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by SwimSwimHungry 2138 days ago
If that's the case, then it does a terrible job at it. Cryptocurrencies, by and large, are absolutely horrible for a reliable store of value. The swings in value are too great and numerous to count, based on the whims of whatever people feel like they are, often on a daily basis.

I'll take US Treasury notes any day for "long term store of value". If the United States gets to the point where they can't honor Treasury notes, we will have much bigger problems on our hands anyway.
1 comments
shanusmagnus 2138 days ago
See the "long-term" part. On most timescales since its inception, btc has stored value pretty well.
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SwimSwimHungry 2137 days ago
I totally read that part. It still sucks for it because of how unpredictable cryptocurrencies are. Bitcoin has a bunch of "Bart Simpson" style pump and dumps and, even over the course of the many years of Bitcoin, unless you were a true believer from the early days, I'd find it hard to believe you came out ahead or didn't lose your shirt in the process. I'd rather not be subjected to that, and there is absolutely no guarantee bitcoin will be relevant 10 or 20 years down the road. Another black swan event, a cryptocurrency that becomes the new hotness, or maybe even a quantum computer breaking into wallets could render bitcoin worthless.

Another thing to consider, most users of bitcoin or whatever else generally relies on exchanges to get out what they are really after, US Dollars. The end game is to see which sucker will buy your tokens for more than you paid for it, then you can cash out. But to that end, we kinda have to trust the exchanges as well, and there are many cases of fraud that have happened at that level, which shakes trust in such a system.

Now if we are being intellectually honest here and asking ourselves if bitcoin and its ilk is good for something like speculation or even as the basis for treating it as an "exchange" for transferring money (albeit a rather low performing one at that compared to other established systems like SWIFT), then I can potentially see the benefit in that, even if I personally have no real use case for it.

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