Bitcoin Forum

For bitcoin to be used as a store of value and a medium of exchanging for goods and services, It must be stable like others currencies.  For the past 5 to 7 weeks now bitcoin has started to develop that characteristics and that is a big sign that both online and offline retails and wholesales business will started to used it very soon.  I believe that in blockchain technology we are getting closer to what the founders has in mind.

What stability? What "other" currencies? Fiat currencies? Fiat is the worst store of value.

This is the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar from 1913 to 2013, and it is contantly sinking.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2012/08/20120815_JPM1.png

Give me Bitcoin, or give me death. 8)

Online retailers will adopt bitcoin only, if there is a huge army of people that use bitcoin on a daily basis.
The global amount of people,that use bitcoin is probably between 20 and 30 million,and most of them are HODLers.This is a very small number.The btc price stability doesn't matter that much.

i believe he was talking about other currencies aka fiat like USD,JPY,CNY and many more.
also, that 'thing' is much more stable compared to Bitcoin if we are looking at its history.
USD lost 96% its power in 2013 from 1913, but it needed 90 years to do that while Bitcoin only need a few months. that means USD is much more 'stable' compared to Bitcoin.

Yeah, but the main feature of Bitcoin is volatility. How to reach stability?

for bitcoin to become (relatively) stable like other currencies it first has to be around at least half as long as they have been around so far and be adopted half as they are. we are not even at 1% adoption yet so we can not start expecting stability and we certainly can not compare this very young bitcoin with other currencies.

however, interesting thing is that so far the usage of bitcoin as a currency (based on user's spending behavior) has been at its peak when price is rising fast!

You are referring to on-chain transactions, right? Because people aren't actually spending their coins, they just move them back and forth mostly for speculative purposes only during pumps and dumps.

Bitcoin needs to scale properly in order to stimulate actual use as currency, which isn't the case right now. I'm actually a bit disappointed with how we haven't managed to scale more than we already have with SegWit.

It's however not Bitcoin that's to be blamed here, but the toxic entities representing the big block camp. They can't stand Bitcoin to be cheap, because that directly lowers the utility value of Bcash.

What else than low fees can Bcash market itself with?

i don't know about "shortest way" to adoption but it is one way to do it. you are correct that stability will help with the currency aspect and store of value aspect but we still need actual adoption to happen. people need to see the benefits of using bitcoin instead of fiat so that they start spending bitcoin and merchants to start accepting it as payment. so i think the shortest way and the surest way is to increase awareness and educate people about these benefits.
stability means nothing when people don't know what decentralized, high security and privacy, no charge back, global, cheap (as in low fee),... mean.

no I am talking about actual usage when people purchase something from a merchant using bitcoin. and what I said is based on what I have read in the news from merchant statements claiming their sales have grown during the big fast rise of last year. and also based on Bitpay's annual statistical report showing an increase in number of payments they processes during those times.

But isn't it should be the opposite though? People should spend bitcoin when its quite cheap or relatively stable just like we witnessing in the last several month. Ah, the human behaviour, really hard to predict as well. But yeah, its too early to say when the market is barely in a decade and we didn't even have a sample size to say that usage of bitcoin as a currency is picking up or not.


Big block? LOL. Seriously, There's nothing that BCash can offer than can leverage people to shift on other coins. Bitcoin is enough to be used as currency if LN could be implement and people see's the advantage of it. Now, those arguments about its high cost and slow confirmation should be thrown out of the window when the Segwit + LN rolling out in the next couple of years.

Funny how the OP mentioned it because I'm been playing this idea for a long time that people should take advantage of bitcoin today because of its price stability to buy some stuff online or even make it as mode of payment. Been doing this for 1 year already (paying my utilities like internet, water and electric, even paying my credit card bills and buy some online stuff).

In Japan many companies are adopt the Bitcoin so most of the employers wages are Bitcoin and most of the shopping mall also accepting the Bitcoin so slowly it will improve the crypto improvement. I think day by day crypto technology is increase the positive reputation so all the peoples are using Bitcoin in 2025 or other cryptocurrencies are occupy the entire world.

You are talking about "stability" like it is something we always had and will always have.
Bitcoin is stable for now but there are couple weeks every year (even the most stable year in 2018 had some insane jumps time to time) and the price increases and decreases insanely.

