No mention of the Fed balance sheet by Vitalik. How come? He's clearly too smart to be ignorant of the Fed's money printing and its dramatic effect on crypto prices.
Oppositely I think the global fiat currency inflation and the Fed increasing interest rates sunk the Crypto market. Now you could argue that the Fed keeping interest rate so low for so long created more "money", which it absolutely did, but not directly. Banks created more inflation than the Fed printing money because loans became so lucrative at these interest rates and put more money in everyone's pockets. That allowed the stock and crypto market to grow though not crash. You increase interest rates the first thing to get squeezed is always going to be high yield high volatility investments like crypto followed by the stock market as banks and wealthy people divest to the stable now higher yielding bonds market, which should out pace inflation with a fraction of the risk.
Meanwhile internet propaganda constantly tells people that it is a push based system, that somehow the Fed is telling the commercial banks to issue more loans and then for every dollar in created reserves the commercial bank calls and naggs you that you should borrow more and somehow the citizens just keep falling for it every single time.
GP is referring to Quantitative Easing which is a push based system, not sure how this is internet propaganda? The Fed actively creates new dollars and uses them to buy assets from the open market.
How else are Erdogan, Madura, et al going to fund their piggy banks & militaries?
I'm not sure if banks would let you point to 100k in bitcoin or such as assets that would help qualify you for a mortgage, but doesn't seem too out there. Or do the 2-step route and sell the crypto and use it as your downpayment to leverage up into that mortage from an initial investment of $100 or so in 2011. Still inflationary - you've turned your initial tiny investment into purchasing power for a house and all it took was someone else deciding to invest in the crypto you were selling instead of more traditional vehicles, so they also feel like they have the same amount of assets/wealth as they would've otherwise.
EDIT: putting it another way. Money is one thing. Consumer behavior is another. People spend not just based on their "money" but based on their total assets and expected income as well, so things that pump up those on-paper asset values will lead to higher spending and inflationary pressure in the same way that "giving them money" would.
Money isn't just something you exchange for goods and services. It's directly linked to the sovereignty and economic soundness of its issuing authority. Imagine if a country started accepting tax payments denominated in something they have no influence over. Holding Bitcoin reserves necessarily means ceding economic power, and therefore autonomy, to a third party. For failed states without any economic autonomy to begin with, this bargain might be fine. But for everyone else on the international stage, this is a total nonstarter.
Wars have been fought over monetary authority! We've had this discussion as a species already. What we have now isn't some pathological problem that needs to be disrupted. It's actually the outcome of a rational evolutionary process over thousands of years. Does it have problems that can be improved, yes. Should it be thrown away in favor of a new system built from first principles, absolutely not. That would be a new dark age, a dystopia.
I'd wager the average car and average house both would be cheaper if you couldn't borrow against them. Property might even be a large enough asset class that that would impact other things.
I personally am interested in a currency that does price level targeting but I have my doubts that it would work with a cryptocurrency because the oracle that collects the CPI is going to be centralised.
I will admit getting the CPI right is easier than getting central bank policy right.
I know some places accept Bitcoin. Tesla accepts Dogecoin for some products.
What can you buy with stablecoins?
You can pay for work and fund developer grants with DAI via https://gitcoin.co
Aside from that, if you are interested in accepting payments with crypto, checkout https://hub20.io, a self-hosted payment gateway.
ETH is not meant to be a currency. It is meant to be a scarce resource like oil and its value is in its requirement to power the crypto economy that is based on the Ethereum blockchain. With ethereum, there will be plenty of people who might be in accepting payments (with stabletokens or other ERC20), but no interest whatsoever in holding ETH.
People already measure the amount of crypto that is registered in a block chain which effectively is counting the money supply. It is an interesting metric.
As an aside, take note that the value of something like Bitcoin is actually proving quite stable so far. This last downward collapse hasn't even been a dire crash by its historic standards. Yet, anyway. We haven't seen any signs of an implosion that would be comparable to the hyperinflation death spirals in fiat.
For the record, I still don’t have a good explanation for a persons willingness to pay currency for any crypto. The relationship to QE is thus impossible outside of general trends. Raising seas rise all boats stuff.