“Stability in value is presumed to be the decisive factor for acceptance. Hayek makes the assumption that competition will favor currencies with the greatest stability in value since a devalued currency hurts creditors, and an upward-revalued currency hurts debtors.”
Stability is not the observed behaviour in BTC.
That's a nonsensical statement. Use BTC to buy a car today, and then use it to buy the same value car in a year. BTC is, fundamentally, unstable at this point in time. Even when all BTC is mined and it is distributed across the globe to every human being and sentient AI and animal, it will likely continue to be highly unstable as a currency.
Compare to the, relatively, stable USD as a currency. Prices for goods and services in USD fluctuate, but typically only changing once a year or so. Your milk price doesn't, in USD, shoot up by 500% in a week.
The idea that USD is becoming worthless due to recent monetary policy, however ill-advised, is greatly exaggerated.
The idea that Bitcoin is the only way to protect oneself against inflation is also greatly exaggerated. Investors have been buying assets and investments for a long time before Bitcoin was invented to avoid inflation. Bitcoin didn't magically change that.
If Bitcoins were the dominate and only currency, people would continue to buy food, clothing, luxury goods etc. b/c they need or really want those things and will be willing to trade bitcoins in exchange for those goods. Practically, Bitcoin is unlikely to be the dominate currency allowed in countries to participate in transactions without incurring significant taxes, so likely people will store wealth in Bitcoins(or other cryptocurrencies) and then convert to fiat currencies as they need to make their purchases.
Fiat can, most of the time, grow or shrink the money supply as needed for the most stable economic outcome.
In a pure BTC environment, the borrower is employed and being paid a salary in BTC. Loans would work just like in an inflationary environment, except now the overall deflation rate of BTC would be taken into account during loan origination.
Bitcoin is not a good asset to do loans in right now as it has high volatility, but as ownership of Bitcoin becomes more and more dispersed, then the volatility will reduce. Once the volatility of the asset is stabilized, then the depreciation rate could be factored into loans.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1899/if-the-econ...
No fork necessary. We can already use millisatoshis on L2.
I think I need to break down how this works. Bitcoin L1 chain is a settlement layer where transactions are pooled per tx (its not 10 tx per second or whatever people think it is). Regardless, its L2 that processes small frequent transactions. That would be providers like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Circle, etc. They process the transactions and keep the account, only infrequently is it settled to the actual blockchain ledger. Then you get into the lighting network. Bitcoin can absolutely scale without issue.
nacs: because common sense
Source?
The only statement Mastercard has made is that they will support "crypto" on their network in the future.
They have not mentioned which cryptocurrencies they will support at launch from what I've seen.
So, not Bitcoin. And maybe not any existent cryptocurrency.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/mastercard-will-...
Has anyone confirmed that Mastercard is even going to support Bitcoin? Previous articles suggested it was stablecoins only.
In no way is spending Bitcoin as easy as spending regular old cash.
Many dont understand Bitcoin was designed this way on purpose. L1 is for infrequent important transaction settlement. If it wasnt the chain would grow to a point where it could not be decentralized because the chain would be too big for hard drives and individuals to run nodes. It would naturally expand faster than memory advancement and centralize.
SWIFT and ACH don't seem to be it. Assuming a generous 3,000 transactions per block Bitcoin can do ~158M a year.
ACH does ~25B a year. It's harder to find numbers on SWIFT but it looks like at least 10 million per day, so ~3-4B a year.
Let's say I'm running a business. I have day-to-day transactions going through some higher layer network, but I expect some money "settled" in my account each month. That's 12 transactions a year. The US has around 30M businesses, so that's 360M settlement transactions a year. Already more than double what Bitcoin can do and we're not even talking about, say, having employees paid on the blockchain.
For the rest of us, the next layers sitting above the Bitcoin blockchain can either be a truly decentralized, trustless layer with on-chain settlement, like Lightning Network, which might incur too many on-chain transactions to be practical. Or it can be a centralized, trusted layer, like Mastercard -- in which case, what's the point of having Bitcoin underneath it?
It goes right back to gold. Sure, we can back currencies with gold, but it's too impractical to move around for individuals and businesses to transact in. So paper currencies developed. They were backed by gold for a while, then ceased to be, and not much fuss was made about it because it changed nothing for the average user.
"why should they use Bitcoin rather than a centralized scheme they all agree on?" because customers decide what they want to own and they dont seem to like the fed printing non-stop thing they keep doing.
LN will be for the rare nerds actually using the chain as payment and want cheap, instant, frequent transactions but on chain settlement periodically just as an institution would.