[zaarn]

>It's a great medium exchange, but it suffers from low adoption meaning it's a bad store of value (but so is fiat) and a bad unit of account (but so is gold).

So it unites the drawbacks of both fiat and gold without any of the advantages.

>* It's sound money whereas fiat is not (nobody can arbitrarily increase the supply)

Yeah they can, it's called a hard fork in cryptocurrency.

In fiat it's called "printing play money", but the goal is essentially the same.

>Except for the fact that you can't send gold coins digitally.

Actually you can, though in this case you exchange ownership contracts of the gold, which you can swap for the gold you own at your bank.

Plus I don't need to wait an hour to do that, I can do it even offline if I wish, where all parties can verify the transfer without a computer at all.

>Also, it's much more difficult to check for gold coins. And difficult to transport. It's easy with cryptocurrencies.

Until the tax office knocks at your door and wants to know where all that money went. Then the ease of transport is suddenly a problem.

>It's a great medium exchange,

In my experience, no. It's not a medium of exchange at the moment any more than beer tops and a ballpoint pen are. Bitcoin and Friends are at the moment a speculative asset that people hoard in case it gets more valuable or use as an unregulated stock exchange.

The average customer can't even get refunds if they get scammed, how am I supposed to take it seriously as a digital currency?

[lawn]

> So it unites the drawbacks of both fiat and gold without any of the advantages.

Well, if you conveniently ignore the advantages...

> Yeah they can, it's called a hard fork in cryptocurrency.

That's similar to me printing "Doge dollars" and claiming it increases the supply of US dollar.

> Actually you can, though in this case you exchange ownership contracts of the gold, which you can swap for the gold you own at your bank.

Yes... If we ignore the fact that you're not actually sending gold.

> Until the tax office knocks at your door and wants to know where all that money went. Then the ease of transport is suddenly a problem.

That's not an argument. Taxes are applied in the same way as cash is taxed, with benefit of you having a ledger you can reference.

> It's not a medium of exchange at the moment any more than beer tops and a ballpoint pen are.

Except them being instantly verifiable, have a constrained supply, are easier to transfer, are divisible, are fungible & uniform... Just the properties that money actually needs and make for a good medium of exchange.

> The average customer can't even get refunds if they get scammed, how am I supposed to take it seriously as a digital currency?

I guess the same way you take physical cash seriously?

[yoz-y]

> Except them being instantly verifiable, have a constrained supply, are easier to transfer, are divisible, are fungible & uniform... Just the properties that money actually needs and make for a good medium of exchange.

Money also needs to have stable value within some margin and small but steady inflation. If the value rises then it is a bad idea to spend it because it becomes an investment. If the value fluctuates nothing can have a nominal price. A MacBook costs $1400, but in a day it could be anything between 0.2 and 1 bitcoin. Like in the cafe story in one of the GP comments, this makes it impossible to use for any transaction.

[ISL]

The only thing preventing me from using bitcoin regularly is the need to account for the capital gains (losses) on every individual transaction relative to USD. One year's worth of itemized accounting for trivial transactions was enough.

Barring that, I'd be actively using BTC (or other cryptocurrencies) in the same mode as many people use Venmo.

[yoz-y]

Would it not bother you that an object would cost twice as much on one day that on another?

[kobasa]

What if it costs twice as less? Think of it as cashing in a small part of some stock/investment to use it to buy something. If you're really that concerned about crypto price changing, you can just top it back up that evening.

[yoz-y]

That is a good analogy. One would not cash in a part of investment for a banal purchase but might do so when buying a house. In that case I would definitely wait for a right moment to sell.