Bitcoin conf stopped taking Bitcoin payments because they don't work well enough

I was, I've spent more Bitcoins than traditional currencies on buying actual products during last year (electronics, games, hotels, flight tickets, etc.). That ended, 1 months ago when fees rose to a point limit that made such relatively small operations inviable.

That said, I still hope for new cryptocurrencies to provide a solution to scalability issues. Maybe https://failsafe.network/ or maybe something else.

Given the trends, a lot of people are willing to exchange fiat to get hands on the coins. And so, in the current situation, it does look like coins, however speculative their worth may be, are in fact potential store of value. I don't see a circular logic here, tbh?

I agree, though, unlike stock options of publicly/privately traded companies, there's no real value generated here; its... umm... 'ether' But the point I am trying to make is, at the cost of repeating my self here, as long as people are willing to pay fiat in exchange for the coins (and the trend is strong and investments continue to pour in), isn't it actually a potential store of value? For how long though, it is anyone's bet.

Grandparent's analogy was "I have a trillion widgets, and my friend paid $1 for 1 widget, so I'm a trillionaire!" All I'm saying is that the economic activity surrounding cryptocurrency is nothing like that.

The nodes define what a bitcoin is. So long as they agree that bitcoin should follow the original exponentially decreasing reward schedule, then that is what will happen.

There are some problems, for instance, if almost all miners decided to switch to another fork, then the original chain would simply die because of the difficulty. But miners have electricity bills to pay and are strongly incentivised to mine the most profitable chain. It is not a matter of convincing the miners, but of convincing the world that your uncapped fork is more valuable.

Lolnope. For my generation in Germany certainly not. Current accounts and saving accounts deliver interest ratios hovering around 0%, some even with negative interest. Tax-exempt vehicles are only for the ultra-rich. Pensions are a laughing stock, I'm 26 now and don't expect to have anything resembling a pension when retiring with 80. Stocks/trusts? Either you really have considerable savings to start with (due to minimum order fees it's not really worth it to trade below 10k) or you got the stuff inherited at which point you're rich enough to not be affected by anything. Property? Unless you want to invest in the rural countryside that's so far off society that you'll be lucky when you have a 2x64k ISDN uplink you are not able to get property, especially not since the latest round of credit regulations which make it all but impossible for the ordinary person to get a mortgage.

Oh and that all has the prerequisite of actually having money to save. The boomer generation has royally screwed up the current young generation. We're struggling to pay rent and (in the US) hope we won't have a major injury sending us straight into bankruptcy, and that's it. Money to save is something for the elite.

> It baffles me how scared people are of inflation given how low it is at the moment in the West and has been for years.

Low inflation has only been made possible by advances in "how to feed people with cheap garbage". Rents, energy, transportation - everything has skyrocketed, but due to bad selection in the comparison basket inflation is "low". Screw that metric.

The 51% is a better chance attack, you can still try to perform it with 10% and succeed and you can try with 60% and fail.

>Bitcoin could easily be worth nothing in 10 years, it's a poor Store of value.

Gold is more and more used in electronics, less and less in jewellery, if we move to graphene-based computers gold will not have much place there and its value in USD will probably drop. One nuke on Hawaii or California will cause huge drop in value of USD compared to other currencies.

Because it's nice to have a long term value storage that cannot be randomly seized by the state, debt collectors, thieves, burglars or anyone. We have seen such things during the many times in the past where private gold ownership has been outlawed, or during the financial crisis where the balances of account holders above 100k EUR were used to pay off the debts of the bank.

> And if you did, what's wrong with gold, which has a bit of a track record?

Can be seized by the state, is subject to export controls/tariffs, and for the environmentally conscious: the production process of gold and many other metals is incredibly nasty, however gold is a special kind of bad given its chemical properties.