[boreas]

Bitcoin has very few of the properties that one would consider desirable for a currency.

1) Transaction costs. Don't want to beat this horse to death. Some other cryptos improve on this.

2) It's inherently deflationary. Deflation is bad. This ties into another strange thing, which is that the boosters of every coin think they are supporting the long-term adoption of the technology by "HODL"ing but that is the opposite of what people would do with a real currency. I haven't seen a crypto that isn't deflationary.

3) The bitcoin protocol decentralizes some things but centralizes along other dimensions. For mature cryptos its very tough to get the entire community to agree to a hard fork, which means that mundane fraud can't be effectively unwound, like banks could probably do with fiat transactions. I have the most trouble articulating this.

[bittcto]

"Bitcoin has very few of the properties that one would consider desirable for a currency."

The desirable properties of currency are: - difficult to counterfeit - fungibility - robustness from degradation (eg: salt works except if you get it wet) - consistent store of value - Easily transportable.

Bitcoin has all of the above, and has better qualities in each regard than both gold and the US dollar.

As for your complaints: 1. Transaction fees are not a problem. You can move a million dollars for $0.20. You can move 1 penny for a millionth of a penny with bitcoin. The "transaction fees" FUD is just a campaign combined with a spam attack and that spam attack has been defeated. Further it becomes irrelevant with lightning.

2. Bitcoin is literally inflationary. It won't stop inflating until 2140. You think its "deflationary" because its price keeps going up, but that's simply a consequence of the technology adoption lifecycle.

The idea that deflation is bad is absurd. Monetary inflation is a form of taxation, or more precisely counterfeiting. It is literally theft. The reason old people have trouble getting by is that the government has stolen their lifetime of savings via inflation. The idea that government propaganda has convinced people that this is somehow good is really quite disgusting.

3) There is no reason to hard fork bitcoin. The only ones that have happened were early days and an accidental one (which nobody noticed because everyone upgraded.) You don't need to hard fork bitcoin.

Unwinding "mundane fraud" is not a feature of gold or the US Dollar so the idea that this is a requirement of a currency is absurd.

Also, you were complaining that it is centralized, but your evidence is that it's so decentralized that you can't reverse transactions?! You said you were having trouble articulating it, so maybe you switched points in the middle.

Anyway, censorship resistance is a good thing-- any method that lets you "unwind mundane fraud" would let a government censor who has what bitcoin.

[andrewla]

> It's inherently deflationary

I hear this argument a lot from skeptics, and even from some supporters (though the supporters often contest the "Deflation is bad" follow-up).

I think anyone who says "it's inherently deflationary" should translate that to the phrase "it will always go up in value", which is another way of saying the exact same thing.

Even as a Bitcoin supporter, I find the notion that "it will always go up in value" to be a pretty dubious claim to make, much less a more convoluted argument (that admittedly you did not make) that it cannot be successful (i.e. cannot continue to maintain value) because it is deflationary (i.e. must always increase in value), as those two things are saying the opposite thing.

Practically speaking, in the Keynsian view, any examination of the deflationary/inflationary aspect of Bitcoin has to be tied to the fact that there will be way more "Bitcoin" in circulation than Bitcoin on the blockchain, because of the multiplier effects of banking and credit markets (neither of which exist in any interesting way at the moment, but despite what some of the more fervent supporters believe, there's no reason that fractional reserve banking cannot be denominated in Bitcoin). So trying to make an argument about inflation based on M0 is a bit meaningless -- the state of the credit market is way more important than the supply of specie.