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Comment by jobs_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

How has it not been a store of value?

It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.

A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset: it has very high price volatility. It is not a store of value in the proper term.

By that standard, over the past year, Bitcoin would be a better store of value than gold...

Over the past year,

Bitcoin lost 10.8%

Gold gained 60.0%

qed

> A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.

You just proved his point. In this example, bitcoin's volatility is closer to zero than gold's. Thus, by the quoted definition of "store of value", then in this particular time frame (it would be very different going back 5, 10, 15 years), bitcoin is the better store of value.

It has an extremely volatile profile. You might as well stick your money in the SP 500 and call it is a currency.

Except the S&P 500 will give you a return. The stock market is not gambling, much as some people want it to be.

It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow.

There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.

And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains.

There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.

> If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments.

That’s exactly my point.

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