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Comment by enumjorge | Hacker News Reader

If Bitcoin had a history of stability your point would have more weight, but as it stands I don’t know how people can present it as a viable alternative with a straight face. Banks are having a crisis—-Bitcoin seems to have at least one every year.

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If Bitcoin were the default currency, the value would not fluctuate, it would just slowly rise. Responsible savers would be rewarded. Irresponsible risk takers would generally be punished.

You mean the people who bought in early would benefit.

Undeniably, in the beginning, yes. Eventually it would be distributed more evenly as those people spend or die. We already have billionaires and the difference is that, with the current system, their money will not become distributed. They fail and then the government prints more to rescue them or they just print it and give it to them directly to "prime the economy". i.e. The Cantillion effect.

The people should control the money and that's only possible with Bitcoin.

> Undeniably, in the beginning, yes. Eventually it would be distributed more evenly as those people spend or die. We already have billionaires and the difference is that, with the current system, their money will not become distributed.

Why would a bitcoin billionaire's money be distributed more than a traditional billionaire's? At least a traditional billionaire will invest his fortune in assets like stocks and thus help fund some innovative companies to protect his fortune from inflation. The bitcoin billionaire can just hold his fortune in bitcoin forever since it's deflationary.

Every time I see a bitcoin backer talk about finance, the things said fly in the face of Econ 101 and basic common sense. I guess I "just don't get it".

Econ 101 seems to have a failing end game. Bitcoin gets distributed because, since you can't make more, you don't get anything for free. You spend it and it goes somewhere else. Maybe you get it back if you add value, but you don't get it back just because you're part of a ruling class that gets free money printed by the government and handed to you because "you will add value to the world". That last assertion is demonstrably untrue in many cases. They fail, we bail them out. Again.

Edit: Modern economics seems to require more mental gymnastics than a Bitcoin standard. We invent things no one really understands until the rug gets pulled one day and the scam become clear. Then we move on to the next scam. Financial instruments seem to be designed to fool the common man into believing we need these complications while what's really happening is that someone is simply stealing money until something breaks and we bail them out.

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