Bitcoin Forum

As of press time, I am having a sigh of relief because bitcoin is back on the $8,000+ zone and hopefully in the next few days there can some pressure for it to go upwards. Now, there is a resurrection of the debate whether Satoshi Nakamoto designed bitcoin from its foundation to be a Store of Value (SoV) or primarily a Peer-to-Peer cash. Both sides are presenting their arguments well with evidence and proofs included.

However, I could not understand...can't we have bitcoin function as both which can make it much better and far more attractive than the physical gold? Or am I missing something here which I probably don't catch up?

Well, that debate was took over the years between these two. I'm sure it's originally designed as peer-to-peer cash as per the whitepaper, but when the high volatility strikes, it becomes more complicated as for others and it somewhat becomes a store of value as it has finite numbers of supply.
Which I don't think why Satoshi never realise this stuff and come up with an idea of cash instead of store value. Or if satoshi did explain some of this stuff when he still around the forum?

there is absolutely no argument about what bitcoin is and what Satoshi created bitcoin to be. it is a currency as it has always been and as the bitcoin paper is calling it a "peer to peer digital cash". what different people treat bitcoin as is a different matter. usually because price is always rising people tend to see bitcoin as an investment rather than a currency which is why they have invented the store of value concept and have been advertising it ever since the last big rise and high fees of 2017ish.

If you look into the history of various forms of money and how they evolved over their lifetimes SoV always comes before a MoE. Why would anyone want to spend a deflationary currency? Once some stability is reached (5+ years away) its utility as a MoE will become more prominent.

Bitcoin is not made to be a SoV.Bitcoin is made mainly for p2p cash/trading,basically a real currency.Bitcoin can be a SoV  of one person but its risky compared to when we store our money using traditional things made to  be an SoV like gold or real estate.Bitcoin is made to be a currency.

gresham's law agrees insofar as fiat money being more tempting to spend than bitcoin. but what if fiat monies are eventually abandoned and we return to hard money and commodity backed money? in an age characterized by honest money, especially post-mass adoption where bitcoin's speculative value (based on future utility) is gone, i think people would be more inclined to spend it like a medium of exchange.

But it makes sense though, even though bitcoin was invented with the purpose of being a currency, it simply cannot do it right now, it will never work as normal currency, the volatility will always be there, even without it, transaction fees add up if you are using bitcoin for daily transactions, it's also slow, what are you going to do, wait 2 hours for a transaction to confirm to buy coffee?

bitcoin can be a p2p cash and SoV
but bitcoin cant be just a SoV

to be a SoV it has to have value, which is found due to actually being useful and not a crapcoin.
so if bitcoin loses its value as a medium of exchange then its just an empty token

seems your reading too much into the scripted rhetoric. (obvious by the use of 'coffee' out of billions of possible product purchases)

BITCOIN can be a normal currency. its not the fault of the technology that bitcoin is not being utilised to its full potential. the reason its not at its full potential is the 'conservative' devs who want to stifle bitcoin to offer and advertise alternative networks to try getting people off the bitcoin network.

before anyone jumps in defending a dev. remember bitcoin is not some self manifesting/evolving/writing AI. it is just code. and who writes the code... think about it

Bitcoin can't be better than real gold simply because BTC market have much less money than real gold and it is too unsafe. For some reason people don't look at Bitcoin and don't sell all their savings aiming to buy BTC for it. And for the same reason people are not selling all their BTC stashes to buy all those "bitcoin killer" shitcoins.
Bigger and more established market is always the best one.

Ok, let's say you are a normal business, small-medium at most, a bar/restaurant/shop and someone wants to convince you to accept bitcoin as payment, what are you going to tell the owner? What does he stand to gain from it aside from a headache? I really don't see it, do you?

i helped get loads of businesses to accept bitcoin between 2012-2015
if you only knew what happens after the customer walks out after a visa payment. business needs to do chargeback checks. wait for funds to actually arrive in bank account. have to keep transaction receipts for 5 years. has to pay monthly/yearly point of sale equipment costs.

with bitcoin its just a QR code and someone to swap to fiat

And wait for the transaction to be completed which can take hours? How is that going to work when you are buying food, are you going to have to wait for hours for the transaction to complete and confirm? What about all the transaction fees? What about the fact that Bitcoin might just lose 30% of its value overnight, what is the business owner going to do, convert the btc immediately to a stable coin? Pay even more fees when he wants to actually cash out?

