Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Why Bitcoin will collapse in price.
by
porc
on 09/12/2013, 12:28:46 UTC
dear porc,

as gold is bitcoins are a store of value before beeing an everyday currency. Why? because people like to be safe: if you are very rich you do not trust in banks or goverments, you hoard gold aside of other assets but you have to build a caveau if you want to keep gold safe and someone can still steal it. instead you can hide several copies of your btc wallet everywhere. That's why cryptocurrency is the MOST safe value store ever. Probably btc will never be everiday's money just because it's a too good value store, that does not mean it will not grow exponentially in price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

Yes. But I dont think it is a good store of value versus gold.

I have explained this in the second paragraph under heading 2):


Also Bitcoin is a technology, that can be outcompeted by other altcoins. Your wallet can be hacked. The average citizen cant judge if the code can or can not be hacked and thus more bitcoins created. If you want to store wealth over a long period of time investing in a technology is not the best and easiest option. Also Bitcoin is not useful or wanted. If you ask a Bitcoiner what can I do with it they will say: dump it on the next guy it will go up in price! Gold and Silver where always wanted (jewlery and nowadays industry) and thats why they became MONEY in the first place! They have unique properties and everybody love to hold them in their hand. This will always be the case ensuring significant value and acceptance. Nothing like this can be said for bitcoins. Thus I dont believe bitcoin will function as a store of value in any significant way.


Now let me explain this paragraph in more detail (a lot of people seem to have missed it).

Definition store of value: To act as a store of value, these forms must be able to be saved and retrieved at a later time, and be predictably useful when retrieved. WIKI

Now lets look at useful: 1 Bitcoin of course is not useful in and of itself. So already we have a problem. However lets broaden the term to mean that bitcoin is useful when  others accept it for payment of goods and services or if I can convert it to currency (dollar) which is accepted for these goods and services.

Now you already said that bitcoin wont be a media of exchange (which I believe is correct as government will prohibit it). This leaves us with bitcoins only use: its ability to be traded into currency. So all you have left basically is an artificial agreement to use it as a store of value and accept its worth. Its totally artificial and thus NOT predictable nor suitable. People could decide not to accept nothing (bitcoin) for something. People could decide to use a different cryptocurrency. Many people might lose trust in the code or not even begin to trust it.

Gold is fits the definition perfectly. Its reliable usefulness is that its pretty and not everybody can have this form of pretty (rare). This value judgement by society has been established since the dawn of man and cant be replaced. So its much more suitable than bitcoin for storing value over lets say a 15 year period.