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Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

In a time of economic calamity, if you think your grocery store will take 'Coolbits', or their employees will take 'WokeCoin' as payment, or suppliers will accept 'TrumpGoldBucks' I think you'd be mistaken.

If there were a serious problem with the USD, first, because of it's seigneurage position in the world, it would imply a 'giant crisis'. It would be bad.

People would switch to other currencies like Euros, Pounds, Canadian / Australian Dollars and Swiss Franks, RMB and Yen because they are fungible and transactable.

Gold and other commodities would increase in value, but only as stores of value, they're not good for transactions.

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Nobody said the grocery store would take crypto.

But you'd park your capital in places that are safe havens and convert out as late as possible to the (increasingly worthless) dollars. Arguably we're already at a place where keeping any non-emergency funds in USD is a terrible idea.

My point is exactly what you said: that you'd see a flight of capital to hard assets like gold and bitcoin to shield it from inflationary forces and their contagion. In that scenario, bitcoin is no more a "ponzi" than gold.

Crypto is a delusion. It's a very bad idea to move money into an 'asset' that has no value other than to the degree other people share that delusion.

Real-estate is valuable on some level, so are most other assets - even 'currencies', however poorly managed, are valuable because people need them to do stuff.

The worst place to go is crypto, it's the bottom of the 'store of value' equation in almost every way - the fact that the government would wipe them out immediately being just one of many risks.

Cypto, at least the way they exist today, have no rational place in anything other than for entertainment and intellectual speculation.

Your opinion is duly noted, my opinion is that your opinion has little bearing on what the price of BTC will be if the purchasing power of a dollar drops quickly. My prediction is that demand for it will surge and so the price will go up somewhat inversely. I'll note that you're not taking the counter position, just stating why that would be a "very bad idea" for people to demand it. I'm guessing you've been saying the same thing as the price has gone up to $50k. At some point you'll either be proven right in a massive collapse or will have to capitulate that the market is not irrational. What is your threshold? (Year/price threshold where you'd capitulate.) If you're on your death bed and BTC is worth $1M, will you change your mind, or just presume you didn't live long enough to see yourself proven right?

You talk exactly like an MLM salesperson.

Do you have a seminar I can register for?

...

But seriously, people will speculate on things and bubbles will happen in all assets, some are more resilient than others.

While the future is never easy to know, your predictions can be dismissed out of hand because we definitely have some 'hard parameters' we have to deal with.

BTC is definitely an outlet for illegal activity and tax evasion, and to the extent that it becomes material in that way, it will just be banned. And when it's banned in China, EU, USA, UK, Aussie, Canada, Japan, Korea etc. - well it probably won't be of much use to anyone.

No regime will allow their tax base to be challenged in that way. And neither will the population, so the banning will be a popular measure.

So by nature if it's own design, it can only be an annoying parlour game.

Why resort to personal attacks?

You can dismiss my predictions all you want, they're still predictions. Maybe instead of just dismissing them, state your own.

Because arguments such as "You will regret on your deathbed not going BTC when it could go to $1M" is not an argument, it's something worse than ad hominem - it's snake oil / infomercial marketing masquerading as reason. At least ad hominem is honest.

Consider the inanity of BTC trading at $1M, something so utterly volatile couldn't feasibly be used as a currency, for much the same reason we cannot use it now, it's deflationary: nobody wants to spend it, they want to hold it and believe in magic. That's the last thing you want in a currency, it means circulation dries up.

BTC has already killed itself as a currency for reasons obvious before it's inception.

Chiming in on boards with 'to the moon' / 'don't lose out' / 'you too could be a millionaire' rhetoric is not helping.

Hilarious - I never said anything about regret.

I said simply that either you’ll be proven right in a crash, have some point where you’d be willing to reverse your position, or just never change your mind. These three scenarios are obviously the only outcomes. So I was wondering if you could write down a point in terms of time + price where you’d change your mind. If not, and there is no other scenario where you would, then you’re holding an unfalsifiable position.

Personal attacks are a weak argument, friend.

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