet the same can not be said.
> where governments no longer are able to use the soft power of economics to react to other countries
The idea that monetary policy is the only way to influence economics seems kind of absurd? You're surely not suggesting that removing fiat currencies would remove economics from the world of politics?
You really need to get someone rich in order for the meme to spread. This is the only way. People have a natural tendency to not be interested in currencies. Thinking about currencies makes their head ache. It needs to be really rewarding. On the other hand, there was no precedent and it was really risky. Most people were throwing away bitcoin at the start, and they just wanted it to spread.
In Bitcoin the security depends on the price of the currency. If the price doesn't pick up, the network won't be secure enough. It has to be rewarding, it has to spread as an idea, it has to be secure. The more secure it is, the more plausible it is to succeed, and so forth.
Most people don't really understand the disinflationary model as you explained, although I agree that in theory it is better and more elegant way to distribute coins. However, I think that if Bitcoin had chosen this model, it wouldn't have taken off. This model has too high inflation for too long, and the meme and security would have died off.
If the inflation is too high for too long, the meme won't spread, and the price will stay very low or nearly zero. Then a single miner will mine all coins and no one buys them, or only a single rich dude buys them. So in the end the coins won't get distributed as widely / fairly and the project will fail.
I think that Bitcoin succeeded in it's distribution as fairly as possible. I don't think that this can be replicated. It's impossible to create a new cryptocurrency where someone won't scoop them all off cheaply in the start, and that's why the creators typically own most of the coins, which will eventually doom the project. The infinite disinflationary model might be the only way to succeed in distributing a completely new currency, because no one wants to invest in it. But it has to have some other properties in order to spread widely.
Hopefully it's not as bad since there's no early adopter advantage and I don't expect to profit at all. I just want peer to peer electronic cash!
https://www.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/kgsetd/grin_monet...
Bitcoin's supply schedule, in which half of all Bitcoin is mined in the first four years, guaranteed a Bitcoin wealth concentration on the early miners, especially considering how few there were. At long intervals, Satoshi would be the only one, mining on his laptop.
A truly altruistic system would not confer such a huge advantage on early miners, for example by fixing the block reward. Then each generation would be able to mine the same amount of bitcoin, instead of each next generation getting 32x less than the current one. Such a steady supply would also make Bitcoin much less the vehicle for speculation that it has turned into.
Of course, then the supply wouldn't have a finite cap, it would be limited by time only. Still, that would already make it very different from fiat, with the yearly supply inflation rate going down steadily toward 0 (known as being dis-inflationary). Eventually, the supply rate would more or less balance the inevitable coin loss rate [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...