Thoughts on Bitcoin

Emotionally it does matter. Economically there's no difference between having the $2000 cash and buying 100BTC at $20 versus having 100BTC at $20 and choosing not to sell it.

I would strongly recommend rereading skwirl's post and introspecting on the ways that emotions rather than the hard calculus of the market may be at influence.

I say this as someone who is long on BTC (and purchased right before the last great crash, where it dropped 30x in an instant). I've known the entire time that it's a wild gamble, and having a few coins just in case it becomes absurdly successful sounded fun (it's been very successful for that, watching the highs and lows, talking about it with friends and coworkers, even if it crashed again I've already gotten my money's worth).

I think much of BTC's valuation come from expectations that money velocity and market penetration will increase.

EDIT: Sorry I meant to say the velocity will decrease.

Inflation is not essential.

If people hide their money under mattresses, all that means is that they aren't competing to buy the available goods. Inputs for other ventures are cheaper.

If the government weren't trying to re-inflate the asset bubble with cheap money, ventures that make more sense would be flourishing instead.

Resources are not infinite. When someone accepts a piece of paper and just holds on to it instead of immediately consuming what he could buy, the resources are available for other things.

And when there are more people deferring their consumption, its cheaper to borrow money/resources and cheaper to grow new industries.

Countries don't become rich and powerful by consuming everything as soon as they get it. They do it by growing their industries.

A higher money velocity => lower BTC/USD, but yes, the current price implies a huge future growth of the bitcoin economy. This is what sam is saying and I agree. I happen to think that we will not see that growth/adoption, but that is a different question.

Note that you are the one that calls my list bad, yet I specifically said that the uninformed should prefer this currency. Why should the uninformed prefer an inflationary currency? Because the uninformed are bad at accepting a decrease in demand of their market rate (their work performance would disproportionately decrease if given a 2% decrease in nominal wages).

With that aside, let me give cover my complex thoughts on inflation:

Sometimes it is possible to alter a function in such a way that the output is later maximized. Sometimes this is possible by essentially lying to people. When someone doesn't get a raise each month to make up for the expansion of the monetary supply he is effectively getting a pay cut, but he's been manipulated into not really noticing this. But markets are not fixed. Technology expands, populations expand, priorities shift (from religious worship to drugs or science, for example). At some point it is possible for a portion of the system to understand the manipulation and to maximize it for that portion's gain. Just as Keynes talked about priming a pump, imaging those that sell the primer. It is in their interest for the system to stutter so they make efforts to have it so fairly frequently. The secondary effects of this manipulation are malinvestments by those not party to the information about the cycle.

But even that has a secondary effect: The effect of some informed people taking actions to minimize the harm done to their own fortunes. They sidestep property and stock bubbles, but they still need to beat inflation.

Those informed people start talking about a replacement for the inflationary monetary system. They argue on the internet about crypto-currencies and they refine their ideas, and ultimately Bitcoin gets created. We are living in aftermath of centuries of Keynesian policy, this is PART of the long run to which Keynes is dead in. The part where something by design is (essentially) non-inflationary. Even gold had its risks (Fusion, for example) but while Bitcoin is free as in liberty it is also unforgiving of mistakes. That is why the uninformed shouldn't access it. Or at least not it directly. They should trust banks or become informed, because as it stands now they are not equipped to handle it.

Lastly, I reject the notion that inflation has proved useful for stabilizing the economy.

Fractional banking by its nature monetizes all assets (since most loans are secured, the 10x multiplication window is just a fancy way of "printing" money from the value of your house or factory). But the relative value between the underlying assets and the currency is in flux (or the futures market for the good would be 0, and the information already priced into the market) and in exchange for this freeing of capital and acceleration of gains to wise economic asset allocators, this temporal variance in asset value causes an increase of volatility in the financial system ESPECIALLY when the majority of its deposits are demand deposits since there is also system wide uncertainty in cash-on-hand.

It may be that the increase volatility and subsequent government action maximize technological, ecological, and industrial advancement by allocating assets into the hands of todays best and brightest; or it may be that the cost of management (inflation, regulation, deposit insurance, super insurance, asset backed derivatives, to big to fail bailouts) exceed the gains of a fractional reserve banking + inflationary monetary supply system, but we will not be able to tell by examining the data on inflation in economies where fractional reserve is a GIVEN.