601–610 of 930 posts
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> since rapid deflation is extremely undesirable in a currency What do you mean, why should my money NOT go up in value?
if you genuinely are interested in an answer to your question, I recommend this blog post by Matt Ranger: https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...
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It should be. It’s dumb as hell. Bitcoin and blockchain have no real use.
There are probably a billion bitcoiners (direct or indirect owners) and you basically state that you're smarter than all of them. Just wow.
cryptocurrencies are a failure and net negative, and the longer we hold on to believing they aren't, the more damage we are doing
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Looks like a fair take to me. They are not forcing people to accept it anymore because it didn’t work. It was never supposed to work. Bitcoin tried for 15-20 years to find a use case but now it’s just an asset class like gold and nothing else, it will never be more than that.
> asset class like gold and nothing else, it will never be more than that Lol, gold that can be teleported around the globe for fractions of a cent, yeah.. it sucks that bitcoin will never be more than that.
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There are probably a billion bitcoiners (direct or indirect owners) and you basically state that you're smarter than all of them. Just wow.
You don't need to be dumb to fall for a dumb idea. Also, the average person is smarter than about 4 billion people.
I get you can do something stupid in a rush but the longer you have time to reconsider, the higher the likelihood that you "didn't just fall for a dumb idea". Bitcoin is 15 years old.
> Also, the average person is smarter than about 4 billion people.
Bitcoiners are drawn from a normal distribution and not from the bottom part of the distribution, so that argument doesn't really work here.
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Legal tender does not have to be a mandatory means of exchange.
That is actually the defining characteristic of legal tender: “money that is legally valid for the payment of debts and that must be accepted for that purpose when offered” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legal%20tender
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I think you're confusing proof of work with proof of stake. The integrity of the Bitcoin network is enforced by the miners agreeing on the rules, not by anyone staking their ownership for governance.
What about if you hack a lost wallet and then you transfer the coins to yourself. No proof of work needed then. It is just there, in your wallet.
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“Another change makes using bitcoin entirely voluntary. (Previously, the law mandated that businesses accept bitcoin for any goods or services they provided.) Additionally, bitcoin can no longer be used to pay taxes or settle government debts.” -- https://reason.com/2025/02/03/el-salvador-walks-back-its-bit... Sounds pretty failed to me.
They did this to receive a loan from the IMF. The IMF was withholding the loan because of BTC and would not disburse it until they got rid of its status as legal tender.
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Yeh, it failed so hard no one even uses it anymore.
Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?
Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management.
As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to.
You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it.
Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value.
But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.
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if you genuinely are interested in an answer to your question, I recommend this blog post by Matt Ranger: https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m...
That's a long post that seems to tell me it's bad for the economy. It's not my job to help the economy. Again, why should I use a money that loses value?
But to answer your question more directly, you should use a money that loses value because its purpose is as a medium of exchange and not a store of value. You need to have something in your life that you can reliably use to acquire things you need and exchange them for things you have (new laptop for hours worked). You want a hot potato, you get it, you pass it along to someone else. If you don't want to spend it on material goods and want to save, that's fine, you can instead "buy" a savings, or "buy" an index fund. You're still passing the hot potato around, but its giving you different things.
Now imagine you don't have a hot potato, you work and you get paid in... idk, something you don't want to get rid of. You struggle with letting go with your currency and so it costs you when you're trying to do exchanges. Similarly, if you're a shop owner or something, people are more hesitant to give you their currency as well. Things get slower, and darker, like a mechanical flashlight that you're spinning slower and slower.