Cryptocurrency really feels like a solution desperately in need of a problem.
I'm just not 100% sure that it is a real problem, but those who buy it either believe it to be, or at least, want to hedge for it.
"Decentralised" is a phantasm.
1. there are multiple competing implementations
2. it's ultimately up to the users/merchants/miners what software they run. A commit making into the bitcoin core repo doesn't mean it's going to be adopted by the network.
What if I told you that the root cause of inflation is not the price increases, those are a side-effect. The real cause is that the value (aka purchasing power) of your money is being diluted by means of central banks printing money and stealing value from the populace over time.
70% of the US dollars that were ever created were created since the invention of Bitcoin. It is only natural that the real value of those dollars has fallen.
Inflation is theft by central bankers to pay for politician’s desires without openly increasing taxes on the people.
Bitcoin fixes this because no politician, central bank or corporation can ever inflate the supply over 21 million, nomatter what they do.
Anyone can make their own crypto, and they do - so cryptocurrency as a whole is hyperinflationary.
Bitcoin maximalists say, but bitcoin is first and unique in many ways. Certainly - but not in ways that the trading or payment markets appear to care about. The "banking the unbanked" proposal is much closer to the payments market - nothing about it seems to depend on bitcoin's special characteristics.
I note that you're proposing a bitcoin version of Austrian economics there, with the word "bitcoin" substituted for "gold" - but Austrian economics proponents have long noted this cut'n'paste cryptocurrency problem with the bitcoin proposition.
Seems to me we're actually heading for the competing private currencies advocated by Hayek, who thought the result would be long-term price stability without the need for top-down control.
Denationalisation of Money was arguably disproven by the ICO boom - it turned out that actual users just treated the shitcoins as proxies for BTC and ETH, and BTC and ETH as proxies for dollars.
But fine, I'll admit I have little to go on. Are you willing to admit the same? Because you're even further from the actual data so far.
as in, demand for using crypto as a transactional currency, rather than as a speculative asset right?
The demand that is unstable is because it is driven primarily by speculation. There's very few commodities being exchanged via crypto.
So to reach stable demand, crypto must be a currency that is used for non-speculative transactions (such as buying groceries, or buying oil from countries). I don't see that happening any time soon tbh, except for may be countries that are trying to escape USA sanctions.
...So apparently you will not admit that there's little evidence to support your hyperinflation theory.
So they claim. Could it also be that debasing the currency is far easier than taxation as a form of wealth appropriation since the effect is subtle and indirect?
Bitcoin claims it's a "currency" but almost everyone uses it like a store of value (HODL) because its value keeps increasing.
This is weird. Inflation can happen without any central bank activity. Regular banks can lend out money. People can spend their money faster. All of that creates inflation without benefiting the government at all.
Inflation like what we had under the gold standard is bad, it leads to currency hoarding. Deflation is bad, as it leads to all sorts of bad effects. And minimal inflation can also be bad, as it leads to higher asset prices if the velocity is dropping.
I've been working through a thought experiment where we have a cryptocurrency that ensures that velocity stays constant. It does so by enforcing a tax on transactions, where you lock in a transaction to occur at a certain time in the future, but you can pay for it to occur sooner. The more we are taxing, the more we can ensure that the economy is doing well, the more the money supply is allowed to expand.
I'm also thinking that PoW is an extremely bad model, and I would prefer to work with their proof-of-weather, where weather is determined by a combination of many different weather trackers that we can prove occurred but are unable to predict much ahead of time.
It seems to be a good model, but there's still a lot to think about.
Or a pyramid scheme in need of an excuse / justification.