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exitb

So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?

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Speculators buying from speculators and hoping today isn't the day the hot potato explodes.

How long has this been the case for gold roughly? Since the 1970s?

Gold is used to make things.

You can argue what its value should be as a material alone, but it’s not entirely speculation.

can you make useful things with abstract art? They're not even good as toilet paper and yet people still buy and trade them.

Crypto can be used as a store of wealth when crossing borders preventing search and seizure of your wealth against overzealous governments. See Russia in the early 90s which would regularly search and confiscate cash from people leaving. That alone makes it very valuable.

What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet?

Any scenario where you're sufficiently careful with your private keys.

What happens when they bust out the $5 wrench?

They would need 300 million wrenches, one for each citizen. That leaves society in a much better position than letting them do it at scale with an sql query.

Are wrenches single-use, or are you allocating individual attackers per-citizen? In the case of a successful wrench attacker, how are the stolen funds recovered?

This is the classic time-money tradeoff. Theoretically you only need one wrench and one attacker—but even if she attacks 100 people a day it would take thousands of years to reach everyone. And word of the attacks would spread, so later victims would take steps to safeguard their money and the attacks would become ineffective.

To be maximally effective you'd need to mobilize enough attackers and enough windowless white vans to reach the entire populace within probably a day, so let's say 3 million attackers and 3 million white vans. That's when things start getting more expensive than the sql query.

that is assuming every citizen has a crypto wallet, something is not even close to be true..

i would guess that percentage of people with wallets would be very small and a relative small team could with a relative small number of white vans and wrenches could get every single one in relative short time..

and for countries that heavily monitor internet usage, like china, i bet they could have a list with pretty good assumptions on who has crypto that they can target for further investigation before sending the wrenched goons..

You give them one of your three seed phrases.

When they don't know the crypto wallet exists?

There is no scenario where the government doesn't know it exist and the Bitcoin is useful in any way to your life. If you ever use it for any thing there's a bright line directly to you. The silk road guy was taken down for screwing up one time years before he even started the website. Maybe a criminal organization that forces their grand children into it can potentially hide a wallet.

The silk road guy pretty much had a government department trying to shut him down. They don't have the resources to do that for the average individual.

yeah, but that was more then 10 years ago..

i bet the analysis for that is all automated by now and built into their systems, making it much easier to go after the average individual.

Government cannot take money from a crypto wallet because of cryptography. They could only do it if they compelled you to hand over your secret keys against your will. They also may not even know you have a crypto wallet since it is not registered in your name and is very easy to hide.

On the other hand, government can sieze funds from your bank account by seeking a court order or whatever legal instrument is needed in your jurisdiction.

Exactly, and that's why in EU a transaction to a self-custody wallet from an exchange you need to declare that wallet as your own. Then when the government want to seize your BTC they can track from that wallet onwards all transactions.

The problem with crypto as a hedge against government overreach is with fiat exchanges. I hope more businesses start accepting crypto and you won't need to go trough an exchange that often.

You can use cash to buy BTC in bitcoinmat. If you want anonymity while buying it on public place, use mask.

no, while you are typing, there are senior finance legislators that are reviewing multi-hundred page reports where "the only legal way to trade is with a licensed broker" i.e. you Joe Citizen cannot hold your own keys. If you have not heard of this, welcome to old news in the USA and elsewhere. This is not fringe or conspiracy at all.. this is lawyers in the backroom for the last year(s).

What they can do is (in England & Wales, for example) is to impose a confiscation order on you so when you do end up liquidating your easily traceable crypto current, they will simply come after those assets.

> What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet?

In cryptocurrency's defense (I am not a Bitcoiner), it not as easy for them to do that, because they can't just order a bank to transfer it/freeze it....assuming the owner is going through a lot of elaborate, inconvenient, and easy to footgun security measures. If you have a Coinbase wallet you're in exactly the same situation as if you had cash in the bank.

HOWEVER, the cost people pay to get that is stupidly high. For every suave international drug dealer who's kept their money out of the hands of the evil government with Bitcoin, you probably have 1,000 dudes or more, who lost the keys to their wallet somehow or got their Bitcoin stolen in a hack.

