Bitcoin's monetary velocity is now higher than USD M1

Its closer to $715USD right now, after a 5:1 split last year, so $17->$3575 in 10 years. It has been traded on the public markets since.

10 years ago you could not buy a pizza for 10k btc. Laszlo choose to trade 10k BTC for a pizza, bootstrapping a value exchange on an experimental p2p software network. It was an adhoc tx, not done on a public market (which did not exist at the time).

I don't think it upside down. Assets can gain value over time, especially when you have inflation of the monetary base feeding into these assets, and a growing audience participating. Makes sense!

"Simple" changes to the bitcoin protocol aren't simple because it's a coordination problem. As long as more than 50% of mining power is behind the older protocol, the longest block history will remain under that protocol. Nodes which can switch will have incentives against doing so, because mining an embiggened block that does not become part of the official history orphans the mining reward.

From another perspective: any breaking change to the bitcoin protocol involves politely asking miners to execute a 51% attack on themselves.

It's unclear to me what the financial incentive to run a full node is at all -- from what I'm reading, you don't need one to mine, and you don't get any reward just from running a node. So if it becomes expensive (20 TB hard drives, big pipe for bandwidth) to run a full node, who will want to do it? I suppose the exchanges would run some nodes, if only to keep the coins they trade in functioning.

There is 100% chance of economic calamity if there is an external shock.

You can tie your boat to the dock with rope (flexible) or you can use boards and nail them to the dock and the boat (inflexible). As long as the boat stays in the same place, the planks are probably better than rope. But the moment the tide comes in or leaves (i.e. cycles in the economy) or a big wave hits (existential shock) - your planks are going to break and the ship will be wayward.

It is not an 'opinion' that as an economy expands, it needs 'more currency' or else prices get weird and the entire point of the currency fails.

And yes, as I said straight off in my comments, currency debasement is a legit problem.

As for 'trusting crypto' - it's pointless because BTC 'numbers' are completely worthless.

I would rather trust the a poorly managed 'World Bank Dollar' that maps 'Global Dollars' to assets in some roughly transparent way, then a 'distributed network of numbers' - which is basically ridiculous.

Bitcoin is a neat idea, worthy of experimentation, but most of the Bitcoin people a) don't understand currency or b) are on some level of the Ponzi koolaid latter or both.

Finally, none of this is to say that BTC won't take hold. If enough people want to use it for whatever, it will be used for that whatever. That doesn't mean it makes any sense, but we do a lot of things in this world that make no sense.

First - currency is not a store of value, it's just a means to facilitate exchange.

If you have more than a few thousand dollars, and want to store it for a while you can literally ask the teller at your bank and they, in their most absolute basic form of financial counsel will offer you some alternatives like long-term bonds with better yield. Or you can buy real estate or whatever.

As far as 'transparency' - it's more 'understanding'. The proles don't need to know, in fact few people need to know.

The issue of 'credit' is more or less between regimes, not between people within an economy. USDs held by China are IOUs, but that's a little less relevant when Canadians are trading CDN dollars among one another.

But it doesn't matter, regular people don't need to understand, just like they don't need to understand what mRNA is.

'Stores of Value' just really are not a problem for the proles, and frankly, once they have a little bit of money there are plenty of financial options for them. If they have a lot of money, there are people that can advise them.

We need to have monetary policy and we need it to be done well - there is absolutely no magical equation that can solve that problem for us - the notion of 'distributed currency' doesn't provide anything.

We need competency in our justice system, our medical system, in our regulatory apparatus, in municipal works etc. - the Central Bank is no different - it needs to be managed responsibly and there's no way around it.

Some people think BTC would work for developing nations i.e. the 'unbanked' masses, in areas with bad banks or shady central banks. I suggest that BTC would be bad in almost every way: it's impossible for people to use directly, they would need some kind of 'exchange' at minimum, which would have to be regulated, at which point -> just have a bank account (!) denominated in some respectable currency and that's that. Literally Bank of America could bank Nigerians if need be over their SMS. That would be much better than BTC.

Crtypo may have some value for digitizing national currencies ... but blockchain itself probably provides no value at all.