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Is bitcoin meant to be a currency or an investment? If it’s a currency without price stability, what’s the point? If it’s an investment without any underlying

Is bitcoin meant to be a currency or an investment? If it’s a currency without price stability, what’s the point? If it’s an investment without any underlying economic value, what’s the point?

arthurcolle 6y ago
Bitcoin is peer-to-peer digital cash. I don't need to go to a bank, and I can send money to friends around the world without worrying about currency controls or other bullshit. It can be both. It can be one or the other. If you don't care about these things, that's cool. But this is a drum that's been beaten for years... not sure how useful continual discussion of skepticism of something that's been around for 13 years and seems to be working as expected... I personally like the idea of a unit of exchange, investment vehicle, and store of value that isn't exclusively backed by America's fleet of destroyers and aircraft carriers and trillion dollar war-machines, and that isn't forever devalued due to inflation. Given that a single BTC is divisible into 0.00000001 satoshis, maybe one day a BTC will be worth $100,000,000 USD per BTC. Probably not, but it's not entirely speculative. You can buy many things with BTC. People choose not to because they expect it to rise in value. People spend dollars because they either have to, or because they want to put it into cashflow generating assets. The dollar has lost 7% of its value in the past year because of ongoing emergency measures by the Fed. This is great for aggregate asset inflation, but is terrible for anyone's savings. Arguing about bitcoin's utility after the last year's monetary policy is a little funny to me.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  To clarify, assuming the actual float of BTC is around 15e6 max (around 6e6 is presumed missing forever due to user error) ever, once all the bitcoins have been mined, and you use my figure of 1e8 USD per single BTC, then you get a market cap of 1.5e15 (1.5 quadrillion). Right now there's around 90 trillion in "total money" (narrow + broad money) in the world, so 1.5 quadrillion is around 16.667~ times that amount. Again, with fiat currency inflation, implied economic growth projections and technological efficiencies to be gained, will total money be around 1.5 quadrillion dollars? Eventually, sure. Especially if you denominate this in dollars, which obviously have been devaluated to the extreme. These are huge figures, but that doesn't sound so crazy when you really think about it. Especially on a 50-100 year time horizon.

arthurcolle 6y ago

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer digital cash. I don't need to go to a bank, and I can send money to friends around the world without worrying about currency controls or other bullshit. It can be both. It can be one or the other. If you don't care about these things, that's cool. But this is a drum that's been beaten for years... not sure how useful continual discussion of skepticism of something that's been around for 13 years and seems to be working as expected... I personally like the idea of a unit of exchange, investment vehicle, and store of value that isn't exclusively backed by America's fleet of destroyers and aircraft carriers and trillion dollar war-machines, and that isn't forever devalued due to inflation. Given that a single BTC is divisible into 0.00000001 satoshis, maybe one day a BTC will be worth $100,000,000 USD per BTC. Probably not, but it's not entirely speculative. You can buy many things with BTC. People choose not to because they expect it to rise in value. People spend dollars because they either have to, or because they want to put it into cashflow generating assets. The dollar has lost 7% of its value in the past year because of ongoing emergency measures by the Fed. This is great for aggregate asset inflation, but is terrible for anyone's savings. Arguing about bitcoin's utility after the last year's monetary policy is a little funny to me.

arthurcolle 6y ago
To clarify, assuming the actual float of BTC is around 15e6 max (around 6e6 is presumed missing forever due to user error) ever, once all the bitcoins have been mined, and you use my figure of 1e8 USD per single BTC, then you get a market cap of 1.5e15 (1.5 quadrillion). Right now there's around 90 trillion in "total money" (narrow + broad money) in the world, so 1.5 quadrillion is around 16.667~ times that amount. Again, with fiat currency inflation, implied economic growth projections and technological efficiencies to be gained, will total money be around 1.5 quadrillion dollars? Eventually, sure. Especially if you denominate this in dollars, which obviously have been devaluated to the extreme. These are huge figures, but that doesn't sound so crazy when you really think about it. Especially on a 50-100 year time horizon.