So you probably shouldn't be worrying to much about duh gubbament.

And then, the obligatory xkcd about crypto: https://xkcd.com/538/ / https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/forget-hacking-this....

These threads always leave me baffled. Some people say that only drug dealers use bitcoin. Others say the ratio of normal dudes to drug dealers is 1,000:1 or more. I guess it depends what sounds convenient at the time.

If you worry about the government seizing your money like that, you really should be someone whose money the government wants to seize [1]. Those people aren't regular dude software engineers.

[1] Also, keeping your money in a bank account almost certainly product you from those controversial civil forfeiture situations.

I think the argument is that the drug dealers are actually using bitcoin for its utility, whereas the 1000 normal dudes are just buying it as an investment, not to use.

if you replace "investment" with "speculation" I agree

By head count maybe, but by value you gotta include the ransomware gangs, gambling rings, weapons dealers, human traffickers, money launderers, etc. too. And then it's probably not 1000:1 anymore.

It's true that bank accounts are relatively secure from seizure when crossing borders, but literally everybody I know here in Argentina who's my age or older lost three quarters of the savings in their bank accounts 23 years ago, because the government took it by converting dollars to pesos at the 1:1 pegged exchange rate and then dropping the peg. In a cryptocurrency wallet (a real one, not an exchange like Mt.Gox, Coinbase, or Binance) they wouldn't have lost anything.

Another case is when a foreign government puts you on a sanctions list and freezes your assets in the banks under their jurisdiction. This has happened to a lot of Russians and Russian companies in the last few years. (It also happened to the foreign reserves of the Russian central bank, but Bitcoin is not liquid enough to be a significant international reserve asset.)

Another case is when the government suspects you of some kind of wrongdoing but can't physically find you, or can find you but for whatever reason isn't willing to torture you. For example, two and a half years ago, some truckers in Canada staged a protest for misguided reasons, and the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau froze not only the truckers' bank accounts, and the organizers' bank accounts, but even bank accounts suspected to belong to people who were suspected of donating to the protest: https://www.cato.org/blog/emergencies-act-after-two-years https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-... https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/bureaucrats-who-froze...

> In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.

Earlier this year, a court found that the government's actions at the time were illegal. https://freespeechunion.org/trudeau-government-not-justified... explains:

> In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

And of course it's well known that, when Wikileaks was targeted by the US government for their journalism, Visa and Mastercard cut off their donations despite apparently having no legal requirement to do so, while Bitcoin donations were able to continue. This was crucial in enabling Wikileaks to support Snowden's escape from the US when he revealed the extent of the US's illegal spying on its own citizens.

You made a subtle, but important, pivot from the topic of “Bitcoin” to the broader topic of “crypto”.

Bitcoin specifically, with its multi-trillion dollar market cap, is built up that high purely on speculation. It is a very fragile store of wealth, especially the higher its market cap becomes.

and how much of gold price is in your opinion value of material itself? Strip out that material price and you have speculation price. Price of Bitcoin is mostly that speculation price + instead of material some mathematical properties.

> Price of Bitcoin is mostly that speculation price + instead of material some mathematical properties.

Mathematical properties don't provide economic value.

The demand for bitcoin is almost all speculation, and a tiny bit is for purposes of making clandestine payments, paying ransoms, and such.

So, access to a permissionless SWIFT-like system from anywhere around the world has no economic value in your opinion? Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.

I said _mathematical properties_ have no economic value.

Most paper money intrinsically has no value at all, even the paper it is printed on can't be used as toilet paper due to its lack of softness. It is only a medium of labor exchange. For me, Bitcoin is exactly the same, but in a very new form, backed by math instead of a government.

You're quite right that neither fiat money nor bitcoin have intrinsic value, though they both have exchange value (i.e. market value). This means there must be a demand that prevents the market value from falling to zero. In the case of fiat currency, the public demands fiat currency for transaction purposes and to pay taxes. In the case of bitcoin, the demand for transaction purposes is anecdotal, almost nonexistent. So the demand for bitcoin is almost entirely speculative. (There's no other possibility as far as I know, given no intrinsic value.) In other words, people demand bitcoin because they expect that the price of bitcoin will go up. Such a demand can be sustained as long as people continue to have the same expectations. When (or if) these expectations change, the demand can evaporate quite quickly, and the price will collapse dramatically as a result. So bitcoin is not backed by math. It's backed by a speculative demand.

