All cryptocurrencies (except Bitcoin) are idiotware. Bitcoin was built on the idea of sound money - as a fix for the serious problem of inflation. Other "cryptocurrencies" are pro-inflation by design. They're based on the idea that "everyone can print money," by simply redefining a few constants and recompiling the code. Their proponents see this as pro-freedom, but free money is worthless money. "Cryptocurrencies" are anti-bitcoin, and have a worse inflation problem than the fiat which only bitcoin provides the fix for, and only bitcoin can provide the fix for, because you can't invent the wheel twice.
You can improve upon the design of the wheel. You do this by improving Bitcoin without reintroducing inflation.
Bitcoin was built with a really narrow ideological view of money (that limited supply of money is good) built on a fallacy (that current money is fake money created by governments, when in reality it's created by the banking system through credit). It's not “sound money” it's more like «libertarian dream money», and so far it failed at becoming a money (e.g. something you would buy stuff with), because of the scarcity, which leads to automatic deflation.
Deflation is not why bitcoin didn't become a currency; transaction fees had a huge role in it. Imagine having currency but needing to spend $15, $25, $35 per transaction. That was the reality last year. This coupled with the insane hype that bitcoin received (to the point that random people in my friend circles were discussing it), caused people to not use it as a currency at all, but as a hoard.
Now with fees back to normal, time will tell if bitcoin will gain adoption as a currency or if it's too late.
Not only this, but the whole concept of awaiting half an hour to be sure the transactions is confirmed makes it a terrible payment system IRL. But in the long run, the deflationary nature of bitcoin dooms it.
Bitcoin alone doesn't make the greatest payment system, but it needs comparing to gold for its best physical analogue. With physical gold, confirming it takes expertise, special equipment and time. It has a huge attack surface for fraud, which is why it is impractical for everyday payments. Bitcoin is superior to gold in many regards: it is very easy to validate, it requires no physical storage, it is very cheap to transport, and very easy to divide.
The systems which are being built on top of bitcoin will enable the use of the currency in practical payment systems: instant transactions, very low fees, and automation - some of which on a scale which was never previously possible because of the high cost of payments in existing payment systems. Systems like the Lightning Network will enable the creation of brand new economies which were simply not possible to do before bitcoin.
In terms of deflation, bitcoin is also more similar to gold - it cannot simply be created out of thin air, and must consume energy to extract from the earth. The deflationary nature of bitcoin, and gold before it, make it an excellent store of value, even if it is not the most practical solution for national economies which, according to Keynesians, require stimulation through inflation.
The money people are using for their payment systems does not necessarily need to be backed 1-1 by real bitcoin. We can already see some services like conbase are taking custody of people's money, offering debit cards to consumers and Point-of-Sale services to merchants. These will enable the everyday use of bitcoin without any strain on the bitcoin network, and without it necessarily being backed 100% by actual bitcoin. These may benefit their users by providing convenience, but can only work for as long as the providers are sufficiently responsible as to not become insolvent.
There are plenty of people who will refuse to use such "fiat bitcoin" services, and will only ever use bitcoin proper. This makes it kind of difficult for conbase and the like, whose fiat bitcoin will end up trading at a lower rate than bitcoin proper - and who will probably try to counter this damage by preventing withdrawal of bitcoin proper from their digital coffers, making their fiat bitcoin only spendable to merchants who will accept fiat bitcoins. They are essentially, trying to recreate the existing banking system on Bitcoin.
There's a big difference between the banking system and bitcoin though, and that is permission. Nobody needs permission to use bitcoin proper, and given the choice of fiat bitcoin or bitcoin proper, those with sense will choose the latter. It doesn't matter that bitcoin is deflationary, because people will always act in their own best interest and acquire the most saleable currency, which will continue to be bitcoin proper.
The opponents of deflation think that somebody ought to dictate the supply of currency, or that individuals should act against their own self-interest for the good of the many, but this is just a complete ignoring of the reality of human nature. People will always act in their own interest, and deflation is beneficial to ones own interest if they are intent on saving money.
Unlike historical events where governments have threatened to send in their henchmen if people don't surrender their gold, bitcoin can not so easily be seized. Bitcoin does not care if you think that deflation is bad, or whether you think "expert economists" ought to decide how much inflation there should be. They are absolutely powerless against the force of Bitcoin. Everybody is. Nobody can control it, but everybody controls it through their own selfish interests.
