alt Hacker NewsTo understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.
Replies
but there's no compounding interest. no dividend based on future cashflows.
holding stocks of a diverse index seems better on the long run, no?
If you only care about inflation, real-estate in desirable locations is also inflation-proof. You can't print more land in San Francisco, London or Hong Kong.
> there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin
It turns out this doesn't matter: you can't hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It's just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that's not actually guaranteed!
Also, you can't print more Bitcoin, but that doesn't matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.