Yes, but even speculative demand consists of many levels of speculation. For example, I speculate (based on history) that the world will always consist of corrupt governments printing money like crazy, so "digital gold" will be much better for their citizens than what they have to offer. How reasonable is my speculation? Other people speculate that Bitcoin will double in value, while others speculate it will increase tenfold. I believe their speculation has less merit than mine (at least, that's how I see it). I also speculate that a programmable, permissionless money system, similar to SWIFT, is a very interesting idea that opens up many research avenues and there is some non zero value in it. Another example: How many gatekeepers do you think someone in a poor country has to pass through to transfer dollars internationally using their bank account? You really think there is no value in avoiding all those proxies that charge you high fees? So yes, there is a pyramid of speculations, but some of those speculations are much more reasonable than others.

Speculation is always based on future price expectations. Whether such expectations are justified is a matter of debate of course. Personally I don't find any of the rationales convincing, quite the opposite. But, look, we already have examples of irrational behaviour such as in the case of lotteries. In principle, no rational person should buy a lottery ticket, since the expected value of a lottery ticket is negative. Yet many people buy lottery tickets. The world is full of gullible people who are willing to believe that they can get rich for free.

> Go and ask people in African countries what it means to them.

Probably incredibly little. I have not in the slightest looked into it, but based on bitcoins properties, I'd guess that it doesn't suit 99.9% of Africa. They use cash and frequently use mobile phones for transferring cash etc.

BTC is used for trade. You know, drugs etc. And money laundering. Sanctions busting. Tax avoidance. It has a lot of utility...

BTC is pretty bad for illegal activity since the transactions are public.

You'd be much better off using the US Dollar. Even if it's through a bank like HSBC.

It is used for those things I agree.

Those things alone do not hold up a $1.5T market cap. I would say they don’t hold up a $1.5B cap either.

Let's revisit this again when we can melt bitcoins and sell them.

Gold is a finite resource that has to be extracted and processed, ecoins are made out of thin air (mining them is a superficial analogy) and speculation.

no, but I am using my index fund on s&p 500 to buy goods and services

Dividends provide a real income stream people live off of, bitcoins need buyers.

It’s the difference between owning a farm and a gold bar.

There are plenty of companies whose stock is sought after but that never paid dividends (I think Tesla and Amazon are some example, or used to be at least)

They return cash to shareholders in the form of buybacks.

Never have isn’t never will, dividends and buybacks are a sign the company doesn’t have use for the money. Meta and Google both eventually started paying dividends because they’re essentially tapped out of internal investment ideas.

Telsa and Amazon on the other hand believe they have something meaningful to do with the money. But eventually successful companies just don’t have anything useful to do with their giant piles of cash.

It’s not really about dividends. If you buy a share of Amazon stock, you’re getting a cut of the value that a million+ people are producing every day by writing code or moving stuff around. The value most workers create for their employers’ shareholders is much bigger than their rent check, and capturing that value is even easier than being a landlord. Dividends are just moving money from one pocket to the other, the value created by people’s work is where the returns come from. Financial returns without value creation are an anomaly, though not necessarily a rare or short-lived one.

Dividends don't matter. What matters is profits (regardless of whether they're distributed to shareholders or not).

People in retirement certainly are

The difference is that owning bitcoin doesn't give you partial control over the world's largest companies.

Another difference is that you aren't arbitrarily excluded from being able to buy Bitcoin based on where you're born.

Bitcoin itself won't exclude you. But depending on where you are, buying Bitcoin might be illegal.

Oh, definitely. Those are, generally speaking, the places where it's most important that you can do so: the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Afghanistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_.... But it's legal in almost all of the world, and fairly easy, while opening an account with a NASDAQ-listed broker is near impossible for most people.

Because you think you have any power over microsoft, with one action ? Unless you have a majority of the company, you are worthless.

Even in the literal sense of "owning" you don't need a majority, but yes - one share does have fractional power. I voted my 1000/<a very big number> just recently.

