It's actually useful in places that don't have great financial access. I'm guessing your estimate of "very few people" is from a place that has good access?

That makes absolutely no sense. If you have limited or intermittent internet access, why the hell would you put your money on the internet? Any outage will bankrupt you.

To hold, yes you're right. I suspect you're thinking of the storage of value use-case?

It is a way to transfer value. I'm from the Philippines and I'm seeing increasing usage in remittance or getting paid salaries from abroad.

I also get a better feel for what else bitcoin is doing with this podcast episode "Alex Gladstein on Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom" https://pca.st/aQy0

I think it is solving some man-in-the-street problems for people who aren't in countries with good financial systems.

Trust in it to do/be what?

Trust in it to maintain its value if it is a stable coin. Alternatively, trust it not to be hacked or inflated if it isn’t. (As well as trust it to maintain whatever monetary properties they advertise to give it value as money.

I see. Thanks for clarifying!

Even if miners could change the rules and print more, do you think the users would continue to use it?

Why not? They use it today with the current coinbase. Why wouldn’t they use it tomorrow?

Some will stop using it, sure. And they probably have enough coin to affect the price short term.

But I’d argue that the majority of usage is now not for political/philosophical reasons but for economic ones.

How would the users blacklist the miners using the newer inflationary protocol? Is it even possible? By design, the longest blockchain wins, and that would be the one with the inflation if the majority of miners agreed.

> By design, the longest blockchain wins

The longest blockchain which follows the rules. If a chain does not follow the rules, it will be ignored by the nodes, even if it's the longest one. To change the rules, you have to update all nodes, not just the miners.

The 21 million limit is in the user's bitcoin client, not in the miners proof of work.

I didn't bring it up because I suspect that we'll eventually find a scaling solution, whether it be sidechains, tree chains, riding on Moore's law, multiple cryptocurrencies connected through an interleger.

It's a more long term view of the impact of cryptocurrencies concerning government issued currencies.

The interesting part for me is the more people speculate, the higher the price becomes, and the higher the price becomes, the more useful it is in the institutional level because the markets are deeper.

Thank you! I knew I was just lacking in Google-fu when searching for other articles that expressed this idea I had been forming in my mind.

That would be interesting!

Yes, I certainly can't say I'm an economics expert. Mind sharing with me what part of the article you think is misguided?

Yes. I posted my thoughts in another comment > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15184382

Honestly, I'm kind of scared/surprised more people aren't talking about this.

Thanks for the link. I'm not sure where in the article I said inflation is worse than deflation. I don't feel I know enough about economics to express an opinion about this.

What I'm trying to say is that if people have a choice, they'll keep their wealth in a currency that destroys their wealth the least slowly. This, I suspect, will have a runaway effect. We probably wouldn't be able to stop it if we tried, which sounds a lot like the AI singularity.

My concern is that you ignore the effects of deflation in your argument altogether, which you simply cannot do.

You are also effectively demoting the US dollar to the current inferior currency of the two to support your little adage, which I find a bit strange.

I believe your intention was just to write a little thought experiment, which is cool. I'm just a little baffled the way some people follow along for the ride without question.

Perhaps obvious, but I hold no cryptocurrency. I'm not saying I never would, but the sheer amount of dreamy speculation like this is exactly what keeps me away from the market.

By "effects of deflation", are you referring to the claimed ill-effects of deflation, that will grind the economy to a halt? If so, mind helping me understand why I can't disregard that?

I appreciate your replies - not sure if I mentioned it earlier to you, but I posted it here in HN because there is no shortage of smart people willing to express their thoughts.

It's a concern I have about deflationary currencies in general. It's not very common in the world right now so you could argue I'm speculating too, really.

You are talking about the singularity being the point that we switch to crypto currency. I suppose my argument is that the singularity may not come because of deflation counteracting and convincing people to continue holding.

All in all I'm glad it's been such a diplomatic discussion. I would engage people the same way if I were you and appreciate that you seek new information.

I understand - I'm not aware of an asset class like bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, so I have to go with opinion and extrapolation for a lot of the thinking. :)

It sounds like what you said is that the singularity may not happen because cryptocurrency deflation will make cryptocurrencies more attractive to hold compared to inflationary fiat. I'm fairly certain I understood it wrong.

Won't people move more of the money into deflationary currencies if they are accessible and exchange friction between the inflationary one and deflationary one is acceptable?

I appreciate the appreciation!

If I read this comment right, I agree with you. People will use inflationary currencies more because they aren't as good as a store of value.