Those who are new to BTC only see it is a SoV unfortunately, most of them are unaware about the possibilities that bitcoin offers. Cryptographic security and privacy, no involvement of an intermediary in any case and ease of use.

It ll take a long time for bitcoin to reach satoshi's vision of being purely p2p. I really hope that by the time bitcoin reaches here, there will be no longer any kind of speculation about its value with regard to USD or any FIAT.

take hours? 'coffee' 'value loss over night' - dang your reading some old scripts

did you ever think that bitcoin does not have to be a one world currency for all 7billion people for every product type.
bitcoin can still be a p2p currency for niches

bartabs, gym memberships, 40minute fast food deliveries, restaurant meals.
trying to rule out and stifle bitcoins utility completely and pretend its useless as a p2p just because of chewing gum. is a foolish argument by those that cant think beyond what they been told

we don't need any more evidence that the bitcoin paper that the creator wrote! in that Satoshi doesn't say bitcoin is for people to store their money in as in Store of Value, instead the only thing he says is a payment system without a middleman. that doesn't mean bitcoin is not a store of value, quite the contrary. because bitcoin is a high security currency with appreciating price, it is also a store of value.

It doesn't matter if it was made for X - things change. This simply isn't how money works, no money in existence begun being used as MoE before it had value not even fiat currencies which are backed by no real value. A real currency needs value FIRST. Gold and real estate isn't 'made' to be a SoV the free market decided that they were based on their properties, properties which Bitcoin shares with both of them (e.g. scarcity).

I honestly don't care about what Satoshi designed Bitcoin for. I respect him for inventing Bitcoin, but Satoshi's vision, nor the whitepaper isn't law.

I only care about how it benefits ME and there is not one single entity that can tell me what to or what not to do with my coins. I support anybody's right to use Bitcoin, regardless of me linking people or certain businesses or not. The fact that they can use it shows how powerful this technology really is.

My primary usecase for Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. Fiat does its job well locally as cash, so the incentive to use Bitcoin as cash is pretty low. It is however a great internet currency. I no longer have to use a bank that takes days to move money from one account to another. I can do that with Bitcoin fast and cheap and that 24/7 every single day.

And this is up for debate and I don't think that we will settle this once and for all.

Of course maximalist will wanted to see bitcoin being used as P2P cash. But time has changed, when bitcoin went from $1-$10k then the landscape has evolved.

It's not longer just a P2P but people compare it to gold as as SoV. So it's really up to us bitcoiners on what we are going to used it, how will it benefit and no I'm sure there will be no consensus here.

gold is only SoV because it has utility. take the utility away and no one will want it.
just ask yourself. why is dirt and gold not the same. they both require digging out the ground.

you might say dirt is everywhere. but then go to any gardening centre where bagged dirt(has a purpose) has a pricetag
you might say gold is scarce. but then my dog will only do a couple thousand poo's in its life. anyone want some. its scarce

if gold had no purpose. people wouldnt dig it up and wouldnt value it. so gold needs a purpose/utility first. and then the value is LATER judged by how useful it is, but mainly how much it costs to acquire it.
(if gold could be dug up using a spoon and coffee filter in anyones backyard it would sell for $1 not $1k)

bitcoin as just a SoV wont work without it having function/utility/purpose. no one would value it if it done nothing for people
i can make a database of 200gb. the data does nothing. anyone want it for
145billion? (market cap)
how about $100k per mb?(blockreward)

Bitcoin tends to incline more on the side of being a store of value rather than a peer-to-peer cash which it was intended to be in the first place. Frankly speaking, I don't even know where to spend my bitcoins wherein the merchant directly receives it without having the need for a third-party (if there is one, please let me know). The lack of infrastructure and places to spend bitcoins to is, IMO, one of the driving forces as to why speculation is king for the said cryptocurrency, But yeah, its P2P function/utility still remains even though it's heavily speculated upon by people, and one cannot take that away from bitcoin.

thinking about it.

