a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00

Depends on what you're doing with it. If you're putting dollars into an ATM at the gas station and thinking you'll get a useful means of exchange, that was never going to happen. Bitcoin won't ever get above 600k transactions a day. SWIFT is at 35 million.

But mutual funds can't be moved except once a day. Bonds are even harder to sell. It doesn't have to be trivial to move in order to be valuable.

If I'm a Chinese oligarch with a fair amount of earnings that I want to protect from the vagaries of the CCP, I have ample reason to diversify into Bitcoin. For one thing, three out of four miners are behind the Great Firewall. For another, it's harder to seize than gold or currency. For another, it's much easier to access than foreign holdings of real estate or stocks.

If I have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value bottled up in deep storage where I don't need to move it, Bitcoin looks like another gold hedge. "Another gold hedge" not being in the vocabulary of your average 20something digital libertarian, they decry the death of bitcoin.