I agree that zero is unlikely. Gold might be a deprecated form of money but it still has uses in industry and for that reason it will have some baseline of demand and a relatively stable supply.
We’re a long way from that point now though and gold is still used mostly as store of value (bullion and jewelry) so it should fall a long way from here relative to bitcoin.
One thing I wonder is that nostr ethos seems to be all about spending bitcoin, making it an everyday currency, buy your coffee, buy your bacon and eggs. I’m not an economist by any stretch , but it stands to reason that there would be a push and pull between everyday currency and store of value. When it comes to gold, people don’t trade their earrings for their breakfast.
That's because gold is a horrendous medium of exchange. It isn't practical to do so in any way. Bitcoin is both. And yes, there is a constant struggle and fight within Bitcoin as to which it is.
Yes, this very much confuses me. Many opinions here seem to exist in a quantum superposition of "stack sats" and "spend sats". It seems so obviously logically inconsistent.
The folks that are all in on store of value—the "I'll never zap a single sat" crowd—are at least understandable. While I disagree that Bitcoin will ever come close to gold, at least I get the position they're staking out.
But those that are "store of value" one day and then "day-to-day currency" the next day, I really have no idea what the thinking is.
Why can't it be both? People have savings accounts in a bank. They have a checking account. When you need or want to buy something bigger, you can move money from the savings.
Not sure what the analogy is, the dollars in your savings account don't change their fundamental properties when you place them in there, they get spent by the bank here there and everywhere, and the returns accrue as interest. If Bitcoin becomes a transactional currency it'll appreciate or depreciate within the bounds of everyday life, as all transactional currencies must.
Saving and spending are just competing use cases. Some may favour one or the other at different times, and in different places. Bitcoin has more use cases, such as social, which I tried to push for 10 years, but for the first 5 almost no one was intrested. Eventually people got it, with nostr. But it took a long time. The next use case is commerce. But just like the original bitcoin, people dont get it yet, and it make take some time. Until then, fiat remains dominant.
I think the majority of bitcoin people won't abandon the store of value dream, and that'll make it hard to popularise for everyday commerce . You can't have the value of "saved bitcoin" go up in relation to your cup of coffee while the value of "spendable bitcoin" does not. And coffee shops are not going to update their prices and menus daily.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. IMHO a better is that bitcoin is a bank account or savings account where things get cheaper and cheaper. This seems to me, to be better than the alternatives, right now.
I can't see any magic that would make one's coffee just get cheaper and cheaper. It's not like agriculture is somehow subservient here.
Coffee is denominated in the weaker currency. If you hold the stronger currency, what you purchase is cheaper *at the time of spending*.
I can see some 'cashing out' of accumulated store-of-value margin. But once you start connecting the store of value to the supermarket then it becomes entangled with everything in the supermarket and beyond. It would be the same with gold.
I still can't really see any real difference between bitcoin and gold. I've read that around the year 2140 all bitcoin will have been mined. I've seen estimates for gold that by the year 2100 all gold will have been mined too. The percentage of bitcoin actually being used in commerce is minuscule, same with gold. Governments seem to want both for reserves. Calling bitcoin digital gold seems about right to me.
