Bitcoin is more of a hedge against the debasement of fiat than of inflation.
That is completely untrue. Bitcoin spends more time up than it does now. That would expose you to more deflation than inflation.
It appears you're trying to play both sides of this, but let me repeat this again for clarity:
If you'd bought bitcoin in late 2021 or 2022 to hedge against the inflation surge around that time you'd have seen prices double as you tried to avoid an 8% increase. It's volatile, pro-cyclic, untied to fundamentals, and historically a bad hedge against inflation.
And this is where you don't understand crypto. There are numerous use cases for crypto.
I understand it just fine and continue making my case. Your only counter argument is ad hominem: you claim I'm ignorant. I see no evidence that
you understand crypto. Don't respond with random buzzwords, provide a cogent argument beyond simply saying I'm wrong and uneducated.
Yes, there are use cases-- that's an argument for it being a tool, not an investment. My Visa card is also a tool, but the value of it doesn't really change much with time.
Crypto is not an exchange and an exchange is not crypto. Exchanges are centralized businesses. the fraud is due to the people running those businesses and not because of crypto itself. It's the same as saying the stocks that Bernie Madoff was dealing with are not fraud... Bernie Madoff was the fraud.
Again, you've avoiding my point. You say crypto has value because it's not reliant on government because government can't be trusted. That argument would hold more weight if people didn't run to the government for protection and support when their crypto investments go bad.
Before the end of Bretton Woods and the backing of the U.S. dollar by gold, there were recessions and the Great Depression. They did just fine getting out of those without printing trillions of dollars of money. Printing money is a solution, but it's not the best. It's only made the richer more rich and the poorer more poor, expanding the distance between lower and middle class and middle class and upper class.
They did not get out of the Great Depression with the gold standard intact. Attempting to maintain convertibility to gold is what turned the panics and recessions of the late 20's and early 30's into the Great Depression. The large nations of the world essentially all abandoned the gold standard as a means of recovery.
And when you say they did "just fine", what does that mean exactly? Banks were collapsing, people were losing their savings, the system was being bailed out by private individuals as Rockefeller and Morgan were personally providing solvency to other banks and the US government itself giving themselves massive personal power in the process.
And are you suggesting the 19th and early 20th centuries were eras of class equality? When you think of the late 1800's, do you think of the working class and the robber barons rubbing elbows?
Do you think standards of living were better then? Median
real income continues to rise.
Probably because we're headed toward some kind of a currency crisis with the debt running out of control. At the rate they're going, it will get to a point where they won't be able to grow the economy enough to compensate. The only real solution they're going to have will be to eventually increase the debasement of the currency.
Again, why do you care about debasement if you are agreeing that crypto doesn't help stabilize prices?
Umm, no. Again, you clearly do not understand crypto... and that's just fine if you want to stay that way. I just named a bunch of characteristics of crypto that do not apply to fiat.
Here you go again with the "you don't understand" ad hominem attacks.
Yes, characteristics. Color is a characteristic-- that is my point. You've haven't provided any sources of underlying value of the currencies themselves. There are characteristics one may like, just like one may like using a plastic card or electronic transfer over suitcases of paper, but none of them provide any real significant and, even more crucially, growing value to justify the growing price.
Again, these indicate that crypto is a tool, not an investment. My Visa is also a tool. My Visa has the characteristics of being compact, insured, theft protected, and allows delayed reconciliation. I'm willing to pay a flat 3% more for a dollar worth of Visa money than I am for paper money because of those benefits which is presented to me as price inflation at the vendor because vendors are getting less per dollar I spend.
What I am not willing to do is pay a compounding 3% per year for a Visa dollar. There is no investment opportunity here, it's essentially a service charge.
So, leaving aside your non-functional characteristics (blockchain colored dollars, decentralized banking ledgers), you mention one that is a good illustration of my point: programmability. Automated, decentralized, programmable transactions are a pretty neat trick for sure, but is it a justification for the ever rising price of crypto? No, it's not.
It's a service of the blockchain, for one thing, not the currency riding on it. Etherium is the usual example where you can queue code to run on the EVM and it's paid for with Ether-- fee for service just like a normal service. If you need programmability, there's no reason not to buy the coin, run the code, pay the fee, and convert back out of the coin when complete.
And Etherium is open source, so if there is demand for such a service a new blockchain can always be created for that purpose-- plenty of competition.
None of that suggests that the price of crypto should keep bidding up.
Simply because that's not the whole picture on how currency markets work and what affects the exchange rates between currencies.
Again, just a blanket contradiction with no coherent explanation. Given the inability to explain and defend your assertions, your claims that other people don't understand are rather weak.