I agree it has been stable most of the time instead of volatile but it doesn't mean it will stay like that. This is not a stablecoin like tether or something this is bitcoin we are talking about. The price will never be too stable and will change to insane levels either upside or downside and than become stable once again.

Considering this people who check out bitcoin will realize that even tho the price has been stable for now historically it has not been like that and will not want to danger their investments to something this volatile.

It doesn't have to be like that just for those retail businesses to adopt bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

In fact, that even those old days there are companies that really don't look at the stableness of bitcoin because its character isn't really like that. Just because we've been stagnant for 5-7 weeks you are going to think that bitcoin is as stable as you think. I think that's not enough for it to say. Earlier years bitcoin is already a medium of exchange and that's its main purpose.

Since December 2017, fiat has shown to be a hell of a store of value compared to crypto. In fact, I'm sure this crash has absolutely ruined many economically who decided to use bitcoin as a store of value over the last 10 months.
A question I have is over time if bitcoin doesn't increase in value, what is the point of using it as a store of value? Bank accounts are paying about 2% interest these days, bitcoin pays nothing. As far as using bitcoin as an exchange for goods and services, unless it is a high priced item bitcoin fees make this option totally unfeasible. Maybe the lighting network will fix this, but currently this is simply not a use case.

The fact that it has been stable for the past seven weeks or so doesn't mean that it all of the sudden became a stable currency that will now be adopted all over the world and start to be used by everyone. Look at the history of the price, after every big pump there's a massive dump and a period of really boring and stable price. We are in that period now, after this sooner or later there is going to be a new pump and bitcoin will be volatile as hell again

I don't think most adoption comes from the currency use case. Becoming a medium of exchange comes after mass adoption, by virtue of the fact that everyone uses and accepts it.

The bubble cycles seem pretty good at encouraging adoption. It's these price cycles that give Bitcoin is exponential price curve, which makes it a pretty attractive investment. As long as the long term trend remains intact, people will continue accumulating (adopting) it.

This is definitely the effect of some corrections as what we heard which cause it to be somehow stable for past month and up until now. Still the character of being volatile still there and probably waiting to make some surprises. In terms of adoption, well we already saw it from other countries and slowly been observed by some nations.

taken alone, segwit was never really a scaling solution. it was just a one-time linear block size increase. it doesn't address bitcoin's lack of exponential scalability. we need other protocols that don't scale linearly. lightning, tree chains, sharding, etc

i think slow adoption is good. it exemplifies the voluntary (ie backward compatible) nature of bitcoin upgrades. in contrast, miner-backed hard forks where 100% of users must upgrade are economically coercive.


bitcoin seems pretty cheap to me. :)

It's been a decade now that Satoshi has envision bitcoin to be use as a currency without the need of third parties and I think we are slowly experiencing the adoption. If we look around, there are already many businesses that adopt cryptocurrency as one of their payment option and in due time, more businesses especially those giant ones in the e-commerce, would consider adopting it because they can still benefit from it as there are people who will prefer to use cryptocurrency instead of credit card or cash perhaps.

I am sorry. If you did not understand the context in the U.S. Dollar and other fiat currencies' distressing, long term scenario, then no can help you.

wow i just know this, so this is one of the reason back you can buy more things compare to these days with a same amount of money

Well, when you made $20 a week it better have bought more.
The problem with bitcoin is it needs to gain value over time or it becomes irrelevant, who wants to hold your money in something that is sinking? fiat can sink over time in value and remain relevant because it's all relative to the other fiat currencies and wages, and bank interest offsets most if not all of the drop.
So far bitcoin has done that in spades, but if the next halving comes and goes and the price doesn't surpass the last high by a good amount within a year or so it may be abandoned and crash to near nothing. Leaving prior adopters stranded is not going to work.

What asset just goes up forever? If such a thing existed, we could all be rich.

Even if Bitcoin holds the long term uptrend through the next couple halvings, it'll eventually break down. I don't see why entering a bearish supercycle (years or decade-long bear market) would change the bigger picture though. It's the same thing as the 2011 or 2014 bear cycles, just on a larger scale.

As long as demand continues to increase globally the price will continue to rise. Venezuela is creating huge demand as well as other failing economies so the outlook is very positive, especially with the halving in a couple of years time

Bitcoin is provably scarce. If the demand keeps growing for such an asset them its value will also keep growing.

