3000 years from now what would be the store of value would be the question to ask.
Next I transfer it to kraken, convert it to Monero and deposit it on my drug market of choice.
It used to be simpler but this is how I do it nowadays.
Your marriage is a speculative asset that your wife doesn't cheat on you in future and actually loves you.
S&P is a speculative asset that it will perform like it has been performing in last 30 years.
USD is a speculative asset on US not going bankrupt.
Your career is speculative asset that you don't get fired tomorrow and you can find another job if you do get fired.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset that a decentralized cryptocurrency is better than relying on coins issued by bankruptable nations.
You are a speculative asset of your ego.
So I think I’m missing something. I feel like you’re suggesting that we should be more comfortable speculating because we do it all the time, but I’m not seeing how those are all the same.
You don't know what will happen in any of the cases. You just choose to believe one more over the other based on what has happened in the past.
I suppose where I get lost is that, at least subjectively, I end up treating different anticipated return distributions differently. I want a mixture of risks, both in terms of their covariance and the absolute properties.
When I think of "speculation", I am intentionally shaping only a small portion of my personal portfolio toward high risk, high reward activities. And I only really feel comfortable doing that because a larger fraction of my personal risk is in safer vehicles.
Atop that, I also think a lot about liquidity time bounds. I want access to a reasonable amount of highly-liquid, low-risk investments. I need that flexibility to be safe in the event that I need to buy something.
To my eye at least, I qualitatively differentiate between speculative investments and these liquid/low risk ones. If I felt I only had one kind of risk, I would seek out the other in some proportion.
Spouses are not very fungible though, not that I've ever tried ! ...
Because you wouldn't do either?
BTC has shown itself magically profitable indeed, but its value could only be kept by the ability of holders to keep the asset. Most marriages and some jobs will endure even in the toughest times.
I’m guessing that you had a divorce /and/ that I know the reason why she left you
So why is the IMF so against bitcoins that they'd rather pay to eliminate it? Or are the IMF scared that bitcoin can actually succeed, in a way which prevents IMF members from asserting monetary pressure in ways that benefits them?
I wouldn’t say nobody (fools exist), but, sure, only a fool would deny the statement “gold cannot form a good monetary system”.
But... Isn't that the opposite of your Bitcoin claim?
Cryptocurrency bros are literally speedrunning the entirety of monetary system failures. All of them. You’d think, maybe after the first couple they’d read a book or something?
Heck no! YOLO!
It says a lot about the popularity of Bitcoin, no?
The government were giving out btc
The government literally give (almost) everybody $30 in btc to promote this, 8% is too low
Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin.
The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.
I also think there will be a gold rush of hacking old wallets one day when the encryption is broken. Not sure if that will happen before or after btc failure though. You can’t upgrade security on lost wallets.
Otherwise it's just fiat all over again
(Or a hardfork, if your changes have to apply to all transactions, though this would be extremely tricky.)
It's just a question about updating the source code.
The fundamental appeal of bitcoin is the lack of ability to change the protocol without buy-in from a sufficient fraction of the community.
> Countries do redenominations all the time
That’s not really the same, in several fundamental ways.
It’s hard to imagine a financial instrument that’s less suited to be used as an actual currency than bitcoin. Even going back to the gold standard would be a better idea.
The rest left me puzzled, can you elaborate? Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
This question works better the other way round. Why should people that do all the work and take all the investment risks to make the riches get continually decreasing returns on their efforts whilst the people that sit and HODL get continually increasing returns on doing nothing?
Is that sarcasm? It discourages any type of economic activity.
Why would someone invest into or try to start a business when you can become richer by just sitting on your money pile with no risk.
Artificially constricting the supply of money in a non static economy is a bad idea. Like the gold standard just much worse.
One thing i’ve always wondered: If something like Bitcoin was the only currency, then it would be like a direct mapping of 21 Million Bitcoin <-> all global economic activity and goods and services. In that case, shouldn’t its price be relatively stable, and might actually even go down sometimes? Like in big natural disasters increasing the cost of certain goods?
I’m not a crypto zealot, but I’m not a big believer in the idea that the economy needs to be stimulated and I need to be forced to spend my money before it loses its value. I just want to buy what I need or really want.
And in the hypothetical case of having a mapping of “all economic activity” <-> “21M payment units”, then the relative stability of this money might still make investments more lucrative than just hoping for my money to be worth slightly more tomorrow. In this hypothetical scenario it would be more like “my money is worth 1000 eggs today, next month it might be 1001 (if others grow the economy) or 999 (if something unforeseen happens halfway across the globe). So if an investment looks like it might yield the value of 1100 eggs there would still be people to take the risk of investing, no?
