3 ms·
Calling bitcoin a "currency" seems a bit off to me. I think of currency as the thing you use to buy a gallon of milk or buy a movie ticket. It's for facilitat
by elmuchoprez 14y ago
Calling bitcoin a "currency" seems a bit off to me. I think of currency as the thing you use to buy a gallon of milk or buy a movie ticket. It's for facilitating day-to-day transactions. But nobody (or almost nobody) is using bitcoins to buy groceries or fill up their car with gas.
Bitcoins are more like stocks in my opinion. People don't use stocks to buy day to day items either. They're investments, some riskier than others. And that risk, which would be catastrophic to a currency such as the US dollar, is much more easy to tolerate if it's just another non-currency investment vehicle that you can choose to participate in or not.
- potatolicious 14y agoThis doesn't seem to make sense to me - BTC as an investment implies that there is some external value to BTCs beyond merely an investment vehicle (see: houses, which are useful for living in, power companies that produce electricity, etc). If BTCs are not useful as an actual currency, then isn't it purely an investment vehicle that isn't backed up by any sort of real value, present or future?
- cookingrobot 14y agoInvestments just require an expectation that they will rise in cost. Think baseball cards - they don't "do" anything or really have any value, but there's a pattern that rare commodities rise in cost over time. Bitcoin was engineered to stay a relatively rare commodity. Stocks are the same. The value of a stock is really only it's dividend, and many stocks don't (or can't) pay much. The cost has little to do with the value.
- discountgenius 14y agoWith your definition, I guess I would consider bitcoin to be a currency in embryo. It will take some time to build up the infrastructure and adoption for people to use it for every day expenditures.