> Have Bitcoin supporters shifted their goal from making Bitcoin a viable currency to making Bitcoin a value store?
Bitcoin just "is", how you decide to use it is up to you.. that's the whole point. IMO for it to be money it would need to be adopted for 3 use cases SoV->MoE->UoA, in that order.
> Bitcoin value is based on speculation
Yeah, seems like a lot of people are betting that it will be the global money in the future, so they are building positions now. That's why you get this nice market signal - bitcoin's price increasing relative to other monies, before it has actually become money.
> First of all, fixed scarcity? Is this actually a good thing? And is Bitcoin actually scarce? How does hard forking affect the scarcity? And is there a reason why any singular fork of Bitcoin is the one and true cryptocurrency?
Yes. Yes. Yes. How does the scarcity of Swiss Francs affect the scarcity of Japanese Yen? Not directly, but I'm sure there is some effect. People disagree about this, but IMO Bitcoin is the fork that the majority of economic actors on the network use.
> "Software durability" also is pretty funny
They're referring to the Bitcoin consensus code I think.
> How much cryptocurrency has been stolen through software exploits
Compared to the amount of gold and fiat that's been stolen, I would say not much.
> However, if you're thinking about a value storage, is portability actually that good?
It is. Certainly if you need to escape some increasingly repressive regime. If I was an activist trying to get out of Hong Kong right now, I certainly wouldn't be carrying bricks of gold with me.
I tried to do this with a recent paperwhite but some features seemed to require registration - the main one I cared about being "collections". Had to make a fresh amazon account, register it, then put it into aeroplane mode never to be reconnected.
This is a beautiful response, clear and to the point, perfectly addressing the parent comment... but do you feel like you're making any progress with the explanations?
It seems like every bitcoin thread on hacker news endlessly generates nothing but 2013/14 era FUD. I don't see people installing lightning wallets and playing around.