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You need to understand the point of money in the first place. For most of human history economies were structured around trade without money. You would trade sp
by OliverGilan 6y ago
You need to understand the point of money in the first place. For most of human history economies were structured around trade without money. You would trade spices for cattle and things like that. Once we started mining gold and silver it became convenient to say, hey, these metals are useful for certain things but they're also very convenient to use as a medium for trade. So instead of you always needing another asset to trade, you can sell your asset for gold or silver, and then later on you can trade your gold or silver for a different asset. So let's say you wanted to sell your cow badly but there were no spices to buy yet with it. Well now you could sell the cow for gold and then later when a new shipment of spices came in you could use some or all of that gold to buy the spices. Hence money was born.
This is basically how all money works, as a medium for productivity and assets.
Enter modern governments who print paper currency because it's far more convenient than gold but for the most part it was the same principle. When the US was still on the gold standard the idea was that the US government stored all the gold and any US dollar technically represented a share of gold in the US vaults. In fact if you were a foreign country with USD you could redeem your USD for gold. We abandoned the gold standard ~1971 and started printing fiat money which isn't technically backed by anything. There's a bunch of controversy around this but the undeniable fact is that now the Fed can and does manipulate the USD to cause inflation and deflation at certain times.
So why is holding one Bitcoin appreciating so much faster than the USD? Because the Fed is TRYING to cause inflation with the USD. They've said themselves that they are trying to target about 2% inflation I believe, (I could be wrong on that target). You do this by increasing the supply of USD whereas Bitcoin has a fixed supply so it's inherently deflationary.
So is it illogical to place value in Bitcoin? Maybe but the same can be said of the USD, moreso. Not only is it not backed by anything, it's inherently inflationary and loses value over time. Bitcoin doesn't. So if you get a paycheck for being a productive worker and you want a medium to store that value of productivity Bitcoin seems like a logical medium to store it in so that you know later on you can withdraw and it won't have lost it's value to inflation. Ofc, it could lose its value in other ways but that's the same with any asset.