Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

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>It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. >Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.

You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.

I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

Due to fractional nature of btc to ~8 decimal places, the math is that if everyone on the globe has it, they all have 0.03 btc and coffees will cost 0.000001 btc (so to speak). It’s unlikely that the whole globe all holds it. So this whole paragraph isn’t really an issue based on your unfair claim

> You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins?

while I don't really agree with the bitcoin maxi mindset of the comment you are replying to, do you know that you can buy as little as 1 satoshi? (0.00000001 BTC). Yes, eventually all BTC will be mined (in about 2140) but considering 1 sat is currently worth 0.0006 USD, there is still quite a bit of room for very small amounts of bitcoin being widely accessible (fees being a different issue that will improve with time).

The price (and therefore value?) of satoshis rise/fall at the exact same rate as a price of a bitcoin, so I don't see how this invalidates their argument.

if you can acquire 0.0006USD worth of bitcoin then the price of bitcoin alone is not a limiting factor. Maybe if OP is talking about hundreds of years in the future and BTC is worth $1 Million+?

If the USD were completely replaced with bitcoin (ignoring long transaction times and other garbage) you'd expect approximately 1BTC for every $1.3M currently in circulation. In just a few decades even a Satoshi would be worth the equivalent of $1+.

Fiat currencies will still exist. Remember, Bitcoin is a competing asset to fiat, not a wholesale replacement. I suspect that even if central banks adopt Bitcoin as a currency reserve, their fiat will be pegged to it by some ratio only.

At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.

your comment only makes sense if it's interpreted as describing a world where bitcoin conquers the world and there is no other kind of money

> Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash

We've been solving the problems of trust literally for millennia. For some reason bitcoin apologists pretend history never happened, and painstakingly attempt to re-create the trust systems humans have had in place, once again literally, for millennia.

In practice the problem of trust is not a big deal, otherwise nobody would be able to trade anything.

I think you're mostly right. As with many problems in society at the moment, the complexities have arisen because we're so eager to connect everything to the internet and make it "exist" there. Also that we're so eager to make it work globally.

I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out.

I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally.

The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust.

Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.

My conjecture is that given two economic zones of roughly equal size, the economy which requires less energy to achieve a unit of productivity will be more competitive.

Right now the game is being framed as honest crypto vs corrupt government legacy weakness, but I think an economy that must devote huge resources to maintaining the security and operational infrastructure of their currency will be at a comparative disadvantage.

The defi stuff appeals to me as enabling composable bottom up tools for interaction but trustlessness I think is a very niche attribute which adds a lot of expense and in many cases doesn't mitigate any risks.

We have of course not "solved" trust but our world functions only to the extent that we have and share trust. It is far more valuable than any other asset maybe

You do realize the total number of land on earth is limited, and it will get harder to buy land? Every generation will have to fight over land, and this is extremely unfair.

So is your beef against capitalism? Or the medium of exchange?

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