Bitcoin as represented in the white paper was never portrayed as an investment vehicle.
It's fairly useless as far as currencies go. It literally fails at the first requirement: it's not a reliable store of value.
There are certain circumstances where I think it may make sense for someone to pick an alternative currency; I'm not arguing it is superior to the rest of them.
> Several crypto coins are a bad store of value over 1 week but a decent one over a couple hours.
What kind of (real world) transaction would need to rely on a cryptocurrency for value stability over a couple of hours time-span that wouldn't be served by fiat currency, which provides the same stability guarantees over that same time-span?
There is also a strong real world value in countries where local currency is less stable and secure than crypto. Not all places have access to USD or foreign currency.
There are interesting examples coming out of Argentina. Imagine living in a country where year over year inflation is ~100% and the government may periodically seize assets in your bank account.
I think it could make a useful underlying tool to enable this but to be used directly by end user customers it'd be a tough sell.
I've used Wise to transfer USD <-> CAD, if they use crypto to enable that (I don't think they do, but I guess they could), I couldn't really care less.
I don't think your run of the mill consumer is going to want to use crypto to do the same thing. With smaller amounts the difference in cost is probably negligible, with larger amounts you could theoretically save more to make the effort worth it, but you have higher pressure to have more "traditional" assurances that nothing goes wrong.
In what ways do cash bank transfers not work for international transfers or irrevocable payments?
Why would they do that? I've never had that happen to me when I send an international transfer.
But it's always been for innocuous things like "reimburse relative for vacation rental expenses"
Yes I was made whole but it was unpleasant and I happily would have eaten the ~.30 of litecoin transaction fees and 0.1% crypto exchange fee to avoid that. Not to mention the wire cost me $15 in the first place and not everyone has ready access to a bank with free wires.
Depending on which country it is going to, that seems like an amount large enough to legitimately trip over some checks. In the US itself, last I heard all domestic transfers over 10k get reported.
Getting locked out of your own money can cause major damage. I'm lucky that I was able to dig up another 100k. Someone else could have lost their 50k and be liable for hundreds of thousands more in liability to the seller.
In any case ACH can be clawed back and it is my understanding in some exceptional circumstance a wire can too. The point never was crypto is always superior, it may be conventional is better 99.9% of the time but that 0.1% means a use case remains.
Edit: after reading my comment I realized it might not be clear that bitcoin is astonishingly bad at imitating currency. Almost without exception trading it for goods and services is impossible.
If you dollar cost average your acquisition of Bitcoin it smooths out the conversion risk and if anything the value against USD goes reliably up over a 3+ year window.
Anytime someone speaks crypto to me now I feel like Adam Sandler floating past Clint Howard’s window in Little Nicky: I don’t want to be part of this, they don’t want me to be part of this, and all I can do is wish them luck while they tell me they don’t need it.
It was not.
If someone bought Bitcoin a year ago and wanted it to be a store of value, it is certainly not "whatever the holder wants it to be" for that person
A lot of currencies are not a good store of value the last 18 months.
They also seem to be a lot better at buying Bitcoin and Euros and S&P500, but a bit worse at buying lettuce.
No currency seems to be better at buying lettuce this year, though, perhaps the problem here is that there is a shortage of goods and labour...
What the paper finds (and we can certainly quibble with any paper) is evidence that the majority of people who bought Bitcoin in the 2015-2022 period did so in patterns that suggest that they're interested in an investment asset, not in a currency.
Only a fool uses a currency that's experienced 5000% deflation?
Bitcoin is a long failed currency, I can't believe there are people still trying to push that notion.
Volatility is one thing, but deflation to a nonsensical degree means that using it as a way to pay for goods and services is heavily discouraged because of things like... having your $20 pizza be worth $165,000 if you had just not bought it.
You're making my point. It's not functioning as a currency anymore, it's an investment vehicle.
It'd be like if Forex was the main way that dollars got moved.