If not a "store of value" or "medium of exchange" ...

[Darker45]

Do you think it is not a problem when you release all your personal information to the banks and the government agencies?

Do you think it is all right for these institutions to have control over you, and your life, and whatever you earn and spend for, and so on?

Is it not a problem if the central banks print billions worth of money out of thin air?

Do you not see it as a problem when the majority of government transactions are completely concealed from the public?

Do you not care that the value of what we call money right now is completely under the dictation of a few people up there?

Apart from point three, in what way does Bitcoin fix these problems?

I guess you also agree with me on my 5th point?

Cash is untraceable. 

How do you spend cash? It is either you pay it yourself which means your face is exposed to the whole public, or through someone else which is basically the same, or through cards whose companies they came from have complete information about you.

Every time you send or spend bitcoin you leave a part of the spiders web of where that money has been and where it is going.  Just because it isn't a bank account doesn't mean that you can't be traced.  You buy something, then they have your name and address.  You transfer money, then they presumably know who you are and why?  

Well, good luck to them! They can't even trace a handful of individuals stealing billions of USD in BTC from duly registered exchanges. A wider adoption means millions and millions of people, each one with several addresses. 

Who would you trust more, dark web markets and mixers or the government?  Silly question really.

And it therefore deserves an equally silly answer. In terms of shady deals I would rank it this way:
surface web ==> deep web ==> dark web ==> government deals 

It shouldn't be a problem, the government has already all the information needed, what else? Your bank's statement history? They're not allowed in 99% of the countries, it's called financial privacy.

What is called financial privacy is a myth, that is, if we talk of the government not aware of our bank's history. A little suspicion and they are too quick to subject you to some questions, information updates, verification process, and so on, if not outright freezing of account.

Financial privacy is only real if we talk of how exactly the government spend our taxes, how they liquidate them, how they determine how much money they print, etc. 

[pooya87]

based on your comments it seems like you have never been affected by any of the "problems" that is why you don't see them and think there is no problem in first place. but there is. the banks screwing people over every day, governments have their hands in people's pockets, restricting them, controlling and censoring them, and a lot more. bitcoin simply solved a ton of such problems by simply being a decentralized currency. now i can send money from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world without needing to jump through hoops or be restricted/blocked because of crazy governmental rules, sanctions,....

[Wind_FURY]

bitcoin is a store of value. as it first needs to be a store of value to then be a medium of exchange.
by this i mean if having no value, people wont want to exchange it.

I'm not trolling, OK? But I believe we debated about this before, and you said that Bitcoin should be a medium of exchange first to be valuable, and that because of small blocks, Bitcoin cannot be a medium of exchange. Or am I confused?

[jaocoincrypto18]

Bitcoin can be both as it will just depend to crypto users on how they will prepared to use it but mostly used it as an investments to earn more fiat rather than just an ordinary currency that can be use on normal spending.

[LbtalkL]

then what is bitcoin?  A solution in search of a problem?

At first, Bitcoin was a way of confronting a centralized economy; now it is a way of earning thousands of traders and investors. Bitcoin is losing value as people forget the true purpose of the coin

Correct.  It it loses a third of its value in six months then ... it is not a good medium for investors or shopkeepers.

This is precise but that's how cryptocurrency works it is volatile no one can predict where it goes. But, I'm quite confident its value will rise soon.
Having the nature of bitcoin in being decentralized is good enough no one control even government and banks and available to almost everyone in the world.

[thirdprize]

What is called financial privacy is a myth, that is, if we talk of the government not aware of our bank's history. A little suspicion and they are too quick to subject you to some questions, information updates, verification process, and so on, if not outright freezing of account.

Financial privacy is only real if we talk of how exactly the government spend our taxes, how they liquidate them, how they determine how much money they print, etc. 

Crypto is going that way.  The exchanges have the connections between real people and their addresses.  I'm sure if you took Coinbases database and cross referenced it with any dark Web markets customer database you would get a load of matches. 

[franky1]

bitcoin is a store of value. as it first needs to be a store of value to then be a medium of exchange.
by this i mean if having no value, people wont want to exchange it.

I'm not trolling, OK? But I believe we debated about this before, and you said that Bitcoin should be a medium of exchange first to be valuable, and that because of small blocks, Bitcoin cannot be a medium of exchange. Or am I confused?

being a medium of exchange of value. and being a medium of exchange are talking about two different things.
one being physically able to pass to different owners. and the other being the desire to accept is as a payment for goods or services.

the main smart community know to be a medium of exchange of value for goods and services means that it first needs to have value.

take for instance 2009-2010.
bitcoin functionally could pass between owners. but no one valued it at any $ value. it wasnt until it started costing people money to mine it and someone wanted a pizza for it that it then became a medium of exchange of value for goods and services... because guess what. someone put a value to it and another person agreed it was worth a couple pizzas for that and then the exchange for goods and services started

[hv_]

bitcoin is a store of value. as it first needs to be a store of value to then be a medium of exchange.
by this i mean if having no value, people wont want to exchange it.