If a person or company wants to acquire controlling shares, they absolutely will need to buy up countless millions of shares to make that happen.

I'm pretty sure you're not. Or at least, my grocery stores and the IRS/tax people take dollars, not SP500 or QQQ. If yours does I'd live to hear how that works (and where you are).

If you're referring to investing $1,000, having it be worth $1,500, and then selling off $300 to pay for groceries, which a Coinbase/whatever account would let you do with Bitcoin while it appreciates.

the entire ETF industry is based on either spending the distributions or reinvesting them, depending on which side of the curve your age lands on, so it's pretty much spending the index.

If there is someone who wants to start a dog walking service, but they don't have the capital to do so, I can lend them the money with a promise from them to pay me a share of any revenue. My money goes to create a service that real people get benefit from (their dogs are walked) and they pay for that service with a medium of exchange that represents their own labour (fiat money).

I get something in return for my capital, and the world gets a valuable service.

Bitcoin does not offer that. The only return it offers is the hope that tomorrow some other people will pay me more to take my bitcoin, in the hope that some other people will pay them more the day after to take the bitcoin, with the hope that .... you get it.

It's not hope. It's knowledge.

In a few decades or even maybe a century, your loan to the dog walker will be denominated in bitcoin.

How long do you think it will take you to update your priors on this?

The hot potato has gone 5000+ days without exploding and seems fairly non explosive.

More than 70% drop in less than a year is not an explosion ?

The hot potato can remain non-explosive longer than you can remain armored.

Do people use gold all the time to buy goods and services? That doesn't diminish the value of golds, or its validity as a store of value.

Sadly no, despite how long they've been around, it's pretty rare for people to use gold or index funds to buy goods and services. They're worthless.

this isn't why people buy Bitcoin. they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets. It's the equivalent of gold, that is people turn to it when they think shit may hit the fan but it doesn't have the downsides of physically holding gold.

Except that Bitcoin isn't long term sustainable due to its security budget crisis that will rear its head in ~8-10 years.

> don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar

Whenever the US stock market slumps, doesn't Bitcoins price usually slump too in almost perfect lockstep?

Yes, bitcoin effectively trades like the 3x leveraged nasdaq indices (TQQQ).

Eh the USA hasn't defaulted on its debt. Yet. Once it does BTC will stop shadowing the USD.

The companies in the Nasdaq don't care much about the US defaulting: The cash (and cash equivalents in treasuries, etc.) don't make up a large part of their market valuation. If US defaults USD will tank and equity prices of public companies will soar (just like every other price including oil, gold, groceries, and probably also btc).

If that happens those companies will likely see an asset sell off as owners seek cash to buy basic commodities which will perpetuate a great depression. Sufficiently sized multinationals will relist themselves on different exchanges with other more stable currencies but the general panic will cause a downward spiral for most securities.

No, people buy Bitcoin because line go up.

> they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets

no; they buy it b/c they're attracted by the fantasy of a 100x return like some people got in the past. there are no solid correlation patterns with the USD or other currencies/ stocks, unlike, say, gold

BTC ignores inflation. Thats enough for saving for retirement.

According to Gresham's Law, people will always spend the worst money first.

This is such a hilarious objection. Do people use gold or equities or real estate to buy coffee? Well then I guess they must all be some kind of bubble

When buying "gray market" prescription medications from India, Bitcoin is the main way to pay. US credit cards refuse such transactions.

In the UK, using bitcoin is a taxable transaction, and acquiring bitcoin requires you to do so through regulated exchanges with full know your customer checks. So the government know you have bitcoin, they know your wallet address and they can see that you made a transaction, that you should be declaring and paying tax on.

I don't want a tax evasion charge hanging over my head and I can't be bothered declaring crypto transactions on my tax return, particularly when I'm using to buy medication that I may not be legally allowed to buy.

I know you are being snarky, but i think its worth pointing out that ever increasing prices is bad for a medium of exchange not good. The higher prices decreases the liklihood of it being used like a currency.

Yes, absolutely. But that’s exactly the problem. What is crypto - currency, investment, technology, religion? Apparently for all the crypto people I know, it’s somehow all of the above.