SoV cant survive as just SoV, but with utility.. it can

however. P2P cash is using the term cash. which implies common/mass population utility.
so maybe cash is the stumbling word.

EG
MoE medium of exchange is currency but not on any common concept of needing mass acceptance. cigarettes in prisons are a currency/MoE but not a MoE in large mass country/continent

remember
MoE: currency(niche adopted)
cash: currency(mass adopted)

so knowing bitcoin doesnt need to be a 'one world currency' or legal tender adopted by a whole country. this leaves bitcoin as a SoV+MoE

SOV is all that Bitcoin needs to amass the most value in the coming decades. I just don't see Bitcoin or any other existing crypto will ever be a form of cash that's better than fiat currencies as stablecoins.

Money needs to be spent without thinking about what the value today is, and that's where stablecoins shine. You also don't have to think about buying back what you spend when your salary is paid out in form of stablecoins.

As we speak stablecoins are already started to get accepted as payment option by third party crypto payment processors, and I think this will continue to happen and they will exceed all cryptos in payment volume eventually.

I am with this perspective. Supposedly, bitcoin should serve as P2P cash, breaking barriers, no boundaries as we say it. But as time goes on, bitcoin becomes valuable in the market and its price is now of worth of value that a holder doesn't want to spend it anymore in unnecessary things. Thus, the formation of SoV concept for most holders. Hoping that one day, it will have another ATH and get rich out of it.  :P

Lol gold does not derive its value from its 10% utility usage globally :D it's scarcity and its un perishable nature that gives gold its value (and time, see below). If we start asteroid mining gold it will be worth a lot less.

For society to converge on a commonly accepted SoV it takes time for people to attribute value towards it which gold has had thousands of years to develop. If all of golds utility went away it would still be mined. Having utility actually decreases a SoV's value due to it being more elastic / effected by market dynamics. 

Your dog poo analogy shows you ignorance of gold :D

Storing value and thus avoiding uncertainty is a purpose, Bitcoin can exist as ONLY a SoV which is great because is LN fails Bitcoin will continue to exist.

the interesting part of it is that each year during the big rises whenever you check the merchant stats who are accepting bitcoin payment, you can see a big increase in their revenues that shows people are spending bitcoin more whenever its price is rising or has risen big time. for example BitPay each years shows a huge spike that resembles the price spike on price charts if you check their yearly stats.

try to break up the concept into stages. separate things.

first. what makes gold different from something else scarce like gems, dogs mess of a particular animal, other metals.
UTILITY. this as one separate thing triggers the NEED for it.

then the value. yes you are correct. golds $1.2k PRICE is not based on the 100% utility. infact the speculation of golds utility is only a couple hundred $ of the current $1200 spot price.
this utility speculation is where people see gold and in high need for it the price moves up and low need goes down.

but there is a point at which people give up wanting to sell down. because there is a bottomline support based on the acquisition costs. no one wants to sell at loss. and ofcourse the hype/FOMO can only go so far up too. so the range and volatility of the speculation area is only about $200-300 ontop of the acquisition costs.

so like i said before. imagine instead of say ~$1k to dig for gold. it only cost $1 in your back yard. people would b happy to sell gold right down to just above $1 because thats still profitable sell.

..
that being said.
to even have people wanting to dig for it to such an extent it costs about $1k an ounce of excavator diesel and labour. there needs to be utility to make people NEED it in the first place. otherwise (like crap coins) people would just speculate on dogs mess where the speculation would be from $0-$couple hundred and volatility would allow the price to dip to zero as it has no purpose/function to keep a bottomline support if speculation died

if you honestly thought gold value on the asset spot market was 100% speculation value. then economics is something you need to either take time learning more about or staying away from.

