If you ask a bitcoin “true believer,” many will tell you that something terrible has already happened to the regular monetary system. This crowd is typically very concerned with the level of debt in society, especially US government debt, and the devaluation of the dollar during WW2 and the Vietnam War.
Do we live in the same world? Do you think Jeff Bezos has hoarded all this money to buy himself nice clothes, ice cream and trips to the beach? Dying with as much money (i.e. power) as possible is very much the endgame for many people.
And note that it's not just individuals that accumulate a lot of wealth, it's also corporations and governments. Do you think Fort Knox is just a piggy bank for when the citizens of the US decide to go on a collective vacation in Thailand?
>I think it is a great thing that BTC makes disincentivizes unnecessary spending.
Investing into the economy is not unnecessary spending. Every time you hear about a funding round or somebody making a loan, that's somebody else investing money. Fractional reserve is also about reinvesting money instead of letting it sit idly in a coffer.
The fact that these Econ 101 points have to be made again and again in cryptocurrency discussions is probably the best evidence as to why they're doomed to fail. If you don't even understand what inflation is about how can we have a reasonable discussion about currencies?
At which point, if they didn't provide their private keys to their heirs, the UTXO become unusable, and everybody is a bit richer thanks to these thrifty people generous sacrifice.
> Fractional reserve is also about reinvesting money instead of letting it sit idly in a coffer
Environmentalists seem to dislike investment for investment sake. I don't think they will be too sad if we collectively think it's better to have fun times and let money sit idly in wallets.
> probably the best evidence as to why they're doomed to fail
Doomed to fail, yet continuously succeeded, for over 10 years now, from less than 1 cent apiece to over 10 grands apiece.
It took me a while to realize HN is not fundamentally different from other social networks, like facebook. There is social pressure, and external reality doesn't matter as much as conforming to what the peer group says. Here, ever since BTC original announcement, the majority opinion has been mostly negative, with people actively trying to steer other away from BTC.
The majority has been consistently proven wrong, but social pressure has made that a non issue.
Meanwhile, those who learned how to dissent and did the opposite of what everyone else recommended are set for life. A few people tried to warn us. There was someone who announced here many years ago he put all of his retirement savings in BTC, after which we never heard from him again.
Yet the sour grapes keep complaining. Just for fun, try to read this 2013 thread, and ask yourself what state of reality it will take to consider the possibility you may be wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927637
No one is arguing that Bitcoin isn't deflationary.
The biggest challenge for the next decade will be mitigating stagnation.