pull down to refresh
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0260378aef 12 May 2022 \ on: Fuck Hodl, Fuck buy the Dip bitcoin
It's always been just dumb, to me. The only situation in which you need to not spend bitcoin in case it's worth more later, is exactly the situation where bitcoin doesn't work - that you can't buy it (with labor or other currencies), which means its liquidity is failing. In the realistic situation, where you can, it isn't of too much consequence which chunk of your wealth/assets you use to buy something; you can rebalance your fiat vs btc holding when it seems needed. Put another way, when bitcoin was worth $50 it was actually worth that - there was a market of sellers and buyers you could access, any time.
And using bitcoin for casual payments of smallish amounts has several advantages:
- privacy - it's heretical to say so nowadays, but it is better than using fiat, in this use case. the important thing here is that the bureaucratic state which thinks it has a right to tell you how and when you can spend your money, is generally not aware of this payment, and cannot stop it like it can your fiat payments. Related, you can make bitcoin payments without an account; the receiver doesn't have to trust you (as long as you trust them enough to pay before receiving the goods), so they don't have to carefully vet you (emails, phone numbers, etc).
- merchant reduces fees (as per above about less trust). in some circumstances this ends up creating more opportunities like tiny payments with Lightning.
- security is vastly superior - with credit cards you literally hand over the equivalent of a private key. If people perceive it as not good security wise, I get it, there is meaningful risk of loss, but you just need to be educated enough not to do stupid things (note here, again, small casual payments, where common sense measures are enough). And this risk element is never removed if you're using it properly because it's just the fact that you actually own this thing, so you can actually lose it.
- practicing using bitcoin is really helpful in educating you on how this stuff works. not just listening to wiseacring about "hodl" and economics theory, actually doing things concretely. You get a much better understanding which can feed into your investment decisions, too.
I think you can add to this list.
If someone says 'but i can't use it because every payment has tax implications' I would not hugely disagree but (a) that is basically because governments choose to persecute bitcoin users, not the fault of the protocol - they may end up persecuting 'hodl' too, and (b) tiny coffee level payments, nobody really gives a shit that you forgot to add it to your tax form, let's be real (again, note the context of my post casual payments only).
Using it for really large payments probably is impractical, almost always, but that's just because of said government persecution.