Is price a good metric for whether bitcoin is dead or not? It seems trivial to imagine a thing that is very expensive but still has ~no value as a currency.
How many transactions per second does gold do? How many stores accept gold for purchases?
Yet it certainly has value and isn't going away as a reserve asset is it?
Because gold as a store of value, in and of itself, is a net negative on the world.
The world doesn't benefit with a bunch of gold locked up in a vault.
Goods and services are useful because people use them or transact them. Not because they are sitting there doing nothing.
https://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtml
> Of all the minerals mined from the Earth, none is more useful than gold. Its usefulness is derived from a diversity of special properties. Gold conducts electricity, does not tarnish, is very easy to work, can be drawn into wire, can be hammered into thin sheets, alloys with many other metals, can be melted and cast into highly detailed shapes, has a wonderful color and a brilliant luster.
It has no value, sitting in a vault.
Go ahead and talk about all the use cases of gold, and how it can be used in electronics or whatever.
But, regardless of that, all the vaults filled with gold, are a net negative on the world.
Gold is good for transferring value across time.
Fiat is good for transferring value across space.
Bitcoin is good for transferring value across space & time.
Therefore Bitcoin is better money.
And hard money for long term savings, and best for settling trade between foreign regimes. There's a reason central banks all hold gold as a primary reserve asset.
Give this a read [0] it discusses in detail the idea that there isn't one type (hard or soft) money that best serves both competing use cases of currency and store of value, but that two different monies work best.
[0] http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2011/05/return-to-honest-money.htm...
(Ctrl + F "two monies" for specific section; whole article is good read though)
> both competing use cases of currency and store of value
An action can be both rational for an individual to take, and still be a net negative to the world.
I am argueing that the gold in a vault use case, which sometimes people call "store of value" is a net negative upon the world, while still possibly being individually rational.
That is my point. I agree that gold serves the use case of a store of value, and could be rational for an individual to take.
And I am saying that this is still a net negative, that causes more harm than good, because you have a bunch of resources doing nothing.
It is easy to see in hindsight that a blockchain is and was always going to be inefficient as a transaction mechanism, moreover a finite "money" also can never compete with "easy" fiat money in expandable supply for commerce.
Whatever people (mistakenly) thought it was going to be, it is so far succeeding wildly at (long term, with great volatility) store of value asset.
I guess Satoshi was mistaken as well.
"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"
Sounds a lot like the original project was intended to be an electronic version of cash, which would make it an electronic currency.
It is very successful as a speculative financial instrument, I’ll give you that!
Is this why the infamous whitepaper is called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and has zero mentions of the word "asset"?
But it was meant to be a currency and failed at that.
Now it's just an asset with no practical use (unlike gold) and a pretty hefty cost for it to persist.
Like Gamestop, I think Bitcoin will eventually be worth nothing. Until then, a lot wealth will change hands, but none is being generated.
A meta comment: I don't recall seeing more emotionally zealous defenders of a topic on HN than Bitcoin boosters.
Where might I find anything talking about this more? Why 10 years? Is it time or just adoption? How many people?
Bitcoin will have changes made to it's core software that will allow significant scaling improvements-some of that foundation is being laid this year via taproot and we're really talking about a foundational piece that will take years for the benefits to be fully realized with additional future improvements. But there's little reason to believe that the current state of Bitcoin where it's an asset that can't function as a currency will be a permanent one.
At the moment people already have easy to use currencies they can use on their smartphones, so Bitcoin being an easy to use digital currency adds nothing to their lives. What Bitcoin does provide is simply the fact that it's not a fiat currency. This may not seem valuable to people who've grown up in a nation with relatively stable currency value and a sophisticated economic system. But just look at the value of currencies in numerous nations around the world over the last 2 years. Whether you look at Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Lebanon (street value), Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc. what you see are nations where the currency has dropped in value by double digits per year. So if you live in the US or Canada or a EU nation you may not feel the sort of urgency to find a solution to this problem, but people elsewhere aren't as lucky. You also have to remember that people in these countries can't just buy reputable US securities via a smartphone app like people in most advanced nations can. Their choices for storing their wealth come down to literally their native currency that's tanking in value, blackmarket US dollars, precious metals, and Bitcoin.
I honestly think if you think outside of your own life experiences and look at the experience elsewhere in the world then the actual true value of Bitcoin becomes much more apparent. Then the energy use stops looking so plainly wasteful and in fact you might start wondering whether the fact that video game consoles like the Xbox actually use significantly more power than Bitcoin (and significantly less renewables) makes Bill Gates a bit of a hypocrite when he attacks Bitcoin.
If you and your buddy opened a tab between each other to have bitcoin settlement at the end of the day, that wouldn't be saying "But you aren't using bitcoin".
Because based on what I read on Satoshi's communication, he would take 2 mins to change the name to something else (look how easily he applied the block size limit when the need arrived).
Similarly, there are essential attributes to what bitcoin is, and there are accidental attributes to it. Clearly the name of bitcoin is not necessary for it to be bitcoin.
What about the 'cash system' part? Clearly you and I disagree on this. I believe that cash part doesn't mean that the basic token must be trasnferable on layer 1.
You're talking about building a completely separate payment system that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, that suffers from all of the original privacy and centralization problems as regular cash, but just because the funds get converted to Bitcoin after some purchases we're still going to pretend it's using the same technology and that it still aligns with Satoshi's original goals?
If we're doing that, then I'm declaring that my credit card is a Bitcoin system, because I can buy Bitcoin from Coinbase using a credit card. I'm declaring that Visa is already just a layer 1 payment system on top of a Bitcoin backend.
What are some examples?
Keep in mind that Bitcoin doesn't have to ever be a "currency" for it to remain relevant, as a "thing".
Bitcoin failed as a currency. Bad UX, high fees, high volatility. All things you dont want for a currency.
Now for a store of value, thats something else. If everyone "believes" it to be worth something, thats what it'll be.
Something like lightning popping up that actually worked could turn it into a currency overnight.
• Enough people are burning enough electricity using enough computer processors that no one entity has control over enough computer power to become the majority burner of processing power.
• That's the only way to violate the axioms of blockchain transactions.
Assuming these two points, Bitcoin is a reasonably good “financial asset”, albeit one that's rendered GPUs almost impossible to buy and is rapidly becoming a major contributor to the anthropocentric climate change that's rendering our planet a harder place to not-die.