I'm not trolling, OK? But I believe we debated about this before, and you said that Bitcoin should be a medium of exchange first to be valuable, and that because of small blocks, Bitcoin cannot be a medium of exchange. Or am I confused?

It must be 'easy' exchangable to get value at all - if u cannot transfer, nobody wants it / can handle it -> useless

Bitcoin should be P2P cash - per definition.  so it should be free to transfer

[Niya]

Because of many things (high fees, long confirmation time, lack of many merchants accept it, etc.) Bitcoin isn't a medium of exchange, yet. The majority of BTC users are just traders, speculators or long term holders.

[mk4]

People call it a store of value, but anything that loses that much % is an extremely bad store of value.

Not much of a good of a store of value for economically healthy countries. Think more of economically-wrecked countries as of now.

Speculative Investment : Sure, but due to the price drop after the 20k bubble, not a good investment.

Yea, and that sort of "bubble" isn't the first time it's happened with bitcoin. It just took time for a new ATH.

Medium of exchange : Due to it's volatility, a poor medium of exchange.

Same as my first point.

Yeah , Bitcoin just kinda sucks.

That's debatable. Probably for some people yes, for now. You don't expect a very young asset to be stable in price without a centralized authority. We going to need a lot of time and liquidity for bitcoin to be stable in price. It's just a matter of 'when' in my opinion.

[Findingnemo]

then what is bitcoin?  A solution in search of a problem?

Bitcoin is definitely a medium of exchange with the high volatile price,it may sounds awful now but in future the things will changes.And bitcoin is definitely better medium of exchange than those inflative paper money.

Solution can be found only after bitcoin investors treat it as currency over trading asset.

[buwaytress]

bitcoin functionally could pass between owners. but no one valued it at any $ value. it wasnt until it started costing people money to mine it and someone wanted a pizza for it that it then became a medium of exchange of value for goods and services... because guess what. someone put a value to it and another person agreed it was worth a couple pizzas for that and then the exchange for goods and services started

Not trolling or picking arguments, and I'm hardly an economist, but someone putting a value to Bitcoin doesn't make it a store of value, not automatically, does it?

From what I understand or remember, the very first exchange that sold Bitcoin (or bought it) assigned a dollar value to it based on the estimated cost to produce 1 unit (in terms of electricity consumed to mine it).

So while pizza day was the recognised exchange of goods for bitcoin, it was still a rather vague assignment of value.

[Turk Ace]

For me, it seems like a little bit of both. I see it more like stocks but the "stocks" have their own value and can be traded directly for other "stocks"(coins/tokens) without first going to fiat then back to "stocks" again.
Basically like stocks you can trade directly and some companies and places accept these ''stocks" since they can sell them when they please or even trade them again to anyone else willing to take bitcoin or crypto as payment options.

[squatter]

freedom : No , you are solely dependent on the rich elite to process transactions

What would you prefer, a network secured by CPU miners? Bitcoin is orders of magnitude more secure than that. We're only dependent on the rational mining incentive baked into the protocol. Miners want fees; we pay them to secure our transactions. The fee market is basic proof that it works.

privacy   : No, Public Blockchain, 3rd parties are required to obstruct view

What's your basis for comparison? Bank accounts? Credit cards? And what about CoinJoin?

[franky1]

Not trolling or picking arguments, and I'm hardly an economist, but someone putting a value to Bitcoin doesn't make it a store of value, not automatically, does it?

From what I understand or remember, the very first exchange that sold Bitcoin (or bought it) assigned a dollar value to it based on the estimated cost to produce 1 unit (in terms of electricity consumed to mine it).

So while pizza day was the recognised exchange of goods for bitcoin, it was still a rather vague assignment of value.

yes you are correct. just having a PRICE does not mean it has a store of VALUE. but again no one would exchange something that had no value, EG would you exchange your house for a jelly baby... no. because you dont value the jellybaby as much as the house.

