>The value of money decreases as a designed function of our current economic system.
Well, that is because of quite obvious reasons. People write arbitrary conditions into debt contracts like 5% interest just because. When it turns out that those interest rates were unsustainable they have to be lowered or the contract has to be extended. It would be nice if this happened automatically... Well, that is how inflation works.
The only alternative is to pretend that instead of money earning more money it loses you money and the way you protect yourself is by loaning out money to people who use it to purchase durable goods. Instead of being surprised that you lost money you will be surprised that you gained more money than expected.
>This system is flawed to its core. No form of money has survived it. Thankfully, Bitcoin exists now and is the most sound form of hard money the world has ever seen. This is the system I participate in.
And here we replace the flawed system with a system that has the same flaw except this time the decline happened before the system that it replaced declined... Bitcoin as a medium of exchange has already failed, meanwhile the USD and EUR are still chugging along fulfilling their original purpose albeit with less efficiency.
Austrian economists will talk about positive time preference being ingrained into human nature which justifies positive interest but honestly, that's just not the kind of human I am. I have a negative time preference. It really feels like they are trying to force their own world view onto other people to justify questionable practices for the sake of living up to stereotypes. It's almost like an emperor justifying his legitimacy.
Hard money is foolish and extremely short sighted. Money is effectively a promise that someone else will work for you. It is the ultimate durable good in a non durable world. People escape the real world and flee into a fictional balance sheet in the name of economic safety. When Bitcoin goes up in value, who contributed to that success? Of course future participants. Positive time preference means your greatest achievements will always be in the past. Short term thinking no longer becomes detrimental because it is the optimal strategy. As Bitcoin earns positive interest (lets say it is going 20% up in value every year) people will destroy real wealth as early as possible so that they can buy Bitcoin and then earn the 20% interest. The question is, if you are tearing apart real wealth, where are those price increases coming from?
Burning down the rain forest and farming for 3 years becomes optimal and a fruit orchard bearing fruit for decades becomes obviously suboptimal. If it takes 10 years to the first harvest the productivity of your orchard has to be 6 times higher than the rain forest strategy to purchase the same quantity of Bitcoin. Each subsequent harvest becomes less valuable as Bitcoin rises in value.
Of course this is a very contrived example. What's happening today is that students throw their student loans into speculative assets like Bitcoin in the hope that they don't have to finish college and get a job.
What I mean by negative time preference is that I would prefer to be the fool that runs the orchard than be the genius that destroys the rain forest. I would finish my degree, knowing that I would have to work. The reason I have this mindset is that I do not believe that a balance sheet creates value beyond what exists in the real world. The balance sheet is only useful in so far that it helps create value in the real world. Hard money plays into the desire to not have to create real value. It plays into the idea of creating wealth from nothing.
Bitcoin is basically monetary alchemy.