I'm not sure doing this would decrease your risk of loss. Bitcoin is far more volatile than the euro and if a country like Italy crashed out of the EU or instituted its own currency, Bitcoin would likely still be more volatile than the euro. If you wanted to temporarily protect your currency, you would probably want to exchange it to the US dollar because it would absolutely hold its value better than Bitcoin over a couple weeks or months if the euro was experiencing Italy-based fluctuations. Bitcoin could be ok, but when there's economic uncertainty, could be isn't good enough. You want actual safety.

Economics and history are the two most important subjects you can study to have an understanding of the reason why the world is the way it is. History is about past politics and economics is about current politics. Much understanding of history is an understanding of economic realities of the past. Economics is the single greatest influence on geopolitics and informs why and how countries treat each other. If more people studied economics and history, I think we'd have a much better and more peaceful world.

Crowd funding will never adequately fund the infrastructure products as needed to complete them. The point about such projects is they increase the overall welfare of a nation and should be borne by all citizens then because it's for the common good. A better economy improves the lives of all citizens. There's always going to be a group of people opposed to paying for anything, but they're living off the benefits of having those previous infrastructure projects completed, and they fail to see this as hypocritical.

Precisely, gold is a poor investment for wealth accumulation, but it's a very good store of wealth over very long periods of time (at least decades). Shorter than that, gold can be fairly volatile and the risk of loss is higher. People advocating for gold investment to "make money" don't know what they're talking about. They think a rise in gold prices over 50 years means they made money and not that inflation has pushed the price of everything equally, including gold, so that they really have no more wealth than when they started.

Safest doesn't mean best. If you're "investing" in gold, your strategy ought to be wealth maintenance, not wealth accumulation. People who invest in gold are already rich and looking to maintain that level of wealth in the face of inflation. That's why it's traditionally safe (over very long time periods), because gold tends to track inflation. The "increase" in the price of gold isn't anything more than the cost of everything else rising faster in an economy; this depreciation of the dollar pushes the price of gold "up," but in real terms, you generally can expect to have the same amount of wealth as when you started. In contrast to the stock market, which actually creates returns above the inflation rate, gold is an inferior investment if you're trying to become richer than you are currently. Over long time horizons, which smooths out the variance of both, the stock market wins.

Printing money doesn't make a country richer. Money is a representation of wealth, not actual wealth. Actual wealth comes from resources and demand for products you create. A country cannot print money and create wealth for this reason. The underlying goods/services that money represents has to be created for money printing not to have an inflationary effect. If the level of money rises along with a rise in goods/services created by that same economy, then the money printed represents the rising value of wealth in the economy. Without it, all the money is worth less.

Anyone who's still saying $30,000 is a hopeless dreamer. We're seeing the rationalization that was abandoned in the great hype of last year. My own personal opinion, as someone who still owns Bitcoins, is that the price is probably still far too high and will continue to drop as the hype and vagueness about the "potential" continues to fall away in the face of what Bitcoin is actually used for (not much besides speculation) and the realization that it's not solving the world's great economic problems like people unrealistically expected it to. All those people who piled in last year to push the price to $19,000 weren't doing so because they thought it was going to change the world, it was because they got sucked into the hype cycle and were trying to get rich.

Some countries have natural advantages in production of certain products, so it wouldn't make sense to buy something that is domestically produced that is more expensive than buying the same or better product from overseas for less money. This is the advantage of global trade, it makes everyone richer by trading the products a nation naturally has an advantage in producing, thereby cutting down on waste and inefficiency. The most important element in economics is the efficient use of limited resources, and everything that improve efficiency is good for everyone.

I think the boards are more or less just the manifestation of the overall sentiment in the market. When the price is rising, you get inundated with useless drivel about going to the moon and lambos. When the price is falling, you get inundated with useless drivel about losing all your investment and going broke. In either case, the quality of the posts is extremely low and 90% nonsense hype, the only difference is in what direction it is oriented (positive vs. negative) which mirrors the correct price trajectory. Nobody with enough Bitcoin to matter to the market is going to take any action based on a bunch of rankless BCT profiles posting about it, so it shouldn't credibly be viewed as the motivation of those posts.

Is gold actually growing in price or is your local currency just depreciating in value and gold is staying stable relative to that decline? The thing about gold is it's not a good investment. It's not a productive asset, so it doesn't produce any income. What it is primarily is a hedge against inflation, and in that it functions pretty well over long periods of time. In shorter time frames, it experiences some volatility that could result in loss of capital, but the longer the time horizon, generally the better gold performs in holding value (as opposed to creating value). To create value, there isn't much better option that the stock market or real estate. Both are productive assets that have a leg up on gold.

