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Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

If the commodity in question was anything other than Bitcoin nobody would be saying something like that with a straight face. I think “Beanie Baby” is too strong a term for Bitcoin since they are much more “inherently” valuable ($5 of Bitcoin is much more useful than a $5 stuffed animal). Bitcoin will very likely never be worthless.

But a large chunk of Bitcoin’s 2020 wealth comes from it being a speculative instrument - as your comment indicates! I hope this dies down eventually but obviously Bitcoin is objectively high-risk. We are still in the first year of a serious recession, and significant political turbulence, and a pandemic. It’s not irrational to put that money into dollars / euros / etc.

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Speculation about the (unknowable) future is how we allocate all resources in the present. A lot of people on HN seem to lump the "buy because price is rising" speculators in with the "buy because Bitcoin will become the foundation of the financial internet" speculators.

Investors who understand Bitcoin's potential do it an indispensable service. They inform the public (through price information) of that which most of the public is unable or unwilling to figure out on their own: that Bitcoin has tremendous potential to change the world and warrants serious attention, both currently for certain people as a hideable, unconfiscateable, transportable, no-third-party-risk store of wealth and in the future for everyone as a transactional currency (and as the cornerstone of the financial internet).

What can you buy with your Bitcoins? Can you pay your rent with them? Can you pay your electric bill, or internet? Can you buy gas? Can you buy groceries?

I don’t own any Bitcoins and I never have, but if I did, I could at least buy some goods with them. Not most of those, but I have in fact seen real life stores that accept Bitcoin as currency.

I have as well, but not many. Certainly not enough to call it a "hard currency" (of which the entire point is that it's widely, almost universally, accepted).

bitrefill.com is a decent start to bridge that gap.

You can pay rent with it if your landlord accepts it. I'm a landlord and accept it.

Are you declaring that in your taxes? And tax authorities are cool with it? What exchange rate do you apply, giving the volatility? In which country?

Yes, declare it on taxes. AUD exchange rate. Australia.

How many landlords who accept it do you think there are? I would guess somewhere below 1%.

What can you buy with gold bullion? Is gold worthless?

Who said anything about worthless? Gold bullion is not a hard currency. Nobody buys gold in order to spend it.

you can buy stuff at Target, Ebay, and Amazon, just to name 3. You can get groceries at Target, so yes. You can probably find gas cards, too.

Sigh.

I'll take that as a no. So how is it "hard currency" if you can't buy the things you want with it?

The "hard" part of hard currency refers to its monetary properties - i.e. how easy it is to inflate the supply. On this metric Bitcoin is harder than anything else out there. So then we are arguing about whether it's a "currency" or not.

I personally accept is as payment, and therefore consider it a currency. Why would I want to buy things with it today when I can use ever inflating dollars for that?

Look that’s just not what “hard currency” is. “Hard currency” basically means “money which is considered a reliable store of value in major international markets.” Bitcoin simply isn’t that. No functional national government or large corporation is going to sign a large contract in Bitcoin - the very act of signing it could dramatically devalue the currency! You can’t just say Bitcoin is hard currency and devise some random measure of “hardness” out of ideological convenience.

Bitcoin is a fine technology and a fine thing to put part of your wealth into, especially if you support the tech and want to use it to buy things or invest. It’s also brand new, it’s price / USD or euro is obviously unstable, and there’s a global pandemic-depression! It’s just short-sighted (and intellectually dishonest) to say Bitcoin is low-risk and “hard currency” because it’s protected against inflation.

> Bitcoin simply isn’t that

Agree to disagree. I would say you're the one twisting the definition of "hard currency" (Wikipedia is not the source of all truth).

"Hard money" originally reffered to gold. When paper currency took over the term "hard currency" was used to distinguish between good and bad paper currencies.

I maintain that the "hard" part (which derives from gold) refers to the inability to be inflated easily. But I'm happy to concede that Bitcoin is not a currency yet in most peoples' eyes. I'm happy to switch to calling it a hard money.

> Hard currency refers to money that is issued by a nation that is seen as politically and economically stable. Hard currencies are widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services and may be preferred over the domestic currency.

BTC is inarguably NOT "widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services". I'm very sorry to break it to you.

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