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by loufe 2012 days ago
Thank you for the write-up, sgeisley, much appreciated. What is your personal opinion on the future of Bitcoin, if you don't mind me asking?
1 comments

First and foremost I think it will stick around. It's too useful a tool and it would be very hard to kill. It's money for enemies, no one controls it, everyone can use it.

China might currently be the only country in a position to attack Bitcoin as a protocol (not from a legal angle) but I think it's not in their best interest to do so. They are a rising empire, eventually they will have far less problems with capital flight than others that are declining, so it might make sense for them to let it go on, potentially causing a speculative attack on USD [1]. China's dominance in mining is shrinking, so at some point that won't be a problem anymore imo.

If (which is a big if) a "speculative attack"-type scenario happens the hyperinflation and resulting turmoil will leave a shock and I hope [2] we could actually see new hard currencies emerge. Some of them might be BTC backed as it is a harder money even than gold (at the expense of being younger, not as lindy). If that happens in the form of federations as I mentioned or well-known centralized solutions: who knows? I'll work towards a future with many different, but freely interchangable, uncensorable, private and fully backed BTC-based "currencies". I still like gold in case we nuke ourselves into the stone age, but I try to be an optimist.

Even if Bitcoin doesn't become a predominant store of value (because it gets widely banned, unlikely at this point imo) I think it will at least establish itself as a means of breaking economic sanctions and fleeing failing states. While I don't mind the upside potential in price I'm primarily in it for the freedom, I think either way Bitcoin will increase personal sovereignty by giving people the option to opt out.

That being said, take my opinion with a grain of salt. I'm a libertarian working in that space and quite young. While I try to compensate by reading about history and economics (Dalio has been a great influence) my life experience is very limited. I just try to navigate the uncertainty of this world the best I can, preferably at my own terms.

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/

[2] I know that "hope" might sound cynical given the prerequisites, but given the direction we ("the west") are headed it seems inevitable. So the best I can hope for is a better state afterwards: given that too much debt and printing money got us into the dire situation we are in in the first place, my hope is to take this capability away from governments for the foreseeable future to hopefully enable a more sustainable, less leveraged growth.