Everyone who has advocated for Bitcoin to be only a store of value is a bad actor, remember that.
Not being able to use Bitcoin as money is what governments want, because it prevents one of its main features, black markets and tax evasion, which is essentially preventing you from being robbed.
Governments love the idea of Bitcoin as a store of value, where it increases in price and you sell it through the cash register and pay taxes.
If you can afford to use Bitcoin as money, things change, because in that case, Bitcoin has an outlet beyond the traditional KYC circuits.
So anything that allows Bitcoin to be used as money is welcome.
Replies (22)
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100%
The clear example is the last interview that Saif did with Saylor.
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Bitcoin has to be a store of value first. If there’s not incentive to hold it, any merchant that accepts bitcoin will likely just sell into fiat straight away if bitcoin doesn’t hold it’s value.
The order of operations is important
Some of them are just ignorant though. I personally know a "Bitcoiner" like that. I am sure that he will understand in a year or two why Bitcoin needs to be used as money. Not only as a store of value.
In fact, in some places it can be medium of exchange first, and a store of value later. Let me explain – there are places on this planet where people need Bitcoin to get certain things. So, they get Bitcoin just because they want to use it to buy something. And little by little they notice that they need less and less Bitcoin to buy those things, and that’s when they start to see it as a store of value too.
It seems to me that bitcoin makes more sense to people when you compare it to a fiat currency. Instead of cells on your banks spreadsheet that can be edited arbitrarily to give or take money, it is an immutable spreadsheet that cannot be edited arbitrarily. They can't create more money and they can't take it without a legitimate transaction.
Sure, this argument would not work when talking about a money that you can drop on your foot like gold or silver, but people would rather carry a debit card or paper money with them making gold and silver unspendable at your coffee shop or auto mechanic.
How would one run a business or pay for things anonymously with bitcoin? It seems that even putting a sign up at your local minimart that says "we accept bitcoin" would result in your tax authority adopting some crazy new regulations such as a requirement to provide them with your bitcoin address so they can calculate how much tax they think you owe.
This seems tl be the major downside of thr public ledger. Gov't gang gonna do what they do.
That being said, I agree. Fiat money issuers love assets and inflation and the goal is to be able to pay your bills and be paid in a deflationary "hard" money.
Short time frame Fiat thinker detected
Bitcoin is Freedom Money being both medium of exchange and store of value.
Into my 12th year of hodling 🫡
Than in what world is it not a store of value? Because the USD denominated chart line has a negative slope for any period greater than 1 day? 1 week? What criteria are you using?
Yes, and in other places in the world most people have access to the fiat banking system and it works perfectly for their payment needs but is terrible at storing value into the future
I didn’t say it isn’t a store of value or a medium of exchange, my point is simply that Bitcoin becoming the world’s money happens in layers, with store of value being the first layer.
Medium of exchange comes next, then unit of account once we’re all pricing things in sats.
I’m not sure what I’ve said that you’re arguing with?
Bitcoin's power lies in giving people the ability to self-custody and to make private transactions between self-sovereign individuals without surveilling and controlling rails. The store of value narrative is a misleading maneuver; it gives power to the exact fiat control that needs to be made irrelevant.
Great post. For a long while I was getting pretty annoyed with Michael Saylor and all of his acolytes.
I was wondering why everyone on X only saw it as a means to make money and a 'store of value'.
It was as if they had never sent a bitcoin transaction.
Once you have made even one transfer you realise it is as close as we'll ever get to a perfect payment system.
Plus, those advocating the store of value narrtive simply gloss over the white paper, which clearly states that payments are the main purpose of bitcoin.
It isn’t a narrative. Bitcoin stores purchasing power into the future by virtue of its engineered scarcity.
That’s just what Bitcoin does.
You couldn’t use Bitcoin for day-to-day transacting historically because blocks were often full and transactions were expensive. No-one is going to pay $20 in fees just to buy something small.
We needed lightning to get built out before it became useful to the world as a medium of exchange. Lightning is still actively in development.
We’re all very very early
Value come from utility. Bitcoin is of course a store of value, but will seize to be if the utility vanes. The narrative of first and foremost focusing on store of value is deceiving. When push comes to shove, Bitcoin will mean something but your paper claims on its value will not.
Absolutely spot on
