Quote from: Impaler on April 19, 2013, 03:29:26 AM

Do you seriously believe that BTC mining has contributed 1 BILLION dollars of goods and services to the rest of the economy? Maybe their are some miners who eat Ramen so they can afford their huge electric bills but that's not decreased consumption, that's exchanging one consumption for another. No one can point to any deferred consumption involved in making or hoarding BTCs. The entire LIFETIME CONSUMPTION of the few thousands of elite miners doesn't come to a Billion dollars.

This is not a closed system, bitcoin is exchanged for other currency. The bitcoin cap wouldn't be 1 billon with just the miner, you also have people that bought those coin for cash and the value of what they did to get that cash in the first place.

No matter the type of currency prices are set with many different input. You cannot end speculation, you can just switch it to different place. People will take into account the anticipated change in the value of the currency to make their investment choise.

Lets say I have 100k$ to invest I can do plenty of thing :

- Buy a state bond and get fixed rate
- Buy real estate (leveraged or not)
- Buy stock
- Buy gold
- Buy a shotgun, a shitload of canned good and a bucker in my backyard
- Buy currency
...

The return on each of these will be influenced by the ancipated rate of inflation/deflation and will be taken into account when I make my choice.

Also another thing is you assume is that people should not be rewarded for Hording/Saving/DelayingConsuption. I think this is where you are wrong. Time preference is taken into account in the valuation of any invesment. For most people stuff now is more valuable than stuff later. You delay consomption because :

-You want to make sure you can still consume later when your personnal ability to produce will not be as high
-You get a reveward for delaying consumption (interest, wich in a free market get ajusted to take into account the inflation/deflation rate)

Thanak

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