[roenxi]

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run.

Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency.

All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.

[Webox]

I don't get your argument.

Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.

My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything.

The inflation itself is a systematic thing and should affect bitcoin equaly.

When corona came, i was looking at the stock market and was surprised how many people left it. It doesn't make much sense to distrist the stock market that much. After all alot of pension funds are existing, lots of companies or people who are self employed also have to keep their money safe. There is a lot of dependency on the share market and we are all bound to a certain degree of not being able to move it out asap.

[bradstewart]

I'm assuming you're in the US/Europe/somewhere with a stable currency. Places like Argentina that have had serious devaluation of currency do not see money in their bank accounts as "safe".

Bitcoin can provide a way for e.g. Argentinians to get their money into other currencies when the government is actively preventing that through "standard" mechanisms. It's safe (er, safer) from that perspective.

[M277]

How is it safe when it's so volatile and based on speculation?

As someone from a country which has had its currency's value slashed to half 5 years ago, I genuinely don't see how Bitcoin is safe at all. If anything, gold or real estate are safer.

Sure, if it is somehow guaranteed that I won't wake up tomorrow seeing 1 BTC = $30 000, I could see your argument. But is that guaranteed?

I would also like to add that the swings that BTC takes are unpredictable (at least for the common people who would benefit from it being a safe storage for their wealth).

[vernon99]

As somebody who saw family wealth slashed 100x due to crazy inflation just 20 years ago, 2x fluctuations are nothing. This is the perspective worth recognizing. Bitcoin is actually very stable by comparison. Edit: fat fingers typing.

[M277]

Ouch. My condolences.

Yeah, if things are that bad, it could be viable.

Civil war is another viable scenario. However, one should also assess the situation properly if his/her country is in civil war. If things go bad and you have to escape, "safe passage for x amount of gold I have on hand" is more guaranteed than "safe passage for x BTC I promise to pay".

[Webox]

Nothing guarantees you at all, that bitcoin doesn't fall today from 60k back to 100.

[hooande]

This isn't a very good use case for bitcoin. It's very easy to buy coins, but getting your money out is as difficult as various governments want it to be. Most of the major exchanges have KYC and anti money laundering laws that can make it hard to transfer large amounts of any crypto into a spendable currency.

If a government is preventing people from transferring money through standard mechanisms, it's only a matter of time until they prevent them from using crypto to do that. If the best use is circumventing the law, it isn't much of a currency at all

[arcticbull]

A TransferWise Borderless account that allows you to store any of 80 currencies including the USD, in Argentina, is a much better system.

Not to mention, a $20 transaction fee in Argentina is devastating.

[roenxi]

> My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything.

Your money is safe, your wealth is not. Taking the US as a reference, it is official government policy that if you store your wealth as money then it has a half life of 35 years.

> Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.

I was sneaky in my wording - I'm a gold bug and think Bitcoin is worthless. Nevertheless, a rational person who was interested in bitcoin would probably note that whatever its bad points it is simply not subject to the sort of technical intervention that makes fiat untrustworthy.

Also, using gold as a reference, the unofficial policy half life looks more like 12 years. Using the M2, maybe 14 years.

[arcticbull]

Supply is only half the inflation calculation, the other half is velocity. That's why the increase in the M2 supply doesn't translate to what you're paying at the grocery store. You've missed half the equation. [1]

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2014/september/wha...

[roenxi]

I'm not missing anything, I just don't care about the inflation calculation. I'm using gold and the M2.

[arcticbull]

Ok, so you're doing it incorrectly then. That's fine, but it seems weird to give advise on the basis of information that you know is wrong.

[roenxi]

That's got all the argumentative power of a damp noodle. If you happen to be using the CPI to adjust your portfolio, you might be saying you've experienced real growth when your investments are literally being outperformed by the steadily growing value of an inert rock.

The inflation rate is basically a proxy measure of wage growth [0]. The money printing hasn't going in to wages. It isn't appropriate to use the CPI to adjust wealth, because then you'd be mistaking asset price inflation for productive growth and putting money into things that don't earn real returns (ie, are grossly mismanaged).

[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2015/november/rela...

[arcticbull]

lol, non-inflating is bad.

People aren't owed a risk-free return on thier capital and inflation is an incentive to invest. You're looking for a merged risk-free long-term store of value and medium of exchange. There's no reason to couple those two. It's actually counter-producive as they have different objectives. Money's job is to remain stable enough for as long as you hold it and cheap to transact. A long-term store of value's job is to go up.

Money is your short-term medium of exchange and lossy store of value. Which you use to buy long-term store of value. This is how capital is productively allocated while also creating a stable financial system.

The ability to adjust the money supply is crucial to reacting to shocks, to a changing population, and a changing economy. Taking away the knobs from the Fed removes their ability to create a stable monetary system in which business and individuals can operate.

If you actually look back in time you'll see under the gold standard, an attempt at this, boom/bust cycles were worse and more exaggerated. And much harder to control. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

This whole trope about the fed "stealing" 99% of money's value over the last 100 years is voodoo fringe economics. These are the people who used to hang out with megaphones at the corder of 5th and Market. Of course it went down, they told you it would, and they told you to buy something else with it.