th reason why bitcoin is in the thousands as oppose to hundreds for other coins of near exact same code. is the acquisition costs. which got so high due to the utility. PoW is thousands of $/btc not pennies, because you can do something with bitcoin(there are merchants and services and until recently fee's were acceptable(but losing that edge in future))

at the moment at ~50exahash puts the bottomline support for btc at ~$5k this is the level where most would refuse to sell below as thats where loses begin. the 'value' ontop up to $8k($3k diffrence) is the speculation bit.

but if you take away the transaction utility of bitcoin and make it just a useless locked database of UTXO. no one will want to mine it and say goodbye to a huge chunk of bottomline support. and then watch the speculative element go crazy from $0 to $FOMO and then tank again. thus completely destablising/removing any 'value' store

"like gems, dogs mess of a particular animal, other metals"

All of these have utility  ???

Gold's value is predominately (99%+) due to it having properties / utility as a SoV. This was formulated over thousands of years of use by humans, utility came AFTER it being valued for just being gold. Do you think ancient civilisations thought wow I can make jewerly with this yellow metal, its valuable. No they found gold and valued it then decided to make jewerly with it.

Its value is based on its scarcity I never said it was based on 100% speculation. I'm economic illiterate? lol you are subscribing to the Labor theory of value which which is a crock of shite and any economist would agree.

Satoshi wanted it to be p2p cash, it's clear from the whitepaper and his posts, but it turned out that Bitcoin doesn't scale quite well, you can't be both p2p and cash so easily. The devs decided that the "p2p" part is much more important than "cash" (cheap and fast transactions), because being decentralized and immutable, and allowing users to use it without ANY middleman is what makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place - remove those things, and it's not Bitcoin anymore. Luckily, Lightning Network makes Bitcoin p2p cash again, and in some ways even better than cash. It will take a bit more to get it polished and adopted, but it's worth the wait.

As stated in Satoshi's own Whitepaper, it's a peer to peer money. From person to person, without more.

those examples were about 'scarce'
"first. what makes gold different from something else scarce "
was the first part of the sentance



gold didnt just be SoV because egyptians said "i found it do you want it, if you do pay me 5 loaves of bread"
it started from realising gold had a purpose. and so they begun mining it, which cost bread to feed the slaves to mine it. so rich egyptians had to buy gold.
over the thousands of years the costs went up from bread costs to excavator and sluice machine diesel and labour costs which total $900 an ounce+.
the speculative area above $900 thats the bit where the price moves up and down the most based on the utility.

but that said it needs utility to even get people to want it.

do you honestly think in historic era's of people just trying to survive by gathering food, making shelter, forging tools.. that they just sat around trading things of no utility...
in history people only done things if it was productive to survival. such as food,tools shelter. i honestly cant believe you think egyptians just traded gold initially for no other reason than it was not sand.

I don't know why some people convince other people that Bitcoin is only good as a store of value. They can knock themselves out buying, and using Bitcoin as payment.

hope this means you have now wised up to want to have bitcoin as a payment method rather than promoting deburdening the network in favour of other networks(ln)

Wised up? Deburdening the network? Plus was I against Bitcoin as a medium of exchange?

No, but the Core developers shouldn't sacrifice decentralization for on-chain transaction throughput. You believe in increasing transaction throughput through increasing the block size. That does not scale the network out. It descales it.

It was designed for both SoV and p2p cash. If not, the deflationary nature of bitcoin wouldn't be necessary. Besides, a currency is supposed to serve both functions. 

Satoshi saved lots of bitcoin in his wallets before dissappearing , this probably suggests he built Bitcoin as a store of value too

I believe Satoshi wanted something we can use as "currency" for the internet, that cannot be taken down. But the way it was designed with the 10 minute confirmation times, and the capped supply, it served more to function as something like "digital gold" more than something like "digital cash".

Yes, Satoshi never thought he would be, in a way, fighting against banks. He created it to be an alternative to banks and not to destroys

not necessarily.
the capped supply means that the total supply and how each block introduces some new amount of bitcoin is defined from the start so we don't continue printing money (like fiat does) limitlessnessly and out of  control. and the 10 minute confirmation time is not a reason for bitcoin not being a currency either.

About limited offer, nothing has to do with being a gold. Dogecoin has no creation limit, but this does not make it a "non-coin"