Quote from: johnyj on April 20, 2013, 10:41:58 PM

In a fiat money inflated world, there is no reliable long term medium of saving: House will depreciation, gold is not convenient to use, bond have risk of default, stock will crash when recession strikes ... Bitcoin is almost a perfect store of value due to its technology advantage and limited supply

When you buy a house, you are paying the salary of the workers that build it, the margins of the constructor, creating business for the raw material producers, etc...By doing this you are creating wealth that it disseminates by the society. When you buy bonds you allow countries to build infrastructures that ease and accelerate commercial development. When you buy stocks you help sound enterprises to expand, investigate, grow, create employment and pay your salary. Money in movement creates wealth.

When your just store your Money in gold, bitcoin or under your bed, you are effectively taking out all that power to actively create wealth from the economy, and you are actually producing an economic slowdown. You just become an economic parasite that not only do not contribute to economy, but benefit from the work, intelligence and the willingness to take risk of all the others that are making your country grow and be a better place to live, while doing nothing.

Controlled and not artificially manipulated inflation is a socially good think, because it damages the hoarders that don't produce nothing, and obliges them to lend, invest or use their money if they don't want to see it slowly disappear. Deflation is socially bad because it produces just the opposite.

What bitcoin should have done for the economy is to eliminate credit card processors, the banks and the political and economical barriers and at the some time protect you from artificial inflation. All that money that otherwise would end making the rich richer, would be injected to the social economy, accelerating wealth creation and distribution. That's the VALUE I thought bitcoin had, and that's why I adopted it.

As it is now, bitcoin is just $1,400m of wealth taken from economy and kept in a freezer. Just a poorer version of gold, way more risky and with no industrial uses. If global economy collapses, gold still would be valuable, unlike bitcoin.

I spent the last weeks painfully collecting and analyzing the few and fractional real data that exist about bitcoin economy: what it shows is that in the most optimistic case the monthly commercial revenue is now $35m, mostly from socially undesirable activities like gaming and drugs. Sure It will grow if bitcoin does not collapse before, very fast at the beginning but after that, we already have data from other similar game-changing technology like online commerce that took 10 years to multiply by 4 its volume. No way that the real value of bitcoins reach the one assumed by its market capitalization in at least 5 years.