If this happens to lead to people accumulating and spending less, and this leads to economic depression, then that's what will happen! It might make you uncomfortable to think that you are no longer in control, but you're going to have to get over it. The die has been cast. If economic depressions end up occurring as a result deflation in bitcoin, we'll just have to find new ways of dealing with it, because Keynsian's forever money printing method has run its course.
An economy is based on every person individually making choices based on their own (perhaps narrow) view of money.
The Keynesian view of economics requires that there is centralized control of monetary policy.
In an economy where there exist no overlords who can dictate what people can do with their own money, then people are free to act purely in their own self interest, and they will.
It doesn't matter what 1000s of "educated" economics professors think any more. They're irrelevant and they've dug their own ditch.
Go find a recent economics graduate and ask them what they know about Austrian economics. Good luck!
(There are graduates who had never even heard the term "Austrian economics" until after they graduated. What does this tell you about narrow ideological viewpoints?)
> Go find a recent economics graduate and ask them what they know about Austrian economics. Good luck!
Oh, good to see you live in a parallel world …
I have an engineering degree (graduated in 2013) and during our economic class, the Austrian were the subject of a full lecture. If you think there's a conspiracy to erase them from economic history, I don't really know what to say…
A WHOLE lecture? Wow. I bet you covered all the works of Mises in that time. Thanks for reinforcing my point.
I'm not suggesting that anybody is trying to erase Austrian economics, only that the industrial mills which turn out economics graduates deliberately chose to give it little to no attention as though to shrug it off as "this is what some people used to think, but we don't think this way anymore."
Of course they don't think that way. Keynes gave them the gift that keeps giving. Wouldn't want to throw that away.
You can make a good career following the system, and going over that way will make you an outcast. Wouldn't want to be an outcast, would you?
The earlier point is that Keynesian economics does not apply to Bitcoin, and cannot apply to bitcoin, because nobody holds the keys to tweak the monetary policy.
You are welcome to think that it won't succeed based on this. Be my guest.
Bitpay (one of the largest Bitcoin payment processors in the world) processed a record $1 billion in transactions in 2018. This impressive increase of people using Bitcoin to buy real-world products and services shows Bitcoin is doing very well as "money": https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190116005701/en/Bit...
What you need to look at is the ratio between the amount in circulation and how much is spent every year. For $1billon in bitcoin this figure is ≈1%. For dollar (I'll take MZM[1] to provide a conservative result, but it would be even higher if you took M0 or just cash), this ratio is over 120%! So really, bitcoin isn't really used as money, and mainly as a highly speculative
financial asset.
Also, $1 billion sounds huge, but for a payment medium it's still really low: worldwide, last year that's also the order of magnitude of the transactions made in Vanuatu vatu. As a comparison, PayPal recorded more than 500 billions dollars in transactions last year.
1 billion is what, about 1% of supply of bitcoin? So less than that since this includes bitcoin cash as well?
> In the past year, the BitPay wallet added integrations with major gift card brands, enabling users to buy gift cards in-app for travel, food, and shopping with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
They don't break out what types of goods/services are being purchased. I wonder to what percentage of their transaction are being used to sell / launder bitcoins associated with illegal activity by buying gift cards that can then be resold.
Not sure why you're being downvoted here; I also would like to see a breakdown of what people are actually buying with bitcoin thru BitPay. To this day I still don't know anyone in real life who actually uses it over any other payment method.
Imagine I was offering you a way to own piece of a “giant art”. This particular art takes 100 terra-joules of electricity to build. It’s the biggest one in the world. There are enough people in the world that would pay a non zero sum for it.
That’s the crux of store of value. The bitcoin data structure has inherent non zero value just based on the audacious amount of electricity to build it.
That has no value at all. Nobody cares that it took "so much energy" to mine that bitcoin block, otherwise bitcoin value would rise infinitely as the mining difficulty increases.
Bitcoin has no inherent value. None. Zilch. Nada. We assign it value completely arbitrarily, hence it going from pennies per bitcoin, to $20k, to $4k.
The value of bitcoin isn't how much energy it took to create, but how much energy it would take to steal. By being energy intensive, it ensures that an attacker or malicious agent who wishes steal it, or install an involuntary tax on its users, is unable to do so without consuming at least an equivalent amount of energy. If they fail to muster up the majority of the energy, they end up wasting money on electricity spent. The bigger the cost of "electricity wasted" through mining, the bigger the risk the potential attacker must take to attempt to undermine its security.
