[jhh]

So I feel the "Bitcoin is undesirable as a store of value because it's so volatile" point is not too fair.

Firstly, fiat money can often experience instability which is quite extreme. Moderate instability, mostly in form of inflation, is even normal in large parts of the developing world. And just because the Dollar has been reasonable stable for a hundred years or so, people assume that this is the natural state of affairs.

Secondly, is it a reasonable expectation, that a new store of value would be stable from the start? For example, platinum has become more common as a store of value in the last 30ish years, and its value has sprung up and fluctuated quite heavily (see here for example https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Pt_price...). A similar argument can be made regarding storehouses being less trustworthy than traditional banks. This sort of thing would be expected with a new type of value.

[hello_world_btc]

What's the anti-case against each country launching it's own version of Bitcoin/Altcoin? What's the bull case for bitcoin beyond the fact that it has been the first successful crypto? Genuinely curious.

[powellzer]

Just chiming in here, but I would say the high mining hash rate makes it the most secure chain (secure like people can't go back in time and change the chain's history because it would be prohibitively expensive to do so).

Ultimately I think Ethereum's market cap will come close to challenging BTC's in the next 10 years and when that happens we will see a rapid transfer of capital from the BTC chain to the ETH chain.

[jhh]

So I think it is certainly _very_ unsure that Bitcoin will become the dominant crypto asset. I think there's some reason why it might.

Kind of subtle and hand-wavy, but I think it's dysfunctionality in terms of leadership and "emergent nature" may be features rather than bugs.

For example a crypto asset sanctioned by a government is based on that government's legitimacy. This kind of means that the government could decide to "turn it off". And with Bitcoin, it's not clear at all who could do this.

But yeah, that's very unsure, I guess.