Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one.
All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do kind of enjoy them.
It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies.
They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons.
Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to convert their native currencies into USD, a stronger currency.
So while it's a good use-case for Bitcoin, it's not exactly a situation that's applicable to the world at large.
Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.
In your example, Bitcoin would obviously be the "old system" if everyone wanted to use it for moving money around, because there are plenty of more advanced alternatives that work far better.
So why is Bitcoin so popular? Because it's a speculative investment. A new asset class divorced from fundamentals, making it impossible to say when the value is too high. That's why people like it.
Most people use Bitcoin via exchanges, where they keep the coins. The average crypto user from Nigeria has zero interest in paying $10+ transaction fees every time they need to do anything with their money.
At this point, it doesn't matter if they own BTC or ETH or DOGE or whatever. They just want whatever allows them to move money around. The exchanges could simply keep balances in a database and reconcile them amongst each other via contracts, and it wouldn't make any difference as far as the end users are concerned (There are examples of this happening between exchanges).
Maybe it's a "less terrible" solution in poor countries with inflation challenges, but I don't see that as a strong proposition for the utility of bitcoin. Cigarettes are used as a medium of exchange in prison. That doesn't serve as a strong argument for using cigarettes as currency.
There are long phases in BTC's history where 100% of holders are in very handsome profits. And that's the problem?
If you're just making long speculative investments in btc and volatility is skewed to the upside, well sure that's fine but you're not using bitcoin as a medium of exchange, you're investing in it as a security.
Out of all cryptocurrencies that exist today, Bitcoin is probably the worst one for buying drugs online. It's pseudo-anonymous at best (compared to Zcash that is actually anonymous), slower than many others and if government agencies have tracking tools in the cryptocurrency space, Bitcoin is probably the most popular target for those tools.
Monero/XMR is the only 100% private, fungible cryptocurrency. All transactions enforced private by default, with no option to send an un-private transaction.
hint: posts mostly consist of "<famous guy> tweeted about <my favourite shitcoin>, this is good for the price of <my favourite shitcoin>".
Do we? Or have we lived in a world where asset prices were suppressed due to artificial intervention by central banks.
Interest rate setting is a market intervention. If left to its own devices the market rate would be driven down towards zero.
How do you figure?
Since there are always more reserves than required, and no alternative source of interest, the inter bank rate would be driven to zero by supply and demand. That's then the 'market rate'.
You can't hold reserves so the bank can charge you extra for borrowing money. Only banks can get zero.
How do you think central bank rates bind? It gives banks an alternative source of interest other than lending them to each other.
I interpret the phrase 'left to their own devices' to mean that there is no central bank and therefore reserves are as a concept are null and void, which then also nullify the concept of a federal funds rate, which would upend the concept of the federal funds rate being 'the market rate' in the first place.
I'll take your word for it about the mechanics of what happens to inter-bank rates under different reserve mechanisms, perhaps they would be driven to zero for the reasons you outlined.
However I'm unclear on what the macroeconomic ramifications would be of letting a small group of banks dictate the federal funds rate; I believe the purpose of this system is to achieve a congressional directive regarding price stability and labor utilization.
Banks can't get rid of reserves at the central bank in aggregate. They can only get rid of them to other banks. So there is no need for the central bank to pay them.
You can't hold reserves so the bank can charge you for borrowing money.
Since there are more reserves than required, and no alternative source of interest, the inter bank rate would be driven to zero.
How do you think central bank rates bind? It gives banks an alternative source of interest other than lending them to each other.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Bank reserves aren't an important factor in the financial systems, they're there to ensure customers have access to money if they want to withdraw it and to allow banks to move money between each other. More importantly banks don't lend money out of their reserves (so-called "fractional reserve banking"), they simply add the loan amount to the customer's account and also to their own liabilities i.e. they "create" money.