Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem.
Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
Bitcoin exists because electronic banking requires trust in centralized financial institutions.
When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.
Dude... the stock market is not the same thing as the banking system.
How your investment porfolio reacts to a change in monetary policy has nothing whatsoever to do with the utility of your checking account.
Trust in centralized financial institutions is not a problem. In fact it's is the opposite of a problem, it's an enormous benefit. Centralized financial institutions with government backing ensure the availability and safety of deposited funds.
Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933. In the last 10 years alone, over a billion dollars in bitcoin has been stolen out of people's wallets by hacked exchanges and smart contract exploits, money that can never be returned because blockchain is irreversible by design. Does that really sound trustworthy to you?
> Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933.
Plenty of people have had their bank accounts drained when they fell victim to "identification theft." That is quite a crafty euphemism -- banks fail to create secure systems, attackers steal funds from victims' bank accounts, and instead of owning up to their failure, banks blame the victims of the thefts by saying the victims' "identities" were "stolen."
I'll give the banks some credit, however: they'll prop up a seemingly empathetic customer service representative who will repeatedly say how "sorry" they are on behalf of their employer. If the victim is persistent enough, the customer service rep will eventually promise to initiate a lengthy investigation, after which the bank will perhaps reinstate the funds that were stolen from their system. Do they fix their broken, insecure system? Of course not. But at least the victim isn't clogging the customer service lines any more.
Identity theft is reversible. It has happened to me, somebody got a hold of my checking account details and drained the account of about $10,000. I called the bank, they reversed the transaction and gave me all my funds back right away, and it was over, just like that, no questions asked.
What happens if your bitcoin details get stolen, hm? What happens when somebody drains your bitcoin wallet? Who can you complain to to get your cryptographically secure irrevocably transferred money back?
That's simply the risk a person takes by having a bitcoin wallet. Seems (at least right now) there are plenty of people who want the benefit of a permissionless value transfer system and are willing to shoulder that risk. Hopefully they secure their magical numbers / private keys better than the banks do, because yes, obviously, there is no Central Bitcoin Governor acting as the Reinstater of Last Resort.
Some people are fine with that risk. Others are not. It's totally cool. More than one value transfer system can coexist in the world.
What do you mean "better than the banks do"? For one, banks don't have single-point-of-failure account access like blockchain does, and for another, the risks of banks are much lower because credit card and ACH transactions are easily reversible.
These are all reasons that banks are more trustworthy and more secure than blockchain, which sees tens of millions of dollars of irreversible theft annually.
You're right in that the stock market and the banking system are not the same thing, but I'd argue that they're intrinsically linked.
I move USD from my checking account into my investment accounts in order to buy equities, and I do that more when the Federal Reserve is pumping more liquidity into the market via low interest rates. There are many folks out there using e.g. TSLA as an inflation hedge (which is why it has a P/E > 1000) because they know that USDs will decline in value as liquidity keeps getting pumped.
If we're all using a decentralized currency like Bitcoin with a fixed inflation rate, you're going to see a lot more sanity and price stability in the equities markets.
> When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.
Then you see that Bitcoin moves more when Elon tweets...
I support the idea of Bitcoin and blockchain despite flaws in both but you beat me to pointing this obviously bad argument against stock markets in defense of Bitcoin. BTC constantly has insane movements over absurd things like Musk tweets and etc.. It's much worse than the stock market at being volatile.
...try bringing your cat to the vet on a bicycle in a thunderstorm, or walking fifteen minutes with him in a moderate rain to your bus stop. Try going on a date with someone with no car, or working second or third shift and have to go home in the midnight hours on a train with sketchy as hell people. Try bicycling to work with a decent cold, or having to work a 12 hour shift doing manual labor and then need to bicycle back 30 minutes.
Really, there are plenty of use cases for cars. Right now where I live its incredibly cold with biting winds, and bicycling or even walking 20 minutes to a stop and waiting in the cold would be murder.
Want a deflationary monetary policy? Vote for it. Technology isn't going to solve the problem for you.
Also, deflationary monetary policy is insane and nobody should want it. Economies grow from continuous re-investment and commerce, not from people stashing away their money and watching its value increase for no reason.
edit: also, the fact that bitcoin is deflationary is entirely incidental, that was just Nakamoto's choice. It would have been just as easy to make bitcoin highly inflationary. The only thing that blockchain guarantees is that monetary policy can't ever change, which is also a thing that no sane person would ever want, there are lots of good reasons to modify the rate of inflation/deflation.
What mainstream candidate in the last two elections had a deflationary monetary policy?
ROn Paul was the last candidate with something relatively close to that.
That being said the idea that I want a deflationary policy on cash is ridiculous, but I want a deflationary policy on my semiliquid investments. BItcoin does that.
>It would have been just as easy to make bitcoin highly inflationary.
Yeah but then nobody would have liked it.
There is definitively nothing wrong with two different kinds of cash existing in a system, one purely liquid one semiliquid. Again please do not be dishonest. There are very specific reasons that make bitcoing attractive. Acting as if electronic banking deals with what bitcoin is intended to solve, is an extremely dishonest way of framing things.
Small amounts of inflation like 2% are necessary because of productivity improvements and full employment. Every year the economy becomes slightly more productive and that means that supply is rising naturally over time. If you print a tiny bit of money then that money can be spent on the excess production and thus companies are encouraged to produce more and employ more people since future prices are always higher than in the past. Think of the opposite. Deflation reduces prices of goods and thus makes it harder to employ people. The coming years can only get worse.
The reason why we have fiat money in the first place is that money has to adapt to us and our economyy, we don't want to adapt to the money.
Ok, now onto the second point. Hyperinflation isn't the same as inflation. Hyperinflation is primarily caused by the inability to exchange currency to purchase basic necessities. If there is a war and all the farmers have died there is not enough bread for everyone. No matter how much paper you have you can't conjure bread out of nothing. The currency becomes worthless, precisely because you can no longer use it for anything useful like buying food. The government/super market will have to import food from a different country. That country uses a different currency. So you either have to borrow the foreign currency or exchange your money into the foreign currency. Money is leaving your economy and being put into foreign people's hands.
Every single coin or bank note that is being printed to e.g. pay back debts or buy food in a foreign currency will instantly turn into inflation and since there isn't enough food for everyone you can never stop the printing press. The bigger and more resilient your economy, the lower the potential for hyperinflation.
The central bank might be doing crazy things but it is not forced to do them. Nobody is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to do this. If they stopped creating more money the worst thing that could happen is a crash and we had so many of them and lived through all of them that it's really no big deal, compared to hyperinflation.
Inflation is not a problem so long as you invest your money as soon as you receive it and your wages keep pace with inflation (and they do). In that case the 2% per annum inflation rate only hurts you from the day you get your pay check to the day you invest it productively or spend it on necessities. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
So, you're telling me all the progress we've made so far has been wasteful and damaging to the environment? I agree.
Look at the ecological damage humans have caused! Several other animals extinct because of us, we've taken over their space on earth too. Our greed has caused this.
We must boycott all new things until nature heals.
