Oddbean

I will politely disagree: Smart contract blockchains can be argued to be superior to BTC for thy execution of contracts. But, payment should be in BTC, not in the smart contract "crypto" itself. Separating the smart contract from currency is more practical and involves less crapcoin nonsense.

I wasn't even thinking about smart contracts. Just basic real time retail. BTC can't do it, simple as that. The market has long decided that the instrument for payments is stable coins. That's what people who *actually* use crypto for payments want because it does exactly what they need. And yes, if we go into smart contract capabilities, then there are even more options. That's why that piece of news about BitcoinOS and Cardano the other day grabbed my attention: they say it does what you just said -- use BTC to operate on a their smart-contract chain, but pay and settle in BTC (through something they call Babel Fees, apparently). It seems like an attractive proposition (if only I trusted the tech and someone gave me a convincing, complete explanation...) Anything big, like inter-bank settlements, can and will be settled in BTC onchain, that much I think is true. Just as it can be settled in any other reserve assets.

i thought that lightning works? or are you saying for large payments it can be finnicky? if a large vendor like Apple wallet runs a lightning node, would this solve all the large payment lightning issues?

LN doesn't solve the issue that you're using store of value as medium of exchange, which is my main point. What alternatives exist to BTC as currency in the "crypto" world, I don't know in detail because I don't pay much attention.

It sucks as a medium of exchange because only .01% of the people you trade with, use it. Simple as that. If 100% of people you want to trade with, use bitcoin, it is a phenomenal medium of exchange. Stablecoins aren’t better at anything. The network is USD, and every person on earth you would trade with, either directly or indirectly uses it.

My experience is bitcoin is superior and I prefer it with every transaction. I will use stablecoins only if there is no alternative because the slippage is high, and large amounts of change $10-$30 are essentially dust because the amount is too small to get back into bitcoin or any other usable form. Stablecoins are complete shite.

It sucks as MoE because it is designed in a way that makes it an excellent, if not the ultimate, store of value. That's also what makes it an excellent, if not the ultimate, reserve asset to back currency with.

That it has value is what will make it viable as a medium of exchange. Just because fiat sucks as a store of value, does not mean we need to trade with garbage and save in bitcoin. That is a fiat paradigm. Bitcoin isn’t the dominant medium of exchange because it is not the dominant money. This is part of the monetezation process. Wanting it to be the medium of exchange, before it is the dominant store of wealth, is putting the cart before the horse. If only .01% of people are using it, how can it possibly be the medium of exchange?

There is no need for government to back anything. Currency has historically been and can be again privately issued. For instance, Tether. If they back USDT with BTC instead of fiat trash, with a certain level of auditing and proof of reserves, won't you trust it?

Would I trust it? Maybe for a small amount I didn’t care about losing. But what is the point? Why would anyone want to receive Zimbabwe dollars over USD? That is what USD is compared to BTC - it’s Zimbabwe dollars. having something to trade that reliably loses value is not required for economic activity - if it were, why isn’t Argentina1000x more productive than the United States?

Yes to both questions. But Saif didn't write the Holy Sacred Book, he just put his very valid opinions together. Which I share to a very large extent. I just think that you can have money that's currency, and money that's store of value, that they don't *need* to be conflated and that in BTC's case, they clearly aren't.

Why trade an abstraction of the thing, when you can trade the actual thing itself? I’m not sure the reasoning: do you think the currency has to bleed value to encourage people to spend it? Or do you think there is a technical limitation of bitcoin?

Ok I misunderstood your position then, I thought you were saying bitcoin can’t be a medium of exchange because it stores value. Technically I don’t think we need currency to scale bitcoin. Fedi mints, LN, or something else can do this much better.

And I can’t say that I’ve ever not been able to make a transaction that I wanted to make because I couldn’t , because fees or something prevented me. I have however passed on using Stablecoins because of the high slippage and difficulty getting rid of the excess change

OK, so let's not speculate and go back to my initial point, which is simply theoretical: Aren't the currency function and the store of value function inherently at odds, due to a difference in something as fundamental as the need/convenience of a capped/uncapped supply? I argue they are, and that BTC by design is good at the latter. So insisting that it must do the former as well is foolish. That's what I'd like to see arguments against.