Oddbean

People are very thin-skinned about what such a character as Saylor says about what Bitcoin is or is not, I have my own criteria, Bitcoin like gold has the duality of store of value and money (although currently it is almost impossible to use gold as money). And I go by what my senses see, not by what some random economist on the internet may tell me. Bicoin is a store of value, peculiar (high volatility in the short term) but a store of value, and if not tell that to those who are able to hold it for 5 years or more. On the other hand it is also money, as much as some people insist on saying it is not, since the first day it has been used to exchange goods and services, as much as some people hate it. Bitcoin is what gold was in its day, a store of value and money.

While the transactions are not as fast as traditional digital payments it's fast enough for the people who want to trade it as a store of value, and if something can be traded it can become centralized. People always say how they're worried about the network centralizing, but never think about the supply centralizing.

So what I'm really saying here is that whether someone thinks it's well enough to use as a currency or not is far less important than the problem of the supply being hoarded because whoever accumulates large sums of value can control the rules in a system of governance. For example in the United States, Billionaires control what legislation is written and what passes the Senate because they can donate either directly to or via through a Lobby firm they hire out. So Senators and house reps actually work for the biggest supply hoarders who actually have ambition to rule, otherwise they don't get those millions for their re-election, or secure themselves a job as a hired legislator after their 12 year limit is up. And if one Senators doesn't listen well I'll have my two thirds majority who do expel you on grounds of expulsion.

At this point bitcoin cannot be said to have ONE use. Because look at all the different uses of it. We didnt know how people would use bitcoin at the start, or even IF people would use it. But it has become used by 10s of millions of people as a store of value. So there is an implicit social contract between the devs, the community and so on to protect those users.

One of the reasons for the birth of Fiat money was the low spatial marketability of gold, i.e., it is very expensive to use for international transactions. Gold is easy to use in face-to-face transactions but even so it is almost impossible to verify its authenticity on the spot. Bitcoin solves these two problems, it has a high spatial salability, that is, I can send it to the other side of the world at almost no cost and almost instantaneously and on the other hand it is very easy to verify its authenticity simply by using its own node.