Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

The original intention was to create "an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."

Although starting as a decentralized payment protocol, the idea of trustless decentralization turned out to be applicable to store of value and use as a currency.

For the 3 aforementioned points:

1. You don't need to trust anyone to verify payment transactions.

2. You don't need to trust any group (the Federal Reserve, the gold or diamond industry, etc.) for it to be a store of value. (which is, eliminating unpredictability on the supply side[1])

3. You don't need to have any particular reason, other than public adoption[2], for it to become a common currency.

Let's consider the fiat comparison to US dollars.

1. You need to trust financial institutions to handle transactions.

2. You need to trust the Federal Reserve to be responsible about management of supply.

3. The US dollar is backed by the strength of the US government and the US economy.

If all of these things were true (as it somewhat usually is), everything works fine. But fraud/backcharges/misc. happen, recessions happen and the Fed can be judicious about pulling certain financial levers, and it's entirely possible that the currency of the future becomes something else, like the Chinese Yuan, because of changes in world power.

[1] Bitcoins supply is released at a fixed rate, which makes it predictable, tying its value much more closely to demand than supply. This value eventually becomes completely demand-driven once the last Bitcoin is mind.

[2] The catch-22 of bitcoin public adoption - it's only useful if everyone is using it, but there isn't anything else that makes you want to use it. It would be like if it was 1776, and instead of introducing a US dollar backed by gold, you introduced the modern version backed by debt.

This is why the news of the past few months of institutional adoption is so monumental - it indicates a tipping point of the beginning of stable public adoption, a problem that is completely outside of the hands of the technical driving forces of cryptocurrency.

And if no one would use it as a currency where is the value in it?

It’s always seemed like a chicken and egg thing to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#The_gold_stan...

I mean it wasn't strictly gold hoarding it was gold tied currencies hoarding.

Everything flies out of the window when they discover Bitcoin. Suddenly they don't want to work anymore and just buy Bitcoin and confessed they've been stupid all this time railing against Bitcoin.

And you're going to be able to argue that it's not being manipulated by people who already own Bitcoin, who want to make it seem like there's an upward trend, which of course enriches weighted towards the earliest adopters? In fact there's multiple occurrences of evidence by researchers seeing this kind of manipulative behaviour done by just a few actors.

"For it to be a MLM, current holders of Bitcoin would have to receive Bitcoin for each new person who gets/uses Bitcoin, which is clearly not the case."

What? No, the Bitcoin they already own increases in value - that's quite the gymnastics in your logic, there's no need for an increase in actual ownership unit wise.

"Most if not all of the early holders/investors/users of Bitcoin did so because it was fun."

Hilarious, fun as in gambling fun perhaps - otherwise there's countless people talking about how much money you can make by buying into Bitcoin, along with people talking about how they're doing it for profit - and don't care if it's an MLM or gambling. You've really convinced yourself of these narratives though?

Please don't misappropriate/equate actual stocks of companies to being equivalent to crypto-assets/crypto-"currencies."

It's simply disingenuous to claim it doesn't overlay perfectly with MLM schemes. You've not proven anything. We could actually create charts to overlay the benefit/behaviours of MLM schemes with Bitcoin and it would match perfectly.

There's another way to create consensus among society, and it doesn't require tapping into greed to align the greedy or gullible - and the VC-finance industrial complex - into alignment. It's through democratically elected governments created blockchain databases so governments are forced to be transparent, among the other benefits, and then mandating through law that they are used - with proper safety measures to counter potential pitfalls - and without redistributing wealth from the latest adopters to the earliest adopters. It will be a challenge to counter the "army of HODLers" and attempt at regulatory capture that will continue to reach as far into society as it can.

I'm far from alone in this understanding I have, and I'm not financially incentivized to write all of this out either; most people who see the same as me simply aren't spending the effort to counter the "army of HODLers" who inevitably use similar gymnastics or simply the lazy downvote mechanism to suppress counter-narratives.