Its a thing you buy that will go up in value as Trump, Elon, JD Vance, and RFK Jr. enter power.

Its about that simple now. Whether or not that's good for the country (IE: does anything useful) is irrelevant now.

by that logic people would not buy TVs or memory cards

Errr, by their logic people wouldn't use TVs or memory cards as "cash". Which they don't.

TVs and memory cards keep getting cheaper, not more expensive.

yes, that is what deflation is

The deflation of a currency is when the currency gets more expensive, not cheaper. It's true that other goods get cheaper when measured in that currency. But what we're discussing here is whether, and how, the continued deflation of Bitcoin discourages its use as a medium of exchange, not whether some hypothetical deflation of the dollar would discourage the use of other goods such as memory cards and Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

>The deflation of a currency is when the currency gets more expensive, not cheaper.

This is a perversion of the economic definition of inflation and deflation.

Inflation is the rate of change of prices.

These are two different ways of looking at the same thing, but the crucial issue here is the direction of inflation: inflation is when prices, measured in the currency in question, go up, not down. That is to say, the value of the currency, measured in terms of any given good, goes down, not up. jsbg was getting this backwards, and your comment isn't helpful in clarifying their confused thinking.

Historically speaking, the "printing too much paper money" definition of "inflation", which is more or less what you're saying is "a perversion of the economic definition of inflation", preceded the "general increase in prices" definition you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Classical_economics

Deflation is a fall in the general price level. A fall in the price of some goods or of a particular good is not deflation.

My logic is not that people won't but memory cards, but that they won't replace usd as a medium of exchange.

As far as i am aware nobody uses memory cards as a medium of exchange so looks like my logic holds.

It seems implausible that its price will increase forever. If your concern is that a bitcoin is an inconveniently large unit of value, like a kilogram of gold, you can subdivide it into individual satoshis even on the public blockchain, and at the current price of roughly US$100k per bitcoin, a satoshi is roughly a tenth of a penny, which seems adequately subdivisible to me. If Bitcoin improbably ended up at US$10M per bitcoin, it would still be a dime, which is probably still okay.

It's not the parent comment's concern (at all).

It's pretty unclear what that comment was talking about, and your comment doesn't help.

Not involved in the posts above but I'll explain.

I own bitcoin. If it only ever increases in value, I'd have to be a complete idiot to spend it, when I have depreciating fiat to spend.

When Bitcoin was conceived economists said it would have built-in deflation and it seems they were right

No economist said that. Deflation refers to the behaviour of the price level. As such it isn't a property that assets can have.

The original intent of bitcoin was to be a currency so that's how it was evaluated. The point of this thread is that despite it's increasing popularity it has never functioned as a currency. Calling it an asset is dubious since it carries no equity nor pays a dividend nor is it tied to the performance of any institution. That's why I say commodity since it trades most akin to gold although gold (like most commodities) can actually be physically used for things.

The first step in the growth of any medium of exchange is to prove itself as a stable store of value. Otherwise it can't be used as a unit of account. And the first step in proving itself a stable store of value, is to begin storing value which is where bitcoin is at right now.

How does an asset prove itself to be a capable store of value? I say the first condition is that it must have a stable (non-speculative) demand, which bitcoin notoriously lacks, and can never have because it doesn't do anything. It doesn't exist physically, therefore it can't be consumed or used as raw material. And as a financial asset it's nobody's liability, so like an IOU that promises to pay nothing. In conclusion, bitcoin's market value is driven 100% by a speculative demand and that's not a basis for a reliable store of value.

There's two prerequisites:

a) it has to have the fundamental properties of a good store of value

b) it requires the time it takes for most people in the world to realise this (or at least simply accept that it is a good store of value, based on the price history)

Bitcoin has far better fundamental store-of-value properties than any other asset the world has ever seen. Now we bitcoiners are just waiting for the rest of you to catch up. As you do you will store your wealth in it too, increasing the price. While it's growing like this, it experiences volatility as all growing assets do - it's called "price discovery". The waves get shallower and shallower the bigger it grows. It has the potential to store the majority of the value in the world.

To say it has no use is a big mistake to make. Possibly the biggest in your life depending on how long it takes for you to realise. It took me 10 years and cost me millions.

