Please someone re-explain Bitcoin to me ?

[akaki]

In my understanding, Bitcoin was created following the financial crisis of 2009 where some major institutions went bankrupt and others bailed out by the government with taxpayers hard earned money.
From this perspective, the intention of Satoshi Nakamoto was creating a decentralized financial system that is resistant to all kind of evil manipulations we know, thus preserving people’s savings. However, roughly 15 years later, and passed the very high volatility of the beginnings, the question is: did Bitcoin start fulfilling its promises?

Currently Bitcoin is not really used as a decentralized money in common daily transactions. Thus, we can’t say it’s a commodity money backed by the trust in the Bitcoin blockchain and limited supply of Bitcoin itself. It does not even have the capacity to do so due to the blocks limited size, and the 10 min intervals that are too small to save data of transactions; assuming Bitcoin blockchain is at least intended to replace some day a network like VISA or Mastercard. Bitcoin Cash is a better candidate for this.

If Bitcoin is not a money, it’s not behaving as a raw commodity neither. There is no constant substantial positive correlation with gold. Sometimes they even show an inverse correlation depending on the US monetary policy and geopolitical context. Therefore, Bitcoin is rather classed as a high-risk asset increasing alongside tech stocks when the market is optimistic about the economic growth.
All this being said, anyone is welcomed to contribute with facts and perhaps also data, to an objective definition or classification of Bitcoin. In current times of uncertainty, this is important, and no one can ignore that gold’s recent +60% increase in just 10 months is a strong signal of an approaching storm.

So why should we continue trusting Bitcoin if, during hardships, gold is the one that truly delivers ? Why should we invest even a fraction of our savings in Bitcoin out of fear of a global economic collapse, if gold will ultimately protect those who hold it ? Can we say that the remedy to the dollar’s shortcomings is not Bitcoin, but rather public financial education to be able to fight on equal footing, equal access to markets, robust government regulation, and honest political leadership ?

[retaur]

Honest political leadership? Where are you!

Bitcoin can do near instant transactions over the lightning network so it can be used as means of payment that way.

For large payments and transfers, Bitcoin wins on fees (especially internationally), a lot of places charge high FX conversion rates as well as static flat fees on international spending which can make things go quite high.

Gold is a safe haven asset because it's got it's proof of concept done. People know where they stand with Gold for now. Give it a few centuries, when space mining's a thing or we have lab grown gold and you'll see it not being quite so valuable (if that happens of course).

Bitcoin's only 16 and it's got a higher valuation than a lot of companies that are well structured. It's got a limited amount of circulating supply which will only decrease as time passes and it's managed to remain a secure distributed ledger for the majority of the time it's been running.

But if you don't think it's right for you, don't invest.