> I'm not sure BTC is a viable way to store value...
BTC (and any deflationary CC) is still a better long term value holder than EUR or USD
BTC (and any deflationary CC) is still a better long term value holder than EUR or USD
And what prevents greedy people from forming Bitcoin to remove (or increase) the maximum coin count and getting enough other geeedy miners to go along with it to be the majority fork?
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.
I just want to point out that difficulty decreases when there's less mining. Difficulty would not be the problem. Bitcoin would just be more vulnerable to a 51% attack with less hash power.
This is even worse because it would likely be corralated with a loss of market value for Bitcoin, which lessens the incentive to mine. Combined with the ease at which miners can switch to another coin (or, at least, another bitcoin fork), and it is easy to imagine a death spiral where Bitcoin simply fails to lower its difficulty because it does not have enough hashrate to do so.
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. Certainly compared to the 70s when the UK had a 25% inflation rate. At least back then people realised it had a cause in the real economy and wasn't a money-printing phenomenon.
Personally I think we need to be highly wary of any group that focuses on planting its ideology in people as early as possible because of this phenomenon. Most legitimate philosophy and ideology has no problem convincing adults of its content, and no need to prey on the illogical minds of children.
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.
Nobody wants to hold an illiquid asset and BTC are doing their darnest to make it illiquid as possible.
So, if Bitcoin could easily be worth nothing in 10 years, it's a poor Store of value.
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.
> gold
Gold is actually used for a lot of things (ex: gold leaf on books), historically it's price has gone up and down quite a bit, but within a fairly narrow band. ~0.1x to 1x while being easy to hide or smuggle.
> probably drop
Even then it's still worth more than 0.
PS: In reality you would likely cause a fork, but that would also drop the price causing miners to migrate to some other coin making further manipulation easier.
Yes, probably, but remember - you have way more hashing power still. So you just swap to their new fork and beat them out there too, and you keep doing it until they give up and are forced to accept your fork as the truth.
I'd guess one option would be to build a ban for China into the new fork directly, but that would be easy to bypass with VPNs. Ultimately, if you have the hashing power, you own it. Bitcoin can't keep invalidating winning forks forever as it's a war they lose on each step of the way.
Worldwide there are several hundred people that could afford to do this for the lulz, plus basically every government. Now, I don't think the odds are very high it's going to happen, but they are vastly higher than the odds USD's or Gold is going to become worthless.
And even a deflationary currency can decrease in value if demand drops.
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.