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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

You can pay your taxes, fines, and court ordered debts with fiat currency. It's arguably THE MOST stable thing in a functioning society above pure barter.

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Try saving for retirement. At 2% inflation (the target rate), after 20 years you'd lose 1 - (.98 ^ 20) = 33.2% of the purchasing power of your savings.

But right now, inflation is 7.5% year-over-year. And that's the official measure, which uses "owners' equivalent rent" based on a survey, instead of actual rent prices.

In the past 20 years (Jan 2002 - Jan 2022), the CPI went from 177.7 to 281.933, or a 58.6% increase. This means a 2.3% average inflation rate.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/owners-equivalent-rent....

This implies that your retirement savings are in cash, which is inaccurate for most folks. And certainly, I'd rather have it invested in the stock market than the wild fluctuations of the crypto market, especially with its uncertain withdrawal ability and complete inability to recover if someone steals it (which is, again, typically much easier with crypto than a brokerage).

The previous comment said cash is stable. I was illustrating that it is stably losing value.

Would you rather stably losing purchase power at a predictable pace over time (fiat) or exponentially unstable purchase power in perpetuity (bitcoin)?

Then buy I-Bonds

> Try saving for retirement. At 2% inflation (the target rate), after 20 years you'd lose 1 - (.98 ^ 20) = 33.2% of the purchasing power of your savings.

People shouldn't be holding dollars for retirement. People should be investing in productive assets. Its not good to have society's wealth locked up in paper notes or shiny metals hidden under a mattress or buried in the backyard.

Most people don't save for retirement by storing stacks of cash.

> It's arguably THE MOST stable thing in a functioning society above pure barter.

Fiat currencies crash all the time. I believe the latest to collapse was Lebanon's currency.

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