[cromwellian]

Oh come on. My portfolio is safer in a diversified basket of stocks, bonds, real estate and other holdings than it is in bitcoin.

> we can freely speculate

Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or...

This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom/bust cycles and disappear and everything would be smoothed out are a discredited zombie theory that never dies.

[jokethrowaway]

While I agree with you on Bitcoin safety (your portfolio is safer because the only thing keeping BTC up is speculation), I don't think you can say the Austrian school is fantasy.

It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles.

Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is that you'll find smaller players doing boom / bust cycles in different industries with far less damaging effects.

I sympathise with the libertarian ideas behind BTC, but it's also the most inefficient and power hungry way of reaching the goal. This is a political problem and we need to solve it politically, not technically.

[ISL]

Boom/bust cycles preceded central banks.

[jokethrowaway]

Sure, but the problem was similar: unbacked money printed by banks and used to prop up the economy.

[arcticbull]

And they were a lot worse when no tools existed to mitigate.