[amanaplanacanal]

I was a gold bug from way back. Thinking more deeply about inflation, any asset can be an inflation hedge. The answer is simply not to hold the inflating currency. Bitcoin doesn't do this any better than gold, real estate, company ownership through stocks, or even toilet paper.

The actual use cases for crypto-currencies seem like really extreme edge cases to me. I don't think they will ever see widespread usage.

[unyttigfjelltol]

I ran a Bitcoin full node for a while years ago to learn and contribute, also coming from a perspective that appreciates any viable alt-money. I lost interest when the network centralized and speculation came to dominate. Then there were the governance-- I'll call them failures-- that resulted in multiple forks. I mean, c'mon, parallel systems are one thing but it illustrates that no one even is available to dig a moat around the relevant trademarks. And finally what caused me to disengage was a lack of-- I'll call it honesty about this being a secure long-term store of value. This is a distributed, Internet-dependent software program with a minimally-functional development contingent, that absolutely is a creature of this technological moment-- relative to network structure, laws and the security of the various layers of encryption baked into the system. It's a very human system and not pre-determined at all. If those systems fail for a day, or a week, I sort of doubt BTC ever would recover.

These days I follow the price to infer which direction black market money exchangers in China are running-- are the illegal capital flows toward or away from China today? I also think it's neat that sorta 'banking as a commodity item' has a sticker price in BTC. That is all.

[feisar]

what do you mean by BTC got centralized?

[unyttigfjelltol]

@feisar , I was referring to mining pools.[1]

[1] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-centralization/

[coralreef]

> Bitcoin doesn't do this any better than gold, real estate, company ownership through stocks, or even toilet paper.

VS physical gold it has a lower storage cost, lower transfer cost, faster to transfer, easier to divide, harder to steal, etc. Houses can't be divided up very easily, have high transaction costs (listing, agent commission, paperwork/mortgage, etc.). Stocks can't be custodied, can be frozen, diluted, etc. Toilet paper can be printed at will.