Incorrect - the term inflation is rooted in the inflation of a money supply, which leads to devaluation of the monetary unit and therefore a rise in prices.

Bitcoin is deflationary as at some point in the future the total supply will decrease each year (through people dying with their money etc.)

I know i'm not your typically bitcoiner, I started investing in it at $4. but I pay all my part-time employees in it.

why not use something that's better to transact (less or no fees and faster) ?

actually i've been using ETH lately because its cheaper in fees, but I acquired a lot of BTC, so its kind of wash to transfer to ETH

It's like asking whether one would use ACH to buy coffee. Yes, nobody uses Bitcoin for transactions per se, but if it were to be used as a currency then one would transact Bitcoin over more efficient payment ledgers rather than the Bitcoin ledger. This analogy is similar to how Transferwise enables cross-border payments without actually sending the equivalent volume of money across borders. I know this doesn't address your main question, but either way it is worth thinking over when you think of "transacting with Bitcoin".

Never.

Yet, btc price keeps rising.

Ergo, your model for understanding economics is worthless.

The economy can handle the existence of both currency and securities.

The point is that it isn't a currency. Nor is it debt or equity. More like an incorporeal commodity.

Stablecoins are much better for payments, no one would use BTC for goods and services with the transaction fee and the confirmation time being so bad.

https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/research-insights/res...

TL;DR from the article : Stablecoins settled $10.8T worth of transactions in 2023 of which $2.3T were related to organic activities including payments and cross-border remittances, among others

Today’s payment giants suffer from major disadvantages including high transaction costs, slower settlement times and limited transparency albeit there are tradeoffs to stablecoins too

But at that point you are giving up on the alleged benefits of crypto (decentralization) and you might as well just pay cash.

Not quite. Stablecoins are still more decentralized than classic fiat and AFAIU it's easier to trade stablecoins to/from other coins/tokens.

Practical example, credit/debt card processors almost universally have banned/are banning many adult content sites, but those sites are starting to accept stablecoins.

While stablecoins can be tracked, transactions cannot be universally controlled, especially not by private entities (depends on the exact stablecoin of course).

> Stablecoins are much better for payments

Stablecoins on what 'network/coin/layer/chain'?

Stablecoins on top of ETH? On top of SOL? On top of ETH BASE? On top of ETH Arbitrum/Optimism? Binance Smart Chain? Tron? Polygon?

Doesn’t even matter, because stablecoins are basically acknowledging that all of the crypto tech is a farce and all you need is a digital currency tied to IRL currencies.

> that all of the crypto tech is a farce

Kind of. I would say blockchain hasn't really worked out. Walmart/shipping industries isn't forcing their suppliers to be on some public blockchain, that's for sure.

The on ramp and off ramp stories for crypto to/from fiat are pretty gross. I can send money with Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, etc. domestically

As soon as you talk about (probably breaking some laws) international transfers, it's an interesting tech that's getting adopted.

The blockchain aspects of it kind of don't matter. People just want to send USD-backed-something over country border walls, right?

To purchase goods and services with Bitcoin such as Lightning where fees are negligible. It is indeed being used worldwide. E.g., you can purchase a wide array of things with Lightning at Bitrefill.com

oops, not sure what happened, meant to say "To purchase goods and services with Bitcoin, you would use a layer 2 protocol such as Lightning..."

As someone who was paid in stablecoins, I'm not a huge fan of them, because the final exchange rate still sucks - there's a 10% drop in value from USDC to MYR. While I definitely don't recommend BTC, ADA and LINK actually convert better here.

I don't know about you, but I routinely pay for groceries with crypto.

I just ask the checker for the store's wallet address and preferred currency. Sometimes we have to negotiate about which currency I use that they also use, but this is a detail that only takes 5-10min. Once we agree on a proper currency, I pull out my 2FA dongle to auth my phone wallet app, scan their QR code, check the address twice and click send. Occasionally I will have to add or subtract a bit from the posted price, to account for market moves since I put the items in my basket.

Then I just have to wait about 20min or so for enough nodes to confirm the transaction. Then I can go with my ice cream and broccoli.

It's just that easy!

Can you provide the name and location of this grocery store? Or any grocery store that accepts btc?

