Oddbean

Gold was the unit of account for barely 5 decades, in the 19-20th century. Silver or a dual silver-gold system in which silver was the most commonly circulating medium has historically been the commodity-based currency/unit of account world wide. There are good reasons for this, and they are the same that make BTC a terrible currency while being perfect money as a store of value and as property.

I think the indivisible nature of gold allowed for silver to have the spotlight. Bitcoin is different in that we have sats. One bitcoin can hold much more value (and if will) than one ounce of gold or a gold coin. But it’s possible bitcoin always stays a store of value and something else based on bitcoin becomes the value of exchange. Or the states prevail and we just have a fancy useless asset 🤷‍♂️

Even today when BTC's value (market cap) still has to grow at least by one order of magnitude, its costs of transaction are too high and its deflationary issuance makes it too valuable to spend. I posted a noted recently about how in the Euro zone we have SEPA, basically instantly zero-cost transmitted fiat, bank account to bank account. In Spain there's this thing called Bizum, phone number to phone number, obviously linked to bank accounts, but again, free and instant, with a couple of taps on the screen of your phone. The case for a daily use currency for spending is already covered solved by fiat. Plus, fiat is never going back to the box now that it's out. Not for as long as States exist. Especially not when Bitcoin devs keep relegating anonymity and privacy, which would be the case for bitcoin use as a replacement of increasingly disappearing fiat cash.

maybe so but we have post 1971 dollars now which collapsed thus the new one, and before that it collapsed leading to the gold confiscation, and so on and so on bank run da de da it all looks rosy right now but the fundamentals of money being used as an instrument of fraud by ruling class inherently causes it to eventually fail and people revert to other things, like the notgeld of weimar germany except when it happens this time, bitcoin is a lot more ready to replace it completely

You're conflating one instance of one fiat currency (the current US dollar) with "fiat". Fiat currencies collapse all the time, that's an obvious thing. Doesn't mean that fiat as a technology is being abandoned.

fiat as a technology has a history of around 600 years if you count the beginning as the chinese invention of bank notes and the history of commodity currencies is much longer and persists in the way that people prefer cash, even with the incredible amounts of resources being diverted to push people onto electronic payment networks those electronic payment networks, and the CBDCs they want to replace them with, are going to have problems with downtime, and the more people's weeeks get ruined the more interested they become in networks that don't have downtime caused by human error this is how technology advances, and it's inevitable