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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

That’s just another reason (along with all the others) it should never be imposed as a currency, particularly in a country with lots of people living near the poverty line. Imagine leaving home not sure if you can afford the bus ride to work or food to eat because of volatility.

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I agree that people shouldn't be forced to use any currency, and should be able to choose freely. The reality is, most countries force you to use the currency they issue. The worse reality is, all of them are inflationary by design.

Cryptocurrencies give you a deflationary option. Don't like it? Don't use it.

I think cryptocurrencies are the future, and we will see more and more stores accepting them, and the conversions will happen automatically.

As a retailer why would you accept payment in a currency with this sort of daily volatility of 10%, which doesn’t even have instant confirmation (!!??), has slow transactions, no rollback, no fraud detection or insurance and has high fees?

As a customer why would you make payment in a currency with high fees, poor ux, slow transactions and just enough anonymity to make it perfect for scammers?

As a payment processor why would you touch this currency with a barge-pole given the above problems?

Cryptocurrency isn’t the future of currency or payments, and bitcoin in particular is solving the wrong problems, badly.

Not that I don't agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think despite being digital crypto is a lot more like cash than card payments. But cash also has 'no rollback, no fraud detection or insurance'. At least you are don't have the risk of counterfeit notes.

Sure, and that's one of the reasons cash is going to disappear in the coming decades and yet another flaw in the design of bitcoin (which was modelled on physical currency or some sort of electronic gold just as that loses favour). It's not competing with cash, it's competing with free instant transfers between bank accounts and free payments (for the customer), which many people enjoy right now.

Physical currency was always an instrument of states, and now they have better ones, which retailers, consumers, and states prefer (digital currencies, not cryptocurrencies). In many countries cash usage is down to 20%, it's expensive to produce and manage and not required any more.

A small amount of inflation (single digits per year), is a feature, not a bug. It prevents the boom-bust of people hoarding currency, and forces the currency itself to be used efficiently.

If the gov't can maintain a bond rate below that of the inflation rate, it also acts as a small tax to help fund the gov't - which also isn't a bad thing.

Not that any of this matters at the moment, because the real limitation of cryptocurrencies is the tiny transaction throughput.

But if your rent is X BTC/mo how does the BTC relation to USD change your rent or make you go hungry? A 0.0001BTC sandwitch will be 0.0001BTC tomorrow as well. What we have here is people using bitcoin as proxy for other currencies.

I find it very funny that BTC advocates bring this up all the time, yet inflation of USD is considered to be an enormous threat. Surely both of these things cannot be true.

I am not advocate for Bitcoin, but I assume prices in BTC would raise with inflation like any other currency

BTC is designed to be highly limited in supply and thus all prices denominated in BTC should drop over time by design of the currency. Everything else in society, if it was all on BTC, would do similarly. Basically your salary this year should be smaller than it was last year but your buying power should be similar.

This encourages people to hold BTC because its relative value increases over time. Thus BTC by being deflationary encourages holding and not spending. It will lead to a less dynamic economy than if we had an inflationary currency which encouraged spending/investment.

The thing is that to be actual currency BTC can not be limited forever. Think about it for a moment. Every year BTC gets stolen and will continue to be stolen and it will only increase if it was "the world currency" thus limiting the supply ever more. Then people hoarding it will die and passwords to their wallets will be regularly forgotten again limiting the supply sooner or later we will be at a point where even 1 satoshi is so valuable you can not use it for daily purchases.

This scheme also effectively fucks over the future generations since older generations had the opportunity to hoard wealth while they were earning couple BTCs each month, but then future generations will be only earning couple hundred satoshis. If you think property prices are now out of hand just think what happens when about half the population has effectively millions of dollars in inheritance. If your parents fucked up and didn't leave you any of the family fortune you are just screwed with no way to recover. Or if they died in an accident and their bitcoin wallets were now locked forever.

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