this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
653 points (99.8% liked)
Technology
37805 readers
103 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That is part of the problem. As long as the economy grows, then Bitcoin is deflationary. This encourages people who have it to hoard it, rather than to move it around and drive the economy. It is almost perfectly designed to be used as a speculative investment rather than an actual day-to-day currency.
Having a fixed pool of money to represent your economy only makes sense if the total value of the economy will never change. This doesn't happen in the real world. Populations grow, new technologies add value, and poverty generally goes down. This is all fairly simple math.
It's a great place to store and hold wealth.
The concept you are describing is Gresham's Law. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-does-greshams-law-relate-to-bitcoin
Bitcoin is digital gold. Other cryptocurrencies will become used as well for basic payments. Eventually you will be able to pay cross chain so it wont even matter which coins you hold.
Edit: Using ChainLink: https://twitter.com/0xShmn/status/1696169139168059896
Amid all of this, nobody has managed to give me a reason why I would want to use crypto for transactions instead of my debit/credit card.
Crypto doesn’t come with any of the consumer protections I expect from my current payment methods. And in fact, it is designed to make some of them literally impossible (I.e. chargebacks). This might be appealing to sellers, but financial transactions are a buyers market. Sellers hate dealing with PayPal, but they put up with it because consumers trust PayPal and demand to use it.
So right now, crypto has these problems:
It’s been over a decade and blockchains are still a neat technology without a useful practical application.