Fortunately, no one is forcing anyone to adopt Bitcoin, if the features are undesirable.
> Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug.
You may be right, but we can't stop a community from choosing something deflationary as their preferred currency.
> I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin
I'd argue this is a feature in Bitcoin for many people.
> I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed.
You're fortunate. Last time I went to a bank (right after COVID hit), I was denied cash withdrawals due to liquidity issues. That's what happens when your money is in custody of someone else. Once you look outside first world countries, you'll see the demerits of centralised systems handling critical resources like money.
> Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange.
I'll agree with this point. Perhaps it's because of the nature of the market itself. Bitcoin trades globally, 24x7 and 365 days a year, without circuit breakers when there's extreme volatility. It's not appropriate for buying candies from a store, but maybe a good option for a Tesla?
> I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics.
On the contrary, people holding Bitcoin during the pandemic were relatively well off in 2020. The stimulus package had negative impacts too, like asset inflation. But more concretely, Bitcoin is the first true alternative to central banking, and many people are happy to adopt it because it solves important problems for them.
To participate in PoS, you need an existing stash of coins, which is inaccessible for many individuals from countries where cryptocurrencies are outlawed. Not forgetting to mention that participation in consensus would indirectly require going through KYC.
PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.
Once you understand Bitcoin, there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system. It's not Bitcoiners getting freaking rich; it's them adopting a superior store of value that is being selected as the winner in a free market.
Most people are perfectly happy entrusting their (fiat) money with the banks, and asking permission for accessing their funds. Bitcoiners, on the other hand, have tasted the freedom of self-custody and a permissionless payment system.
Whether it has value or not depends on how important it is to have a monetary good that is not issued by a nation state, and cannot be controlled/stopped/inflated/modified.
Microstrategy's $425M buy order was brokered by Coinbase, and it didn't shoot up the price. Anyway, exchanges will usually deny placing such large orders. Institutions use OTC desks instead, and there are plenty of them these days.
All they care about is opening new accounts, and selling financial products to people who don't need them. They custody your money, but it's impossible to reach them when you need their help. The banking industry continues to exist with websites that were designed in the 2000s. The tipping point for me was when my bank denied cash withdrawals during the initial weeks of the first COVID lockdown.
You may not have been through the same experience, but remember that most of the world's population is either legacy-banked, or unbanked.
Bitcoin hitting $1T is not just speculation - there's a deeper story behind it. All the hype aside, let's not forget what Bitcoin really fixes.
Bitcoin provided the world a way to transfer value over the internet, that's censorship resistant and completely trustless. If that's not disruptive, I don't know what is. GPT-3 is smart enough to understand that.
At my previous job, in a legal-tech company, we used Woleet to build a copyright protection product for intellectual property. However, I believe IPFS [1] is a superior solution for proof-of-existence, compared to timestamping on Bitcoin.
With Woleet, you must keep the original payload (file + personal identification) that was timestamped, for eternity. In the event of a copyright violation, you must be able to prove in front of a judge that hash of the file in your possession is indeed what exists on the Bitcoin blockchain.
With IPFS, you only need to save the hash of the payload (or a human-readable name, with IPNS [2]), to convince the judge that you authored the original file at a certain point in time. Additionally, IPFS has version control. This means that if you want to prove to a court that some revision to the T&Cs of your product were made before a certain date, it makes more sense to use IPFS.
> Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug.
You may be right, but we can't stop a community from choosing something deflationary as their preferred currency.
> I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin
I'd argue this is a feature in Bitcoin for many people.
> I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed.
You're fortunate. Last time I went to a bank (right after COVID hit), I was denied cash withdrawals due to liquidity issues. That's what happens when your money is in custody of someone else. Once you look outside first world countries, you'll see the demerits of centralised systems handling critical resources like money.
> Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange.
I'll agree with this point. Perhaps it's because of the nature of the market itself. Bitcoin trades globally, 24x7 and 365 days a year, without circuit breakers when there's extreme volatility. It's not appropriate for buying candies from a store, but maybe a good option for a Tesla?
> I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics.
On the contrary, people holding Bitcoin during the pandemic were relatively well off in 2020. The stimulus package had negative impacts too, like asset inflation. But more concretely, Bitcoin is the first true alternative to central banking, and many people are happy to adopt it because it solves important problems for them.