[young_unixer]

Maybe we should blame the defenders of constant inflation and government overreach. You mentioned Argentina, which is a prime example of these problems.

If we didn't have those problems in the first place, Bitcoin wouldn't be as attractive.

[Moodles]

What % of bitcoin owners own it for political reasons along your lines, compared to people just using it as an investment?

[saltyfamiliar]

I'd argue it doesn't actually matter. People only buying it as an investment vehicle is still enough to push into mainstream awareness and increase it's level of adoption and usefulness, and at its core, the reason it's an attractive investment in the first place is because it's deflationary, digital and decentralized.

[iamricks]

Well, since you can own bitcoin anonymously, any answer to this question other than “i don’t know” will have a huge margin of error

[jki275]

Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.

[vinger]

They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.

[jki275]

Sure it is.

Chainalysis does it all the time.

Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.

If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.

[willbudd]

Whether or not you can pay/receive currency anonymously has nothing to do with whether or not you can contribute source code and/or whitepapers anonymously.

[Antipode]

How would a completely unregulated currency be better in that regard? Aren't the wild swings in bitcoin price essentially hyperinflation/deflation?

[gruez]

It depends entirely on your time horizon. USD might be more stable day-to-day, but has lost 32.3% of its value in the past 20 years. This is just with CPI, if you're comparing to asset prices this is probably much worse.

[Antipode]

I was talking more about hyperinflation specifically, rather than the normal ~2% annual inflation targets. I don't understand how lack of monetary policy would prevent hyperinflation.