Bitcoin will remain valuable if only because elites everywhere want the fresh printed money but don't want to hold it for long, and Bitcoin is a good asset to save at.
But that is orthogonal to freedom. If the internet is not productive, its freedom will be hard to defend.
That last line :scoresoccer:
> Bitcoin is a good asset to save at.
Not entirely disagreeing but I want to see your reasoning. Is it the digital scarcity, or the cross border transfer nature of BTC? Why only BTC and not something else? Be it a digital asset or a physical like gold?
Bitcoin is better than Gold in every way, the real competition are stocks, real estate and bonds ... And if you trust the power structure, they are good enough.
Bitcoin is basically a global index fund minus the political and legal concerns. So it will always have a place in portfolios, I guess where physical gold previously dominated.
But I don't take that for granted either, it is possible for Bitcoin to do such a horrible job at censorship resistance that you can no longer sell significant amounts without legal permission, in which case it becomes useless compared to gold.
As for other digital assets (shitcoins) they may always exist, but can they survive a brutal crackdown? You don't get censorship resistance by accident, in fact despite all Bitcoin efforts an optimisation for censorship resistance it is still not guaranteed, so what chance do you have if it wasn't your No1 priority.
In fact USDT is already sucking the air away from all other assets, because... If you don't care about censorship resistance... Might as well get USD IOUs and in fact USDT is moving to custom L1s because if you don't care about censorship resistance why bother with somewhat distributed blockchains at all.
See what I am saying? There are two stable ends; censorship resistance and scale, anything in the middle will die.
Very well put Nuh, USDC is indeed taking a major share of the pie. It had somewhat the same volume as Visa last year IIRC and is stable / useful for the most general public.
They quite literally will become the CBDC without the political baggage, and if you read the plans for that, it didn't plan for absolute friction with KYC ... They plan to make it as convenient as digital Blockchain tokens, but the choke the off-ramps with KYC.
This way, everyone is inside the system, and can't easily leave, and when that is complete they may or may not make it as shitty as banks again requiring full KYC for every transaction.
Either way, until the adoption is complete it will feel just as good and free as Ethereum so why not.
Again, the problem isn't that these options exist, but it is that most people will be paid that way, so you won't be able to make money otherwise, because ain't no one has any money elsewhere because no one is productive, everyone is getting handouts from the state that runs the productive sectors.
So my problem can't be solved with Bitcoin, it can't be solved unless the internet magically managed to stay productive in the age of big AI and big Robots.
