[gxon]

It's perfectly scarce and rapidly trending toward 0 inflation. This is one of the key arguments for why it's ultimately a better store of value than gold, which is abundant in the context of the solar system.

I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

[chucknthem]

> I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

Maybe better store of value isn't the wrong choice of words, but better in terms of having the same store of value properties + more resistant to attack, better privacy, easier to secure, easier to use, scalable etc.

There are projects trying to be better than bitcoin on technical fronts, but it needs to be an order of magnitude better to offset the current moment and network effects at this point, unless a real attack on the bitcoin network threatens its security.

[x87678r]

The good thing about gold is if/when people decide its no longer a good store of value, you can still use it, for jewellery or connectors etc. BTC is just goes poof.

[gxon]

This is actually a pro for bitcoin. It's not useful as anything other than a store of value.

If we collectively decide to switch to bitcoin as our store of value network, and retire gold and silver from that use case, then we free up all the gold stored in vaults collecting dust as a value store to do more useful work that it's uniquely capable of, like being used in electronics or dental work.

A lot of these use cases now aren't economically viable because the market value of gold is inflated due to being overloaded with the store of value use case.

[jerrymiller]

Is it a trend that the quality of comments about BTC on HN has increased drastically? It's about 50/50 of the good/bad ratio now, whereas 1-2 years ago, I'd say it was easily 10/90.

Tell me mister gxon, are you a good representation of the HN crowd, or is it just Bitcoiners have piled on this article for some reason?

[quickthrower2]

Solar system? You are thinking ahead. But then you need to think quantum computing too!

The only saviour is highly valued quantum proof forks of BTC, preserving the original txns

[gxon]

Even still on Earth, we're mining ~2% more gold annually. More gold in absolute terms is being mined than any other time in human history.

You just answered the quantum question yourself. We can upgrade the bitcoin protocol with quantum resistant cryptography. I very much doubt it would be a contentious fork. No need to bootstrap an entirely new value network.