Bitcoin Is Time

The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.

>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"

Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.

It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?

This is the wrong assumption to start from. You should think of the opposite assumption. These people fully understand Bitcoin and other stupid investments.

I thought long and hard about all of this and there is nothing to "get".

>Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.

Here is the short story. Everything is up. What makes cryptocurrencies special? That they are entirely fictional? So ultimately, since cryptocurrencies aren't used as currencies and instead treated as assets with 0 return like gold the expectation is that it merely catches up with inflation. If it goes up faster than inflation then it is a bubble purely driven by human irrationality. In other words, Bitcoin is a bubble/speculation sentiment index. You can benchmark any other asset against Bitcoin to mostly "cancel" out the speculation part of the market.

>All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.

I can believe that the value of 1€ is high enough to buy a house and then get smacked in the face by house construction companies who build houses for 200k€.

Meanwhile with Bitcoin that is fair game since there is no company that accepts 4 Bitcoin to buy a house no matter what the current value of Bitcoin is. There is no economy that is making the price sticky by making people consider what you can actually do with the currency. Since you can barely do anything with Bitcoin its value isn't based on the existence of an economy that exchanges it, it is merely based on random thoughts of random people who want a self fulfilling prophecy aka a bubble.

This is needed as otherwise banks could claim to have unlimited funds.

Bank notes provide privacy and are created on demand. Having 1:1 bank notes to M1 money supply would simply be wasteful.