i have a bag of dogs mess. just becaus i put a $10 price tag on it, doesnt mean the dogs mess is valued at $10

as for price vs value. they are not the same thing.
this is the most biggest thing people do not realise.
bitcoins price of $8000 at the moment is not its value

some that are used to gold investing know the spot PRICE is not  the gold value

the pizza thing was 2 pizzas for like 20k coins. so like $30 for 20k btc = 1btc=$0.0015 that was the price not the value.
value is the amount once you take away all the wishy washy stuff and get to the bare bones bottomline of it.. not th high, profitable price someone can charge
over simplified, its like the minimum the price has been in the last month would be the value, as no one wants to sell below it, so everyones agreeing they value it at such in that period.. where as the top/ATH price for the last month is not its value

in retail, the recommended retail price is not the value. the price is not the value, but the value is a discount or last low price it has been recently..
too many people foolishly think a price chart is a value, which is where they get confused and see last week bitcoin was $10k and is now $8k and think it lost alot of value. when infact the value could have always been this low and now the price is at value making it a very good price to buy at.

i personally have not treated the PRICE as value. i have done maths on mining costs and also the long term MINIMUM the coin sold for in a period and treated that as the value line

for instance in summer 2018 the PRICE went way above $6k. but i treated the value as being $5.8k before the autumn dip due to cheaper mining. so yea during summer when people were stupidly saying its gaining and losing value when it was above $6k i was still settled with valuing it at $5.8k and when the prices got close to $5.8k i said it was a good value price, and when it was way higher i said it was an inflated not so good valued price

[maianh09]

Bitcoin was created to replace Fiat, and it was Satoshi's idea to create Bitcoin. Bitcoin currently recognized in many countries and used as payment currency. In some countries where Bitcoin is banned, it has become a portfolio to help investors seek high returns every year.

[Darker45]

What is called financial privacy is a myth, that is, if we talk of the government not aware of our bank's history. A little suspicion and they are too quick to subject you to some questions, information updates, verification process, and so on, if not outright freezing of account.

Financial privacy is only real if we talk of how exactly the government spend our taxes, how they liquidate them, how they determine how much money they print, etc. 

Crypto is going that way.  The exchanges have the connections between real people and their addresses.  I'm sure if you took Coinbases database and cross referenced it with any dark Web markets customer database you would get a load of matches. 

In a way, yes. That is the cost of mainstreaming cryptocurrency perhaps? Exchanges, for example, cannot always be on the run. They will have to somehow find a place to settle down and do their business. That means they will have to undergo all kinds of registrations and approvals and regular audits. And by going through all of them, they are submitting themselves to the system, to the existing laws. They simply cannot say no. And so they are now asking KYC, other verification, and set up limits.

It seems to me that if we stick to the real essence of crypto, we'll have to go with DEx and perhaps even avoid the main road. 

[Wind_FURY]

bitcoin is a store of value. as it first needs to be a store of value to then be a medium of exchange.
by this i mean if having no value, people wont want to exchange it.

I'm not trolling, OK? But I believe we debated about this before, and you said that Bitcoin should be a medium of exchange first to be valuable, and that because of small blocks, Bitcoin cannot be a medium of exchange. Or am I confused?

It must be 'easy' exchangable to get value at all - if u cannot transfer, nobody wants it / can handle it -> useless

Bitcoin should be P2P cash - per definition.  so it should be free to transfer

But if no one wants to hold it, no one would accept it as a medium of exchange. "Medium of exchange" is not only for its sake. It also has to be a store of value, for later use as a medium of exchange.

[hv_]

bitcoin is a store of value. as it first needs to be a store of value to then be a medium of exchange.
by this i mean if having no value, people wont want to exchange it.

I'm not trolling, OK? But I believe we debated about this before, and you said that Bitcoin should be a medium of exchange first to be valuable, and that because of small blocks, Bitcoin cannot be a medium of exchange. Or am I confused?

It must be 'easy' exchangable to get value at all - if u cannot transfer, nobody wants it / can handle it -> useless

Bitcoin should be P2P cash - per definition.  so it should be free to transfer

But if no one wants to hold it, no one would accept it as a medium of exchange. "Medium of exchange" is not only for its sake. It also has to be a store of value, for later use as a medium of exchange.

We know, it is chicken & egg.

But Bitcoin is fully digital / electronic

So it MUST be the cheapest and easy medium of exchange - it's purely intuitive and it is even TOP LEVEL ADVERTISED as the NEW  e-cash

so what is the issue ? BTC is not  Bitcoin and money any more - it cannot be a store of value for its only sake  

[teosanru]

then what is bitcoin?  A solution in search of a problem?

It is a medium of Exchange but just not quite the mainstream one. Which means Bitcoin was originally created for this purpose but even the creators never thought of the deflationary problem of bitcoin which will lead to increase and fall in its prices so sharply. Unfortunately due to this reason Bitcoin today is nothing but a trading commodity. Cryptocurrencies these days are not doing anything good than just helping people trade a living out of them. Even in the phase of extreme bearishness people have found their way out to trade by using the Futures and shorting them. So all in all today BTC's 70% use is merely as a trading commodity.