Considering how easily people invest cryptocurrencies into quite risky ICOs, you can see that people don't have any problem spending, as long as it's something they consider valuable.
If you believe that bitcoin is going to be successful then you should absolutely pay in fiat.
There's also a bigger question, I may need a computer today so I'll buy one instead of waiting. But what about the money that I don't need to spend, my retirement fund or something like that? With inflationary currency I have an incentive to invest that money, fueling the economy. With bitcoin I can just let the money sleep in my cold wallet and I know that it'll keep getting more and more valuable by virtue of being in ever more limited supply. The rich get richer and the poor can't get a loan.
Of course you might say that if the economy is unhealthy it'll cause a recession which will end up devaluing my bitcoins, but then you have a prisoner's dilemma: you want people to invest bitcoins into the economy but you sure as hell don't want to be the one doing it.
But remember kids, bitcoin is about killing the greedy banks and helping the poor farmers in Africa or something so fight the good fight and buy those coins.
It's amusing to me how the bitcoin community rejoices every time a business starts accepting bitcoin but at the same time the rallying cry is always "HOLD", as in do not ever spend your bitcoins because they're going to increase in value. There's an amusing dissonance here.
HODL doesn't mean never sell nothing, it means don't try to trade in and out of bitcoin to time the market.
Nothing wrong with spending some bitcoin, that's not opposed to holding, just better to spend less bitcoin than you're earning from your salary each month.
>63% Of Americans Don't Have Enough Savings To Cover A $500 Emergency
Most people simply can't afford to invest a significant amount of money in bitcoin, especially with the high volatility we're having at the moment.
That's actually the point the parent was trying to make, except it backfires here. People won't stop buying food, clothes and paying rent to invest in bitcoin for later returns. They have to spend that money. Rich people on the other hand can do whatever they want.
If poor people want to become rich they'll probably need some initial investment, but bitcoin's deflation removes some of the incentives for rich people to invest money.
One way to solve this issue would be to tax bitcoins savings to force the rich to "spend" their money by paying taxes, but at the same time bitcoin makes it easier than ever to hide and launder your money and even if the state manages to track your account they can't cease it without having access to your private key. Forget the panama papers, forget the lux-leaks. All you need is a computer running the bitcoin client and you can move millions anonymously without any intermediary.
The not saving part is a cultural and habitual issue. People were addicted to credit in the past 20 years and this is due to a lot of forces, mostly government driven that benefit a fiat currency system.
Bitcoin not being fiat is quite different and it will take decades for habits to change, this is true.
That said, my facebook is overrun with non-technical, random people who are buying Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I don't see how bitcoins very low inflation rate (which produces price appreciation as adoption increases) disincentives investment.... instead it's an incentive because you can see the change month to month.
Taxing bitcoin and making the rich spend their bitcoins makes no sense... there are bitcoin whales with 100 times as many bitcoin as I have... doesn't affect me. IT's not a disincentive in the least.
>Taxing bitcoin and making the rich spend their bitcoins makes no sense... there are bitcoin whales with 100 times as many bitcoin as I have... doesn't affect me. IT's not a disincentive in the least.
That's the kind of short sightedness that worries me about the bitcoin ecosystem. It does affect you if you ever need a loan to buy a house or start a business because those "whales" which will be the new 1percenters won't have any incentive to lend you money. The rich gets richer, the poor remains where they are. We end up with all the problems and inequalities we have today, except worse.
We killed the banks and replaced them with other banks except these new banks are even more opaque and will be even more stingy about lending you money. And on top of that we waste an ungodly amount of energy securing the blockchain. How is that an improvement again?
In fact, my car loan's interest rate is below the rate of real inflation--- glad I bought bitcoin instead of paying cash!
You can't provide any evidence that we waste any energy on securing the block chain, in fact, the market value of bitcoin makes mining profitable, proving you wrong.... further, you ignore the cost of fiat currencies which are several orders of magnitude higher, including in energy usage.
It does in practice, actually. But there is always some portion of the market that needs the better system now. That is much less true of Bitcoin, which is mostly held for speculation rather than as a currency. People who are forced to "spend" Bitcoin are people who want to realize their speculative gain and exchange it for dollars, which they then use as currency because it's still vastly more convenient than Bitcoin.
As well as waiting for it, I only pointed this out after reading the fb comments about an article: https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://... where they basically did not want to pay because of Bitcoin's worth, again this could be because that they were asking for 60 bitcoins.
To clarify, computer markets emulate the deflationary nature of something like bitcoin. Yet they sell just fine.
On the margin, yes. It doesn't stop me from ever doing it, but it does mean I put off upgrading as long as possible.
Plus it's quite clear to me that people are willing to spend their deflationary currency on the things that they believe in - the whole ICO market demonstrates it.