It might. It would be significantly less likely. Basic economics. Unless you don’t think that most people are at least marginally rational..
> In that case, shouldn’t its price be relatively stable, and might actually even go down sometimes
That’s true only if there is no economic growth. Gold standard had a similar problem.
Why would someone invest into or try to start a business when you can become richer by just sitting on your _property_ pile with no risk.
Yeah, I guess.
Well that implies that you are more or less economically illiterate. I’m not talking about property and even renting residential/commercial property (as relatively safe as it is) does provide an actual service.
Anyway.. a very basic example, imagine you have $1000000, you can:
- keep it under your bed and lose 2% every year
- invest it into real estate etc. and make e.g. 4% every year.
- invest into the stock market and make 6%.
Now with a deflationary currency like bitcoin (or gold back in the mid to late 1800s) you can just hoard it and conservatively make 2-3% every year* invest into safe bonds and gain another 3-4%. Business would need to grow at an extremely fast pace to be able to attract much capital in such an environment.
* of course it’s only hypothetical. You’d need the economy to grow and productivity to increase YoY for this. That would be unlikely in any economy that used Bitcoin as its primary currency.
This is how insane that sounds
Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation.
Inflation in the monetary supply, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange.
No, that's not debasement - in fact it was the opposite, the huge supply of silver (not so much gold) meant those Spanish coins were good-quality bullion. Inflation happened, and while that can commonly be caused by debasement, that wasn't the cause in this instance.
The gold escudo was 22-karat for basically it's entire existence,.
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...
If the fees were lower I'd use it for plenty of other things too.
Aye, there's the rub.
With all due respect, why not Bitcoin Cash or some other coin? Bitcoin Cash is the exact same thing as Bitcoin - same protocol, same 21 million coin limit, same Satoshi whitepaper, same everything, except bigger blocks and thus, much lower fees. If you are using a coin as an actual currency, and not as a speculator, why stick with high-fee Bitcoin?
I used to believe in Bitcoin in the beginning, but the high fees make it impractical to use as everyday currency.
Bitcoin Cash is much closer to what I had hoped Bitcoin would become. It’s the same as Bitcoin, except that it ideologically split exactly for the reason that some people wanted it to behave more like an actual currency, while others invented the “digital gold” narrative.
Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.
It not being "used" in this context is referring to it not being used as legal tender. The law that was walked back was one which had made bitcoin legal tender throughout the country. As others have mentioned, it seems to have largely failed in being adopted as such, as surveys seem to indicate that less than 10% of people in the country had used it as legal tender in the previous year.
+ By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.
+ Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack.
+ Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk.
And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.
This has always felt like a completely weaksauce argument to me. Even with Bitcoin, very few people other than dedicated miners download a full blockchain (like it or not). 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop, but 8TB is at most a minor inconvenience on a server or dedicated mining rig. What's the demographic where a measly factor of 8 makes a difference?
I'm gonna have to ask for evidence on this one, I strongly believe most full nodes are not mining pools. http://bitdash.io/ says there are ~10,000 running full nodes, yet there are only ~100 mining pools that have produced a block in recent history: https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin
> 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop
On your phone, sure. But my desktop already has a few TB of storage. But not 8. And Bitcoin Cash supporters usually seem to indicate that they'd increase it beyond 8 if the 8mb blocks filled up.
The only ones who need to have full blockchain nodes are the miners, and for them it’s just another disk in their data center.
Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management.
As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to.
You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it.
Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value.
But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.
The elected government serves the society of its citizens, while inventors and holders of unofficial currencies are individuals who ultimately serve only themselves.
It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses.
When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us.
We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most.
The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state.
To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.
As a general rule it's not very convenient to do so though since the value can fluctuate. (Which naturally all currencies do, but it would be kind of like paying with USD in the EU. You could do that, but most stores are not interested in the extra hassle of keeping track of multiple currencies.)
It is also not uncommon for services like VPN or IPTV streaming ("pirate streaming") providers to accept crypto.
A counter-example: can you come up to a coffee shop with a gold collectible coin, chew a piece out, and use it to pay for your coffee directly? You need a proxy in form of a pawn shop for that.
Instruments are instruments, if it is not used for every day business transactions doesn't mean it is not heavily ab-used inside it's niche