I've never encountered ONE single grocery store, or store for that matter, that accepts bitcoin as payment.

Think that was sarcasm.

The fact that you interchange the words "bitcoin" and "crypto" says all I need to know.

Could you please elaborate on this supposition? I assume from the context that you suspect the price does not reflect an intrinsic value of the coin. I infer that from reading your sentence as sarcasm; your implication is, it's not used to buy goods and services, therefor this is a bubble. (?)

No, the opposite. To not spend - to save in.

gramps, btc has taken over as storage of value akin to digital gold at this point many years ago. No more convenient/secure way to move money.

It's digital gold. For whatever that is worth.

Gold transactions are much cheaper.

>Gold transactions are much cheaper.

How so? Have you ever tried to buy anything with gold? Or store it?

'Digital gold' is a meaningless sentence. What is digital gold? How does it differ from, say, digital iron?

People buy gold coins and hide them under the mattress. For when the zombie apocalypse happens.

Bitcoiners think BTC can be used for the same purpose.

Bitcoiners use it on daily basis for all kind transactions. There are some, that completely abandoned fiat and use only crypto.

Not really - it functions economically in a similar manner to gold. Both have a primary use - jewellery or digital payments - and a secondary function as a store of value. Iron isn't much use for financial reserves unlike bullion.

So like a house which also can function as a store of value. You're saying bitcoin is 'digital housing'?

Yes. All the time, just not for the things you and I buy such as groceries and transportation.

Instead Bitcoin is used to buy illegal products and services such as drugs, weapons, politicians and hit men

ah the old debunked story "but crypto is used only for crime"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

USD and EUR is also used to buy illegal products.

Well, yes, fiat is extraordinarily useful, and used, including for crime. However, there are many rules and mechanisms in place to stop fiat being used for crime (KYC, AML, CTF, ...). So, it is better suited to legitimate transactions, and worse for illegitimate ones. Lastly, fiat is indispensable in running a modern economy.

In contrast, crypto is designed (qua permissionlessness) to evade regulation. Since it's fairly crappy technology, it's also slow and inefficient and cumbersome. So, it is better suited to illegitimate transactions than to legitimate ones. Lastly, crypto is entirely dispensable.

> However, there are many rules and mechanisms in place to stop fiat being used for crime

Yes, but even with those mechanisms in place, crime was doing ok without crypto.

> Lastly, fiat is indispensable in running a modern economy.

Not sure about this.

I did actually manage to use some via the lightning network to buy a regular service the other day - cell phone credit on Silent Link.

But yeah the usual way to buy goods and services is to convert to fiat first.

No, but people are feeling sketchy about keeping their wealth in USD

> USD sketchy

> BTC less sketchy

I get what you are saying but it is still a wild sentence. I get monetary policy, debasement, inflation... but there is no rule/law that says "BTC MUST be a safe-haven alternative to inflation"

The relative sketchiness between those two just had a significant change.

Prices are set on the margins. Not at the absolute values.

Nobody is alluding that it _must_ be a safe-haven w.r.t. inflation; just that it's less sketchy than USD. However, I personally wouldn't put my money there, because there exist cryptocurrencies with much stronger fundamentals. XMR is one of them: the cartels, major organized groups, money laundering industries are all doing their books in it. People often claim that Bitcoin is weak fundamentally, nobody uses it for goods and services, etc etc, well they should buy XMR—it's really strong, and indeed, stable like that.

> just that it's less sketchy than USD.

I think the asset with $20t (M2) that has been around for hundreds of years and has a military behind it is less sketchy that the internet math coin.

While tempting to link the two, you really can't. Post-hoc rationalization fallacy. I've come to appreciate that all of Yahoo finance/stock news is true bullshit. Markov process, random fund manager deciding to move money, these are all potential explanations rather than an actual identifiable and causative zeitgeist. In other words, a lot if it is really just quite random (potentially with a long term trend. But let's say again, post-hoc rationalization fallacy)

hope as a service

Bitcoin can't be used for anything. Bitcoin is the idea, Ethereum is the execution.

You can find many non-crypto native organizations building on Ethereum:

https://ethereumadoption.com/

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