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Comment by oleganza | Hacker News Reader

Unless these people have invested extra money they can afford to lose for the reasons to save them from inflation and confiscation. Then they still have enough cash to pay the bills, so why should they get back to fiat?

E.g. I myself and many of people I know are not going to sell a single Bitcoin unless any sort of personal or global disaster. And many of them are going to spend their BTC over time to avoid interaction with banking system as much as possible.

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Fiat you can spend is more useful than fiat you can't.

> I myself and many of people I know are not going to sell a single Bitcoin unless any sort of personal or global disaster.

In the case of global disaster, who's going to be buying a fringe currency?

If no one, then it's a total disaster. If it's recoverable, some will buy it.

"And many of them are going to spend their BTC over time to avoid interaction with banking system as much as possible."

What is the purpose of avoiding the banking system?

99% of the people who ultimately argue about avoiding the banking system engage in behavior that is either morally questionable or explicitly illegal. I'd say about 1% are true "what i do with my money is my business and my business only" libertarians

Maybe you missed the fact that money in the bank are no longer trusted and can be confiscated for any reason by whatever government or entity?

I guess I indeed missed this recent confiscate event. Can you point me to where I can read about it? Last major financial disaster I've heard about is Cyprus. Where people deposited money in the banks, the banks gambled with the money and lost it. Which is "slightly" different than confiscation. The involvement of "governments" and "entities" only helped the depositors to lose less of their money.

Bitcoin is vulnerable too. A dedicated effort by collaborating governments could destroy or severely damage Bitcoin, by e.g. blocking the protocol, seizing powerful hashing equipment, downing exchange websites, performing a 51% attack, and so on.

This notion that Bitcoin is some robust, untamperable currency system is simply incorrect.

Or just make things uncomfortable for the people changing coins for other currencies.

It's sort of interesting how the liquid dollar market for bitcoins makes it impossible to judge whether someone accepting bitcoins as payment trusts it much.

Bitcoin is less than in 1% of hands. Also, when did you ban cash transactions and made it morally required to pay wire transfer fees?

You could end in gold or silver or some other precious metal as well. The ultimate endpoint need not be USD.

Precious metals are not easy: either you store it somewhere where people ask questions and can block your access to it, or you store it in your pocket and cannot easily spend portion of it when you need.

And the spread between bid/ask in the real world is large. Unless you own "paper" metals, you aren't exchanging them for the rates you see on the ticker.

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