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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

I was talking to a very pro-crypto friend - part of my (sour grapes) issue with Bitcoin is that is actually a pretty impractical way to purchase items day to day - but he pointed out that this is more of a feature than a bug.

He likened it to buying and selling physical gold as a store of value, I hadn't thought of it that way before.

I am still stinging from not buying in when I first became aware of it (approx. $1 at the time) - but I honestly could have bought in at any point of the last 10 years (except the highs of 2021) and still come out in profit.

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There's a large amount of copium regarding this.

In no way is it a feature that Bitcoin transactions are expensive. At best it's a negative that that's acceptable given the other benefits.

> except the highs of 2021

Au contraire!

Interestingly, even if you had started purchasing at the *all time high* (~US$69,000) on 8 Nov 2021, if you consistently purchased daily, weekly, or monthly, you would still be up something insane like 37%, outperforming basically all other market sectors.

You can check this yourself at a variety of DCA calculators (NB I noticed at least one [https://dcabtc.com/] was broken and didn't have any price data for the last 6 months)

Saylor always buys the top.

Is the rationale behind this statement that you’re doing DCA and you’ll come out ahead in the multi year timeline?

He borrows against his BTC to buy more BTC. That is a much better long term play when you are holding an asset that is of a fixed total size. When you buy becomes irrelevant.

> but he pointed out that this is more of a feature than a bug -- he likened it to buying and selling physical gold as a store of value

This is a lot of cope and ex post facto justification. "Store of value which can't actually be used for real-world transactions" was absolutely not the rallying cry for Bitcoin for its first many years of existence, and people only pivoted to that when it became undeniable that Bitcoin was not fit for its original intended purpose. If it serves the new purpose well enough, then great, but don't let your friend fool you that everything is going completely according to plan.

> This is a lot of cope and ex post facto justification.

First sentence of the original paper:

> Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. […]

* https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

> and people only pivoted to that when it became undeniable that Bitcoin was not fit for its original intended purpose.

These days it is likely(1) that the majority of Bitcoin transactions by number(2) are being done via the layer 2 system Lightning, which does have nearly instant payments and low fees. Transactions via Lightning are not recorded on the blockchain, even though you can easily hold funds in a non-custodial way.

I happen to be in El Salvador at the moment, and with the exception of the Chivo Bitcoin ATMs run by the government, every single vendor selling things for Bitcoin has accepted Lightning.

1) It's hard to know for sure, as Lightning transactions have quite good privacy, so it's difficult to get estimates of how many there are in total. But decent lower-bound estimates exist: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/lightning-network-sees-r...

2) Of course, by value it's very likely that on-chain transactions dominate, as there are lots of very high value, multi-million+, transactions out there.

When was the last time you used bank reserves to purchase anything? Even the stuffiest traditional finance systems have layers.

I sold my bitcoin recently after trying to find a practical method to use it. I paid my taxes which were about 50% from the earned amount.

In my opinion it's useless as a currency as no one uses it for anything worthwhile.

I could have converted the BTC to another crypto currency .. but I would have the same problem. How to buy something with it?

Why'd you buy it in the first place if your only perception of its value is to use it to buy something else?

Why not just buy the thing you wanted to buy?

I bought it cheaply to experiment with digital currency .. but then got a wife and kids and forgot about it.

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