bitcoin used to be a shitcoin because it was cheap and everybody assumed it was about to become history
now it is respectable because it's expensive and governments are building strategic reserves
and yet somehow bitcoiners still LARPing as anti-establishment while having long since become the establishment
bitcoiners are like blue haired woke liberals who think they are rebels while being on the same side of every issue as every corporation and government
I've been laughing at this recently after I heard the "anti-establishment" thing again
-You have to earn fiat to buy it
-It records every transaction ever and stores it on the chain (it's not untraceable)
-Law enforcement have been able to identify, locate and seize assets of "hodlers" (it's not anonymous)
-It was probably invented by the government for covert activities (.gov has all the cryptography experts)
-You have to sell it and convert it back into fiat to use it in most cases - and that's capital gains; I hope you don't forget to give Uncle $cam his cut
The main use case for bitcoin is to buy a bunch of it after the next Bankman-Fried or SVB style crash and then sell it when it gets back to 100k+ because you know the true believers will never learn
good digital money would be what Ron Paul had suggested - something backed by a basket of commodities
dollar used to be redeemable in gold - we need money like that
but it can be backed by a combination of things like gold, silver, platinum, uranium etc.
basically if you can prove that you own 10 tons of gold you can issue that amount of currency. or you own silver, platinum, uranium etc.
in such a system the value of money is fixed. it can't go up or go down. bitcoin is not like that. yes it goes up - but it isn't backed by anything. if everybody tried to redeem their bitcoin at the same time they would get ZERO. not $100,000, not $100, not even $1 - ZERO.
that makes Bitcoin fiat.
Lyn Alden wrote in her book ( that i didn't read ) that bank runs show the money is broken. bank runs happen because of fractional reserve banking where banks loan out more money than they have, and when everybody tries to get their money back at the same time the bank doesn't have it.
but at least the bank has SOME money. if everybody tried to redeem bitcoin at the same time they would realize there is NO money at all in the "bank"
because for all the billions of dollars people spent on Bitcoin no real assets were ever purchased. Bitcoin may have market cap in the Trillions but the assets backing it are ZERO.
at least fiat money is backed by taxes and us military. bitcoin is backed by literally nothing.
