Bitcoin is basically the worst kind of currency I could imagine (well actually I couldn’t, if I didn’t know anything about it and someone told me to design the worst currency I can think of that would still be practically usable I wouldn’t be able to come up with something as bad…)
If due to some episode of mass psychosis everyone collectively decided to make bitcoin the default global currency it would result in the biggest economic/financial catastrophe in human history..
Extreme deflation, unlimited price volatility etc. but most importantly it destroys any reason for investing your money into anything potentially productive.
Why take any risk when you can just become richer and richer by hoarding cash?
Literally freeloading with zero effort whatsoever because you get a cut from anything that anyone does that might result in any economic growth (i.e. productivity increases -> prices constantly get lower -> if you’re an early “adopter” you just stay permanently rich with zero risk or effort). It’s basically if we just took some of the biggest flaws in our current economic/financial system and multiplied them by 10-100x for some insane reason).
Of course that whole problem is mostly hypothetical since there would be no real growth anymore and we’d just be permanently stuck in a severe economic depression…
It’s even much worse than gold/silver that was a compromise because no trustworthy and stable governments could exist in the premodern world and because economies were mostly static over multi-decade periods (of course there was still a huge amount or volatility year to year)
If due to some episode of mass psychosis everyone collectively decided to make bitcoin the default global currency it would result in the biggest economic/financial catastrophe in human history..
Extreme deflation, unlimited price volatility etc. but most importantly it destroys any reason for investing your money into anything potentially productive.
Why take any risk when you can just become richer and richer by hoarding cash?
Literally freeloading with zero effort whatsoever because you get a cut from anything that anyone does that might result in any economic growth (i.e. productivity increases -> prices constantly get lower -> if you’re an early “adopter” you just stay permanently rich with zero risk or effort). It’s basically if we just took some of the biggest flaws in our current economic/financial system and multiplied them by 10-100x for some insane reason).
Of course that whole problem is mostly hypothetical since there would be no real growth anymore and we’d just be permanently stuck in a severe economic depression…
It’s even much worse than gold/silver that was a compromise because no trustworthy and stable governments could exist in the premodern world and because economies were mostly static over multi-decade periods (of course there was still a huge amount or volatility year to year)