But I agree that it will eventually break down, if there was an asset a lot better than Bitcoin. So far, there is none.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dgc_RzZV4AE4GIe?format=jpg

Would you be holding Bitcoin as a store of value, or fiat? 8)

Stability is not something we can experience and it all depends on how you are seeing it, as I believe one way or the other, bitcoin's value will keep having more purchasing power in the long run, as the demand keeps increasing, which to me still makes 1btc to be equivalent to 1btc. As time goes on, when we gradually start seeing real life usage, we will get to see some mass mainstream adoption, and there is actually the possibility that when tagged to fiat, we may not be seeing huge volatility or movement as we see today and in that case, I can imagine what the value of btc would even be like.

I like that. One thing for sure which I believe is that due to the deflationary nature of bitcoin, 1btc will always be 1btc in purchasing power with its limited supply, when compared to the USD which over the years, I believe the feds have really melted it to pieces that there really may be nothing left of it in the long run. Stability is just one thing they want a lot of people to believe anyway, but what they do not realize is that in the fiat space, a lot of things have changed over the years, when it comes to inflation, and so many other negativity that surrounds it, and as far as I am concerned, fiat is just an equivalent of death.

We will wait for the best time to hit the target price that will help price to have rapid increase when the right time come. Public adoptions will happen when demand and popularity also have quicker changes which will keep the price gain higher value, that will trigger more interst to thw public.

Key words: "if the demand keeps growing"

Even if Bitcoin is superior to all other forms of money, it isn't guaranteed endless demand. There is a limit to the amount of value that can flow into BTC, even if that limit is theoretically when every other possible type of money is valued at $0.

In all markets, equilibrium is eventually reached and overall trends reverse. Bitcoin is not immune to that, no matter how good it is.

When would that best time will be? I don't think so we gonna do it in a short span of time, and expecting more from cypto was just a mere fact that having stabilized market price nowadays is too hard to experience. And even though we see stabilized price, we tend to have at lower price and not that high expectations.

Exactly why because the monetary system which is otherwise called fiat has been so flawed over the years, with it being covered up by inflation. Normally, most laymen would not understand that. We all know over the years, that there has been some policies that has even been jeopardizing the purchasing power of the fiat system all in the name of trying to place some level of control by all means, the level of monopoly and so many more, which in the long run, for the fact that bitcoin is deflationary, it will always make 1btc to be the same with a higher purchasing power over time like we are seeing already now over the years.

It's not an insensible argument to be sure, but if anyone had been waiting for this period of stability, they might have been inclined to see the same in at least 2 past periods. A pattern is easily seen, where bitcoin flies past all known highs, before slumping quickly and then taper off in price to some relative period of stability... Only to resume its wild pattern of volatility when speculative interest returns.

Don't get me wrong, I do see a period when this volatility assumes much longer, deeper timeframes. But I don't think we're anywhere near that.

I think Bitcoin already serves as a good store of value, one that's for a good many years only set to grow.

that doesn't tell the whole story. "purchasing power" has obviously dropped by a huge magnitude because it's priced in dollars. that doesn't account for wage/income growth, which offsets drops in dollar purchasing power for consumers.

to clarify: the per capita net annual income in 1920 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/20soirepar.pdf) was $223.87. based on what source you look at, the average wage for workers (https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/statistics-american-economy-during-1920s) around that time was $1300-1400/year. in 2016, the annual median personal income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States) was $31,099.

so while 1920 dollars were worth 12x more than 2016 dollars in terms of purchasing power, wages are also 23x higher in 2016 than in 1920. that's why it's important to consider wage growth and cost of living in addition purchasing power.

also, not only are markets fickle, but we can't generalize across all commodities and goods. prices have not risen so significantly in many markets. for example, in 1920, the cost of a dozen eggs was $0.78 (https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/his/e_prices1.htm). for comparison, last month, they cost $1.19 per dozen (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Egg%20Markets%20Overview.pdf).

SegWit itself isn't doing much, so it all comes down to how we are going to see LN gain ground here. I'm just being realistic. People think that because right now the fees are low SegWit is doing its work, but there is more to it.

You know why the fees are much lower now?