What history of resilience can something that is only 10 years old have? There's no track record here to bank on and throughout its short life, Bitcoin has never been stable but rather ultra volatile. A price drop from $19,000 to $6,000 is not a "price fluctuation" but a price crash. And based on the current trend of ever-increasing lows, it is not over yet. I don't think anyone can reasonably have any idea when the drop will stop, and anyone who tells you they can shouldn't be believed. These things aren't knowable, all there is is speculation. Speculation for the ultimate speculative asset.

This is categorically false. 1) Bitcoin is taxable. 2) You are required to pay taxes on crypto gains, whether it's Bitcoin or any altcoin. 3) Its status as a currency has no bearing on whether or not it is taxed. If you were exchanging currencies, you would have to pay tax on any gains realized there too. So even if you consider it a currency, you have to pay tax. 4) You are required to pay taxes based on income and capital gains. Transacting in crypto is not a get out of tax free card. 5) Whether it is decentralized or not has no bearing on whether it can be taxed. It is both decentralized and fully taxable, and you are required to pay taxes on it.

I don't know that anyone would say that because it doesn't at all seem to be true. Economic growth comes from a production base that produces more goods/services than previously existed, and more consumption of those goods/services, not from more money in the system. If you print a trillion extra dollars and release it into the economy, the only thing you've done is created inflation, you haven't grown the economy at all. The only way inflation doesn't occur is when the rate of monetary expansion matches the rate of natural economic expansion. Because that is practically impossible to achieve, the Fed's stated goal is inflation of 2%, which offers a predictable range to strive for. By phrasing the argument as you have, you've constructed a strawman for the purpose of creating a rebuttal, but neither the premise or the rebuttal tracks very closely with what actually happens.

The basis for which it was created might become void, but that doesn't mean it goes away. At this point, BCH has value for the same reason BTC does. It has a very minimum amount of baseline utility and everyone just uses it to speculate and hope to get rich. That's the majority of the use of any altcoin at this point. If Lightning Network gets up and running and they iron out all the kinks and vulnerabilities, BTC and BCH I expect will continue on very much unchanged.

You must be quite insecure in your points if you have to wind up your own posts with so much bluster before getting to anything that resembles an intelligent counter point, although with the amount of shitposting that goes on in your typical response, calling it "intelligent" is being generous.

As an example, you posted about how automation was going to create jobless people who will no longer be contributing to demand for the products created by those automated jobs, and when I pointed out the superficiality of that sentiment and countered with the fact that this hasn't proven out in practice, you tried to cover up for the fact that you had no response by accusing me of changing the point somewhat by adding in outsourcing. In case you didn't notice, and you clearly didn't, whether the job is lost to outsourcing or automation, the lost job is lost and it doesn't change the fact that the US was the manufacturing hub of the world and now it isn't, and we're not a destitute country like you would have to believe if buying into your premise. Your second paragraph evidently assumes that once you lose your job, you drop out of the demand pool forever. I won't bother responding to that and give you the benefit of the doubt that you don't actually believe that.

The price rises and falls rapidly because Bitcoin is essentially not used for anything except speculation. Just as everyone one was piling in last year to speculate on the price rise, so are people now piling out speculating on the price fall. At least if Bitcoin had a general baseline utility, it would be much more stable, but everyone is just chasing gains and hoping to get rich by trading it. That's a horrible attribute for an asset you want to have long term stability.

If this is repeated, soon the only people who will have Bitcoin are the small number of suckers who bought it every time the market dropped, and then you'll have a small group of people who own a large amount of Bitcoin with nobody to sell it to. Owning all or almost all of an asset that isn't valuable is not a good place to be. So the folly of buying something just because it's dropping in price should be pretty evident. If we're in the middle of the bubble bursting and it never comes back, this is not a good time to be buying. The problem is you can never know if this is the case until afterwards. Your risk is very high, even if you refuse to recognize it.

This paragraph contradicts itself. If the GS was fundamentally no different than today's fiat money, there would be no reason that the "elites" would need to own enough gold to back up the paper money since the paper money was created out of thin air and propped up with state power and had absolutely no tie to gold. It is because it was fundamentally different in function that the change was necessary. The GS backed paper money by allowing people to exchange it for gold the equivalent in gold. That is fundamentally different than the fiat money system we currently have.

Physical fiat money, I could see since most advanced economies have been moving in that direction for years, ever since paper checks started acting as an analog for cash. Credit cards soon started eating up market share, and that pace continues to accelerate now that everything is digital. Physical fiat will be replaced by digital fiat, but I don't see digital fiat being replaced by something else.

The easy acquisitions of new investors has already been had. That's what pushed the price up so much last year so quickly. Now we're faced with most likely supply increasing faster than the pace of new Bitcoin buyers, which is why the price is marred is a slow and steady decline. With the hype and mania that gripped the market last year, and the number of people who are sitting on massive losses, I wouldn't expect that type of mania to come again until the next halving, when people will stupidly expect the halving must mean the price will double.