no no, what he said is that having your money in the bank gives you so much more opportunity.
the part when he said opportunity value, he means you get the full extent of what it can do by being able to use it at many more places.
for instance, you can't buy a videocard from newegg if the cash is in a safe in your house or even sitting in your pocket.
It's the same idea if your bitcoins only exist on a computer that is turned off, there is zero opportunity to actually use them. It really was a very insightful thought he shared.
No, that's not what he's talking about. It only takes a few minutes to turn your computer on if you had to spend Bitcoins. Heck, you'd wait on average longer than that just for the transaction to confirm, and I guarantee you'd wait much, much longer for something like a check to clear. Heck, even a credit card transaction takes up to a few days. It's not an issue of your PC not being on at that very moment at all.
What it is an issue of is the economic use of that money. Let's say you get some Bitcoins, you hold onto them for a year, and then you spend them. In that interim period they had precisely zero economic activity. They didn't contribute to any economy, they didn't help anyone make money, etc. Now, let's say you get some dollars in your bank account, you hold onto them for a year, and then you spend them.
Well, see, those dollars actually
did have an economic impact, because your bank turned around and lent them out to people buying homes, new businesses starting up, and other economic activities. Those dollars may have been exchanged many times from person to person, business to business, all while you just "thought" you had a static balance in your bank account. So that amount of money "sitting" in your bank account actually had many times its value in effect on GDP. Your Bitcoins, however, had precisely zero impact.
That is the fundamental difference between using a bank and stuffing money under your mattress that we are talking about here, and in the absence of
trustworthy Bitcoin banks, the only thing you can do with your Bitcoins is the equivalent of stuffing them under your mattress.
Perhaps that's what he meant. However, I believe this economic analysis is incorrect. You're saying that by keeping the money in the bank, and having the bank loan it out, that this was good for the economy. There was some positive contribution of wealth that would not have happened without loaning that money out. I believe this is wrong because the total quantity of money is irrelevant. You're not going to improve things by adding money into the system (and I'm well aware that Ben Bernanke disagrees, but he's wrong). So long as the money is sufficiently divisible, the sum total of it is an irrelevant quantity.
Your analysis assumes that money behaves like, say, oil. Suppose there is an economy that is energy starved. If you double the amount of oil they have, then they will be able to do more stuff. Adding oil adds wealth. But money is not like this. If you double the amount of money they have, it will change nothing. Adding money does not add wealth.
In practice, inflating a money supply does not increase the wealth. It merely redistributes the purchasing power of the money to the people who get the new money. It is a way of taking wealth from everyone who uses the money and giving it to the people who get the new money. It's equivalent to counterfeiting. For some reason, everyone understands that when a non-banker counterfeits a dollar, it is wrong. But when bankers do it, they think it is right and good, when in fact it is equally as bad.