Inflation means the price of assets goes up. That means the purchasing power of cash goes down. If you don’t want your purchasing power to go down, you buy assets instead of holding cash.
If you really believe inflation is going to be high, you could take out USD-denominated loans to buy inflating assets. The inflation would increase the value of your assets and decrease the value of your loan balance at the same time. Of course, if you get this wrong you’re stuck with a house that’s worth less than what you paid.
This isn’t new. It’s basic investment knowledge that holding wealth in cash will slowly devalue it due to inflation. Anyone who wants to avoid inflation must invest it somewhere.
Bitcoin’s value is driven purely by demand. Buying Bitcoin isn’t so much a hedge against inflation as it is a bet that demand will continue to rise. The technical term for Bitcoin’s price increase is demand-pull inflation.
While I do agree with majority of your points, I think people are missing a crucial point why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 bank bailout. Buying Bitcoin isn't a bet that demand will rise, to BTC maximalists, it's a bet that a Central Bank will screw up. That spills over to mainstream hype, scams, and all the sleazy things people associate with Bitcoin.
It's not appreciated by majority of people right now. The USA, with the might of the dollar and the Feds, will keep seeing Bitcoin as a nuance, it's not surprising. The only places where a globally liquid asset like BTC is appreciated right now are countries with a weak central bank. Either the central bank is being cut off by trade sanctions and local businesses cant acquire USD so they go through BTC [0] or just the plain inability of a government to pay debt, and the currency devalues due to the mistakes of a few and ordinary people suffer [1] [2].
But right now with all the QE, that 2008 spirit lives on with that price ticker as Central Banks are bound to screw up somewhere in this economic uncharted territory.
[0] - https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-im...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-...
QE and inflation fears aren’t new. We had “goldbugs” pushing gold as the one true store of value, safe from QE and inflation, for decades.
It’s slightly ironic that among these concerns about inflation, crypto currencies continue to introduce entirely new asset classes that print coins out of thin air. The cryptocurrency supply is only fixed if we put blinders on and pretend that there is only one cryptocurrency in existence, that it never forks, and that it always existed.
Bitcoin proponents like to share stories about Venezuelans or Zimbabweans rushing to Bitcoin, but they ignore the fact that they’re also rushing to USD, or to local assets. They’re simply rushing to be in anything but the failing currency.
Bitcoin proponents also like to draw false equivalencies between failing countries like Zimbabwe and modern countries like the United States. Normally any such comparison between two obviously different situations would draw criticism on HN, but for some reason this false equivalency that all inflation is equally bad or risky gets a pass among those with Bitcoin investments that they want to see go up up up.