On the other hand, you can actually use it to buy things which is nice
Bitcoin is deflationary by design. That makes it a great asset but a terrible currency.
Maybe from your perspective. From mine, it's as unwelcome of a "feature" as malvertising. If I can choose to opt out of this "feature", I will, and I do.
Thank goodness we have the legal freedom of choice to do so, and that bitcoin really exists, rather than still just being a concept on paper.
> It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along. Who defines 'hoard' and 'too long'? If your definitions don't match mine, why should I be forced to respect your opinions? Simple answer: I choose to ignore them, because I can. I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor, even if they do it "for the good of society as a whole". Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
>And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
You want to talk about real bubbles? Look no further than the increase in value between securities and house prices relative to average incomes. That's the fed's money spigot. It didn't save the day, it just hyperinflated the bubble.
This bit I agree with, although I would add that salary (i.e. plain cash) alone as the fruit of labour is insufficient and unfair, and amounts to wage slavery.
> Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
Those are interlinked, as living in a bunker is not good for your wellbeing.
If you were operating in a barter economy, as you seem to wish for, the value of your labor would not be guaranteed to have stable value either, and would likely be far more volatile (especially depending on what the product of your labor is... you think farmers can demand their product not decay in value over time?). You just wouldn't have a convenient boogeyman to complain about, but I guess that's better to you?
It absolutely did. Unemployment during the Great Depression reached a high of 25% and was above 15% for nine years (which would probably have been longer if not for WW2). Unemployment during the covid pandemic reached a high of 15% and dropped below 4% less than two years later.
> it just hyperinflated the bubble.
It didn't do that either. Inflation reached an annualized high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is now down to less than 5% less than two years later. That is not hyperinflation. Hyperinflation looks like this:
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-december-annu...
BTW, you apparently don't understand what "saving" actually is. There are two kinds of saving. You can save by putting cash under your mattress, or you can save by putting money in the bank. These operate in fundamentally different ways. When you put money in the bank, it gets loaned out so that people can use it for productive activities. When you put it under the mattress it just sits there. It's very hard to lend bitcoin because there is no way to record a bitcoin transaction as a debt in the blockchain. All bitcoin transactions are structured as cash payments. So "saving" bitcoin is necessarily under-the-mattress type savings rather than in-the-bank type savings. This is one of the fundamental limitations of bitcoin, and one of the many reasons why it cannot be a currency, only a commodity.
https://milkroad.com/lend/btc/#:~:text=In%20DeFi%20BTC%20len....
This liquidity is so massive and the clearing so instantaneous that you can even get a bitcoin debit card. Open account, deposit bitcoin, spend directly in USD via debit card!
Arguing that using a BTC debit card to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with Bitcoin because the bitcoin you deposited is not sent directly to the merchant is like arguing that using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
It's a nonsensical semantic argument entirely detached from the important aspect, which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it wherever you can use a visa/mastercard with zero friction, as easy as using your credit card.
But dollars change hands (or accounts) at the end.
> using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
Nobody made that argument. You did and argued against it.
> which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it
You buy and sell cryptocurrency so you can use the currency you started with. The added two steps of buying and selling crypto are immaterial to buying what you want. You merely invested and divested in a speculative asset, you didn't use it as currency.