So turns out there are some people who want to save money without it being involuntarily taxed (through forced inflation), and that itself is valuable. Bitcoin has inherent value, and unlike the fiat money it is competing with, that value cannot be arbitrarily adjusted by a monopoly control of money printers, but it is dictated entirely by supply and demand in a free market.
The "BTC/USD" exchange rate is not the value of bitcoin, but is a big distraction. If you are tied up in thinking of bitcoin in dollar cost you will end up being the greater fool who only buys when the price is rising rapidly because of FOMO. Or instead, you might be the greatest fool, who resists it until the last possible moment when you realize the world has moved on and nobody wants paper money anymore.
Nothing as any inherent value either though. Gold can't be eaten and food is worth nothing when you just had a feast. Value is a social construction highly dependent on the context.
But still Bitcoin has a lot of inflation due to speculators... I would trust more a criptocurrency that is used to buy/sell something "tangible" like Filecoin that is used to buy/sell storage.
Bitcoin has initial inflation due to the process by which the currency is created, where the operators of the network are subsidized in the newly created coin for designating their hardware to securing the network. However, there is a halvening every 210000 blocks, with an eventual complete elimination of a subsidy and creation of any more of the currency. There is a hard cap on the amount of the currency in existence, which is a cap on inflation.
The "inflation" of the BTC/USD exchange rate due to speculation is absolutely nothing to do with this. Those are simply growing pains for on-boarding while bitcoin is still in elementary stages.
It is a mistake to think something "tangible" is better denominated by a token than by the thing itself. When you buy storage, you want storage. A promissory virtual token is not a replacement for storage, and has no inherent value in itself. The storage has value - that will continue to be the case whether there is a token or a hundred tokens, or no tokens.
Currency is the same. If the currency itself does not have inherent value, then the paper which it represents would be useless. Junk economists have managed to convince most people that currency itself is worthless and it's value is a construct of our imagination.
Bitcoin has inherent value. Other "cryptocurrencies" also have inherent value - the only difference is that their value will diminish over time, whereas bitcoin will appreciate.
>The storage has value - that will continue to be the case whether there is a token or a hundred tokens, or no tokens.
And this is exactly why I think that a token used for a specific tangible thing like storage would be more stable: storage has a value and that value doesn't repentinely change by hundreds of dollars in a day.
Storage can change value at the blink of an eye, as can the junk token which purports to represent it. The things which dictate value are supply and demand. In storage, you will pay what you need based on your demands, and the price will be determined by how much is available. If there is abundance, it it cheap, if it is scarce, it will be expensive. The same is true for the token. However, as I've pointed out, the token is by-design not scarce, because anybody can print their own substitute. The token only creates additional friction between the consumer, who wants storage, and the seller, who wants money for their service.
If the seller ends up with a bunch of "storage tokens", what good is it for them if they want to do their grocery shopping? What good is it for paying their bills? Do you think each of these services will have their own token, and each one will present an additional layer of friction for every person who just wants to get on with their lives?
Of course this isn't the case. People will sell of whatever junk tokens they have and try to accumulate and save the most saleable commodity, which will be the one which does not depreciate, or depreciates as the slowest rate compared to any other commodity, ensuring that they will get their value's worth when they eventually want to trade it for something they need.
The seller of storage is also going to want to trade their commodity, storage, for a commodity which is more saleable than storage. They would never sell it for something less saleable than storage unless they had a direct need for that commodity. The seller will therefore, also offer their services in exchange for the most saleable commodity - the one with universal applicability which the greatest number of other people will accept in exchange for goods or services.
I suggest reading Carl Menger's "On the Origins of Money"[1] for a better understanding of how certain commodities become money.
Bitcoin has inflation because there is still a block reward to subsidize mining. Speculators driving up the USD exchange rate does not create new units of the currency, it isn’t inflation.
Inflation is not (directly) related to the supply of a currency, but to the value of that currency (usually measured vs the amount of goods/services a unit can purchase). When a currency loses value over time, it is inflating, when it gains value over time, it is deflating.
Now, supply of a currency CAN impact its value, so large increases in supply can lead to large decreases in value. It seems pretty obvious that the main driver of value changes in Bitcoin is not the supply but the demand. The block reward will only have a significant impact on the deflation of bitcoin if demand becomes much, much more stable. Since the primary driver of Bitcoin demand is speculation, this does not seem likely anytime soon.
It's inflation because by buying/selling large quantities they effectively change bitcoin's value. In fact in the past there were a lot of repentine changes in bitcoin's value and not by some cents but in the order of hundreds of dollars.This is an inflation higher than most if not all "traditional" currencies.
