Rpietila, so you are saying that new made bitcoin millionaires have the power to do wonderful things for the world if I understand you correctly. What makes you think that these millionaires will be different than old school millionaires?
Very loaded question, as the majority of old-world millionaires are pretty much regular people. I'd call this a false choice. (In addition to the obvious answers you will get from this forum, asking you to consider the demographic likely to have stumbled into large BTC holdings -- i.e. engineers, tech-minded folks, cryptonerds and others with strong libertarian tendencies on average.) Again, either the division of the monetary policy in the US pushed you above middle class, or below it. It's the banking cartels and conglomerates, controlled also largely by brainwashed and clueless but regular people who genuinely believe that things are as they are through the magic of capitalism and hard work. Very greedy few at the very top deliberately make the policies that have caused these problems. Everyone else is mostly guilty by not paying enough attention to stop it.
The beauty of a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, where the key attributes for this are no/negligible remission and transaction costs and a fixed-supply, is its ability to undermine a huge swath of the traditional tricks in the bankster playbook for siphoning the world's GDP delta. As the world GDP is around 4 or 5% annually, with a fixed currency you could expect holdings (literal holdings) to gain that amount in purchasing power. As it is, our inflation is pegged deliberately at 3%, and may be more since we can't verify this -- and it is more in many countries, and is almost never less (Japan is near the bottem, as they have chosen 1.5% in the recent depressing decision to go inflationary due increasing difficulty competing in trade with countries artificially-boosting their currencies).
Q.E.D.,
anyone in the US not making an average of at least perhaps 8%, maybe more, on their net worth, is invisibly bleeding money to this deliberate black hole. Ergo, I fully expect BTC to appreciate at a minimum of this amount vs. USD. This assumes the supply-demand ratio remains unchanged (currently demand increases are far outweighing supply increases, which themselves of course are an ever-decreasing function). This also ignores any actual devaluation of USD which may become a factor soon as well.
For these reasons, it is an astronomically poor and uninformed economic decision to not hold BTC as your store of value, and conduct the maximum possible amount of commerce in that currency. I hope we see an explosion of solutions like Coinkite and "reloadable" debit cards (working on the latter myself with the ol' think tank) to permit the ease of users only converting to fiat when necessary and at the last possible minute.
I have an entirely different viewpoint. I think capital is dying by 2033. I don't think there is any level of gain that will cross the chasm to 2033.
Still applicable, and will be applicable for a while. I mean, some economists have written on this as early as 2003, so this is not so hot news to those who followed recent developments.
I think my unique insight (which those others did not publish) is that finance and capital itself is losing relevance as the fixed capital industrial age dies.
I am asserting that storing money won't be as valuable an activity any more, because top-down money can't buy knowledge. Unlike manual labor, knowledge is not fungible from person-to-person, thus it can't be bought. It spawns from accretive, bottom-up activity.
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Thought_Isn't_Fungible
I agree with the 'can't buy knowledge' part. Internet has made the cost of most knowledge almost free or next to nothing, something that people in the pre-internet era couldn't dream of. Hopefully these large amounts of knowledge available can bring some quality changes.
Nothing is free. Everything has a cost of human time. What you mean is the access to information is more open thus more freedom. Freedom and openness is not the same as free meaning no cost.
That is part of the rationale of why Eric S Raymond proposed the name "open source" instead of "free software".
Freedom of information publishing and access enables the division-of-labor to increase, i.e. for expertise to become more focused. Which increases the collective knowledge of society, trade, and prosperity, but this is not the same as the knowledge is free.
The purpose of money is that it enables me as an expert programmer to trade with an expert surgeon without finding a patient who needs both surgery and custom programming to act as our intermediate barter.
So we will see
money moving more towards its primary function as a medium-of-exchange with short-term store-of-value and less of as a long-term, hard-on store-of-value. Why? Because knowledge workers crave knowledge more than money, because they can't buy the
NEW knowledge they want with money, even if they tried. I explained why
new knowledge can't be created out-of-thin air at
ANY PRICE in the following linked section.
http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html#FinanceabilityofKnowledgeI expounded on that in 2013:
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_AnnealsDegrees-of-freedom is potential energy. I will go find my writings and research on that from my copute.com
http://copute.com/index.html.origHigher-Level
| Degrees-of-Freedom
The more degrees-of-freedom...
Loans baby. We love loans.
Private banks didn't have a central bank in the 1800s. That came later as the private banks were often failing and taking the USA into depressions too often. Rollercoaster.
Loans are moving the economy for sure and banks keep on failing even with a central bank being established.
With the central bank often bailing troubled banks out (not considering whether it's good in the long term on the economy scale). And in many countries money in the deposits of individuals is often insured to some extent too. Obviously, the situation is much better now than it was in the 19th century...
The central bank means the multiple smaller bank runs and depressions of the 19th century (1800s) will be delayed into
one HUMONGOUS apocalyptic TBTF failure coming before 2024 and lasting through 2033.
We just bound ourselves together in one-for-all-and-all-for-one to delay the correction. So the correction will be one-for-all-and-all-for-one.
Have you ever tried to move a huge crowd in lockstep with zero degrees-of-freedom (in an analogy of the financial derivatives of mass destruction which have enabled debt to rise unabated to 300+% of the global GDP) as if all of their shoestrings were tied to all others? There is only one way, dead.
I
expounded on degrees-of-freedom.