[mountainriver]

Bitcoins wild fluctuations based on speculation would say it’s not a safe place to store value over time

[BTCOG]

Interesting that you should say the opposite of what JP Morgan is now saying. That the wild fluctuations are steadily going away as volatility has been calming down quite a lot.

[arcticbull]

JPM like Goldman are only interested in selling their clients what they want. It's what they do. And it's only to benefit themselves. These are the bankers Bitcoin was trying to overthrow lol doesn't that ring alarm bells? Remember?

[BTCOG]

We typically use the bankers as a sentiment indicator to show you folks who like bankers, that the bankers are getting into Bitcoin. The beauty in Bitcoin is these bankers enter in an equal or lower playing field to those involved. We don't seek permission from, or worry about said bankers.

They are pawns, if you will, to point to as jumping off points to your average Joe and say "Look! Your favorite X,Y,Z institutional guy is into Bitcoin now!" That is all.

[0xfaded]

In my world view, if you are actively removing wealth from circulation, then it should be disappeared.

But I do agree that it is too hard for the average person to save in the sense of "I will need to withdraw some wealth in the future". The best option out there seems to be ETFs. The dirty secret about the stock market though is that companies don't issue new stock nearly as much as one might think, and therefore the stock market is basically counter-parties playing off each other.

There are plenty of people out there with good, useful ideas and skill sets that really ought to be funded. And no, not all will generate VC like returns.

Figuring out how to link your minor excess now to your needs in the future in a way that isn't a net negative could very well be the defining problem of a generation.

[malka]

"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.

[FDSGSG]

Liberty Reserve was such a trusted party for a long time before Bitcoin became popular. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that the US government shutdown of Liberty Reserve is exactly what kicked off bitcoins popularity in the first place.

On May 6, 2016, the operator of Liberty Reserve was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison

[o-__-o]

Including with Bitcoin, since 51% ownership of hash rate is simply a function of who has the most pooled resources (read: money)

[webinvest]

One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation.

It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).

It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap.

Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.

[BTCOG]

This is utter nonsense. XLM is founded by Jed McCaleb of Ripple and Mt Gox fame, and it's not a cryptocurrency. It certainly is not money. Bitcoin tx fees are readily verifiable on mempool.space and are currently $11-12 for a low-medium priority transaction. (One can easily get in for several dollars less, as well) When you insert such blatantly misleading and outright false information it brings into question everything else you said. Plus, it should be noted this fee is pretty high. The BTC tx fees lately have been averaging only around $5-8 and that is sending on Legacy.

[webinvest]

My mistake, bitcoin transaction fees are lower around $25 according to this chart[1].

Everything else in my comment still stands though and it certainly is a cryptocurrency.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

[gruez]

>It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).

market cap =/= trust, especially when you consider that in the past there were outright scams that were in the top 15 (eg. IOTA).

[webinvest]

I don’t like IOTA. It was pretty overhyped for it’s value. I don’t know how many cryptocurrencies there are, maybe 10s of thousands, but being in the top 15 by market cap lends more credibility than in the top 1000 by market cap. Anyone can make a cryptocurrency, but not anyone can make it valuable.

[arcticbull]

> It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap.

lol, Dogecoin is #6 and XLM is #14. Are you saying your currency is less trusted than one with a dog on it?

[webinvest]

Possibly, yes? It’s not my cryptocurrency, it’s just one I’ve used and known about for a few years. Dogecoin is something else; I don’t know how that meme coin got so big. Also by your same logic, should we not trust the USDC stablecoin because it’s #18? Lol

[arcticbull]

Should definitely not trust the USDT stable coin in spite of its position at #5. I'm just saying market cap isn't a function of trust.

[webinvest]

Right on USDT. But Marketcap is a function of overall value and what gives money value oftentimes (but not entirely) is trust.

[random_kris]

Where are you seeing $250 tx fee on btc? Are you in any way related to stellar? Reported

[webinvest]

My mistake, Bitcoin transaction fees are lower around $25 according to this chart[1]. Everything else in my comment still stands though. No I’m not related to Stellar, I’ve just known about Lumens and have used them for a few years now. I figured there might be some people here that didn’t already know about it.

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

[minikites]

Is this a press release?

[FireBeyond]

> All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time.

There are ways to do so that don't involve scenarios literally as absurd as _buying power plants_ to do random equations.

Perhaps some of that desire for a safe value store should be invested in that direction.

[cabalamat]

> Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy

Some governments are more trustworthy than others, and lots of people trust some governments. For example many people hold USD because they consider it a better store of value than their own country's currency.

> a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run

Somewhere like Switzerland would probably be quite trusted to run this.

[pydry]

There are plenty of inflation proof assets out there. Bitcoin's value lies in its immunity from government oversight and transportability.

It's most useful for transactions or transfers that are illegal somewhere. A government can deprive a criminal of a house more easily than a password.

I suspect it was embraced by western governments because it facilitates capital flight from the developing world to the developed world - especially from China.