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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

The point that you're missing is that there will always be Venezuelas and Zimbabwes, and Bitcoin, in its current form, serves as a baseline financial system that unfortunate citizens of failing states can fall back on. It has plenty of issues when it comes to buying coffee and small transactions, but perfect is the enemy of good and it has properties that make it much harder to censor than USD based services, which will just comply with the state.

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I often hear the argument that BitCoin is unsuitable for small transactions. That's certainly the case (at least in recent years).

What I don't understand is why people don't then just use one of the literally thousands of other currencies -- most of which handle small transactions just fine.

For small transfers I use DogeCoin and the fee is 0.2 cents.

Bitcoin for me is a "savings account". The tx fee is certainly important, but more important is the long term value appreciation. I have changed btc to other cryptos to spend them, so I pay less fees, but Im not holding other cryptos long term.

a savings account that loses 50% of its value in a matter of days?

If anything, the crash last March has proven that BTC is not a safe asset and not immune from a global financial meltdown. Other way around - its very sensitive to it actually.

It's very volatile but usually you don't touch a savings account regularly so it doesn't matter what it does day to day, only long term.

It seems like the whole meaning of "savings account" has been lost in one generation..

In the old days, the very point of a savings account is that it keeps the value stable, and pays interest on top. The more long term you save, the higher the interest. Compounded.

Yeah, that whole thing doesn't exist for my generation. We've never had savings accounts that beat inflation in our lifetime.

Savings accounts aren't meant to beat inflation.

In some European countries, your money on the bank was taken by the government due to the crisis. It's a bit worse than ups and downs in bitcoin, where you have a chance to get it back.

Bitcoin isn't so bad fees wise. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/ is showing 3c if you will wait 8 hrs or 72c for 40 min. It has other problems as a practical payment mechanism though - lots of people don't take it, it's always kind of slow, you have to have your passport scanned and pay fees to convert it to fiat etc. Some of those apply to other crypto too.

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