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Great, the MacBook Pro that I bought back in 2014 with Bitcoin is now worth over $8,000 !

People bought drugs on SilkRoad back when the price was $2 / bitcoin. Those must have been some of the most expensive drugs in history !

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I never really understood this perspective. Suppose you had $4,000 worth of bitcoins in 2014 and spent $2,000 on a MacBook, you'd have $2,000 worth of bitcoin left. That $2,000 worth of bitcoin would now be worth more than your original $4,000 and you have a MacBook. If anything, your MacBook was free.

This hypothetical scenario is muddled. OP is lamenting an investment decision (sell BTC, buy computer). It's irrelevant that he/she might have had extra funds (the second $2,000 of bitcoin in your example) that weren't part of that investment decision. OP probably owns other assets as well (car, stocks, patio furniture, etc.). They weren't part of the investment, either. They're irrelevant to this analysis.

Saying the computer was free is misunderstanding what "free" means. If the computer were free, he/she would have paid $0 for it and would still have the bitcoin.

Of course you're right that I am misusing the word "free." But, I understood OP to be criticizing the deflationary nature of Bitcoin rather than lamenting a personal decision to spend his/her own bitcoin holdings. My point was just that it isn't a bad thing for your money to triple in value.

Interesting example. Bitcoin as an example of increased purchasing power facilitated by an increase in productivity and value generation of the entire (global) economy. Thus, a more prosperous ecosystem makes each individual who shares its "currency" wealthier over time - a distribution of the time savings / value generation to all participants.

Can't the same be said of any monetary instrument that has changed in value due to deflation or inflation?

Your point illustrates why half of the federal reserve's mandate from congress is price stability. See Macroeconomics 101... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

OP's point seems to be that inflation of bitcoin value is built in, effectively resulting in de minimis velocity and seeking out of alternative stores of value which are more stable. Bitcoin is how I would design a currency if I wanted it to self implode.

You must be familiar with the pizza story? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2013/12/23/the-bitcoin-...

Those two pizza's were worth $11.6 million in today's value.

were gonna start seeing a lot of 'most expensive' soon due to opportunity cost loss

I have friends who are long-time Apple employees. The houses they bought in the mid-2000s effectively cost them more than $20m, because they sold their employee stock to pay for them (AAPL has gone up 20x since then).

They don't feel bad, of course, and nobody feels sorry for them. But you can drive yourself insane if you spend too much time thinking about the wide variation in outcomes if you'd made slightly different investment choices.

If the houses they bought are in Palo Alto, they would have appreciated considerably since and, if they used the stock sale to pay the deposit on the house and mortgaged the rest, they might have come out ahead.

That's true. In this case, the cohort of people with Apple stock in the mid-2000s is also the cohort of people who survived the dot-com crash a few years earlier, so they were much more of the mentality to secure their homestead rather than taking the risk that funds would continue to flow in to service the mortgage.

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