The ability to store value has great utility. Storing value is one of the basic functions of money, the others being measure of value and medium of exchange.
Consumer price inflation is quite low at the moment - despite all the money printing. All that excess money printed goes to the financial markets where it mostly stays. I believe it's because there is so much value being created by the accelerating gains from technological development. So, while you could treat the major fiat currencies as stable stores of value, which they are from a CPI point of view, you are missing out on huge gains by parking your value in them.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
So I guess it's just demand for BTC that drives up the price as people want to move their funds their. Then it becomes more valuable because it is valuable :) Just seems a waste of the potential of crypto to me, but what do I know? I wonder if Satoshi has all this in mind.
It feels wasteful to you because it seems that for you the two most important functions of money are medium of exchange and measure of value, in that order. You don't seem to focus on the store of value aspect of it as much.
And yes, there is a speculative self-reinforcing FOMO going on in BTC and probably will be going far into the future. That's how BTC can become a store of value.
It's interesting to think what Satoshi thought (whether Satoshi was an individual or a group). In the Bitcoin white paper he talks about an electronic cash system, i.e. a currency.
Bitcoin does not need to scale in order to be an effective store of value. To be a widely adopted currency, it has to, though. Gold is a good store of value but a bad currency, too.
There are such incredible similarities between gold and crypto, I doubt he/ they didn't plan at least some of this deliberately - 21 million BTC but down to 8 decimals, scarce enough but not too scarce, a declining mining rate with increasing difficulty, right down to the 'mythology' - gold has that too, so does BTC.
It all may be coincidence of course, but if it is design it's even more clever than just the pure cryptography.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Oh yes, whoever designed Bitcoin had a firm understanding of market psychology and game theory, that's for sure.
And Bitcoin strikes me as at least as reasonable a choice as gold or stocks in tech companies for 'storing value'.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Stocks in tech companies are really not stores of value rather than investments. Gold is relatively stable and is thus a store of value. A lump of gold does nothing except look pretty and is scarce/expensive to mine. Bitcoin is superior to gold in that it is vastly more transferable. Storing it is as easy as memorizing a 12-word seed phrase. Learn a string of words and you can smuggle billions of dollars across any border or past any security controls. That alone is worth a lot.