* transaction batching
* smarter clients not recommending users to go with fees that don't make sense
* less network activity

Segwit is on the very bottom, and has been taking a dip in terms of what percentage of the transactions are utilizing SegWit. And you said it well, next couple of years. Do you think a 1MB block is enough to keep people satisfied till then?

As long as we don't face a bullish cycle resulting in months of severe network congestion it's not an issue, but what if it does happen? The fees will sky rocket again, which is why I don't hope to see a bull run.

Segwit might not be the main reason the fees have been going down, but we learn to work more efficiently due to network cluttering.

The reasons you pointed out are all the result of a better understanding of how important it is to work more efficiently. It also proves that we can book way more progress with the current block limit than most people even think is possible.

Increasing the block size isn't a solution but an open door to allow more centralization to take place, and it also shortens Bitcoin's life span in the long run. I'm sure that if we had 2-3MB blocks right now, people would throw data in it just because there is enough space. That's not how we should let Bitcoin be *abused*.

Some stability would probably help serious companies to accept cryptocurrencies, but it doesn't mean that the stability should be on the current prices. The market needs to recover for people to trust in it. It lost billions of dollars very fast and that's not very encouraging. IMO if the market gradually returned to previous ath and then stabilized around it with +-10% fluctuations, it would be perfect. People would either profit or at least return their investments; traders will be able to profit from regular cycles; users will probably tolerate such small fluctuations.

I agree. People will join Bitcoin revolution in advance if the price keeps climbing gradually with a break of few weeks each time. Stability is important but moving forward is essential.

Checking out bitcoins price on past months we can really say that it is close to stability but with those price swings or even short percentage cant really be considered to be stable unlike on FIAT.
We are on consolidation period that's why price movement runs on a flat line but anytime when people or community start to buy and adopt then price would swing up again giving out those
ups and down movement.Bitcoin isn't designed for stability just like what we saw on fiats.

What do you mean by bitcoin becoming irrelevant if it does not gain value over time? The thing is that a lot of people are actually just looking at only the idea of bitcoin increasing in value over time alone, but you better start coming to terms that when mainstream adoption kicks in, you will not get to see the same level of volatility you are seeing now over time.

People need to understand that there is more to bitcoin than just the growth in price alone over time. What we should be more concerned is the real value and seeing that in the long run, bitcoin leaves the speculation zone and hit usage level.

Obviously you have no idea what purchasing power is all about. Purchasing power is the value of a currency in terms of the goods or services that one unit of it can buy, probably that will give you a better enlightenment when considering the progress that bitcoin has made being a deflationary entity to what fiat has been over the years, so in a way, you really have some absurd ignorantly placed comparison. If you are considering the short term fluctuation in value against the dollar, then you are basically missing the point already.

History shows you are wrong, people love the volatility and the money they can make in it, just look at the stock market, if a stock is not moving wildly many sell their stocks because they do not want to waste their time holding stocks that do not move, and the same is true with bitcoin, when was the interest in bitcoin at its highest point? When bitcoin was reaching all time highs every day.

I totally agree with your idea, if only bitcoin (the most used crypto) would be more stabilize it would be much easier for it to be traded in such a worldwide basis, the most problem right now is that as much as they want to use it it will take so much time to calculate and reanalyze their product every time bitcoin change its value.

The current trend of stability will most likely be short lived.

I do agree that stability is probably needed for mainstream adoption, but I don't think that it's an issue at the moment. People are still adopting bitcoin as a form of storing value because it is easier to access compared to a lot of the foreign currencies in countries that are suffering from hyperinflation.

But indeed, in order to achieve stability there needs to be more adoption, and the only way to see that is time. There isn't really anything we can do to speed this process up in my opinion, nor is should this be any cause of concern as volatility is simply a part of the bear/bull market cycles that is imminent within all assets, especially in decentralized ones.

I believe that is basically what a lot of people thought about bitcoin when they were getting into this market and that is one of the reasons we keep seeing a lot of whining. It has happened before and I am pretty sure that it will happen again.

Sometimes, I get to wonder if some people actually understand at all how market is fashioned or how it works, and until they come with terms to reality that market will always fluctuate before we will start to get people becoming reasonable with their assumptions or expectations.

No, of course not. But observe where we are in terms of rate of adoption. Bitcoin is still very young in that regard.

Plus scarcity, as perceived by us, also increases demand, and Bitcoin is provably scarce.