[TawandaMoyo]

Thanks for pointing this out. People have different reasons why they believe in bitcoin (and other cryptos). Where I live the government has in the past 20 years wiped out citizens' savings at least 3 times, arbitrarily, without any notice. In such a situation using bitcoin, regardless of the risk/skepticism, is a far better alternative than having all your money disappear on the whims and or experiments of politicians. Once I get sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptos I will happily take my chances, and I'm sure many in my situation will see it that way.

[ogogmad]

It's sad to hear this. Is there no way for you to buy foreign currency like dollars instead? Bitcoin might be an attractive asset to speculate in, but I'm not sure if it's the safest way to hold onto your wealth, because of its inefficiency, volatility, the need for endless mining to sustain it, and so on. It might multiply your wealth by 10 or reduce it to zero -- do you really want to take the risk? I understand that what I'm saying might be boring, but foreign currency is tried and truer.

[TawandaMoyo]

You could buy US dollars of course, but you'd have to keep them under your mattress. The banks can convert foreign currency into local currency with a decree. I see your point though, and ideally I'd have some in something tangible, say real estate, but cryptos make sense to a lot of people dealing with crazy regimes.

[abecedarius]

They're different risks from holding dollars. If safety is your top priority, you won't go 100% into fiat.

[glenvdb]

The only thing fiat currency across the world has proven is that it's subject to the whims of bureaucrats and has the theft of inflation built-in. Even the "best" fiat in the world like GBP and USD have seen their purchasing reduced drastically over the decades.

I don't trust politicians to manage their money or economy well. But I do trust code and math that enforces decentralised consensus that can't be manipulated by a handful of powerful people. Some have tried in Bitcoin's short 12 year history, and they've all failed.

You say Bitcoin is inefficient. In comparison to what? By what measures? If you compare Bitcoin to gold mining it uses less energy. https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons

If you compare it to the legacy financial system (and many other industries), it also uses less energy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

You say Bitcoin is volatile, but that is to be expected for a new form of money that people are still trying to figure out the value of. How long do you think it took for gold to reach a stable point of perceived value over its long history? Bitcoin is only 12 years old.

But perhaps calling it "volatile" isn't really even fair to begin with, when you compare it to top stocks and gold. https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing...

Need for endless mining? Of course it's endless, it's a vital part of network security in an adversarial environment. As the network stores more value the energy expenditure will need to go up to secure it. This is true of any other store of value. Gold is not only incredibly expensive to mine, it's expensive to secure in large facilities.

The more Bitcoin integrates into the economy and the more wealth it secures, the more energy expenditure it should use. This is by design and a good thing. And if you compare it to other industries (linked above), it is far more efficient than current systems.

Forget "crypto". Most of them are varying degrees of scam or cargo-culting around "blockchain technology" (including Ethereum). Bitcoin is the only one that matters because it's truly neutral and decentralised. It wasn't founded by any company, there's no marketing team or CEO. It's just an open network protocol that people choose to opt-in to because they understand its value proposition to the world. In the same way that there's a separation of church and state, there needs to be a separation of money and state.

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...