If you have to leave an inheritance in 30-40 years, would you rather bury some dollars today or save equivalent bitcoins?
That isnot the good way of thinking. If you want to leave inheritance and you want to maximize it, you should invest the money into real business and it does not matter which money. USD is now better than BTC exactly at this. You have much wider investment possibilities with USD than BTC.
The idea to sit on money and let their value rises, which is normal by bitcoin, probably made your thought unclear. Not everything is about money, it is just a proxy. It is about economy in the end.
If I were forced to sit on money for decades (which I am a bit), the way is of course to buy BTC. But the market opportunities are in USD. The fiat money maybe lose most if the value, but big businesses were created with them and such biz can produce money to owner in any currency.
So yes... people who are unable to create anything and gotsome money by accident and they have the only two opportunities - to leave money at bank or change them to BTC - those people should buy at least some BTC. The other people shouldconsider investing the money into economy and their work.
It is exactly my story here. I have registered myself at this forum in summer 2011. I was considering buying bitcoins fof few thousands. It seems to be like bad decision that I did not do it, but in fact, it was not.
- 100x appreciation by now seems to be like certaininty, but things might go wrong and appreciation could have been much smaller
- I would be forced to sell BTC's as price went up, so I would not make 100x profit, probably much less
- I would maybe not have enough money for my investment in IT. Maybe the extra few thousands caused that I actually made much more money during the 3.5 years with fiat money economy. Now I am buying BTC of course.
Writing off USD in 2014 is simply ridiculous idea.
When you talk about the dollar here, you really talk about three fundamentally different things. One is to hold the dollar, the second is to store dollars in an account, which (in a sound savings and loan regime) is the same as investing, except you let others take investment decisions in order to get some safety in exchange for a smaller part of the profit. The third thing is direct investment, which is exactly NOT holding the dollars but rather holding something else of value.
It is prudent to save some of your value, and some must be held in money just to make daily exchanges. In a freedom environment, it is up to the saver to decide what is to be saved in money and what is to be invested. All the wisdom that an individual is able to acquire is used for this. A prudent way is to first make sure that you have some money set aside. If a safe bank is available, use that (which means someone else is using your value for investments), then consider investing.
So that is the platform of language to start the discussion.
If you only have money available, that you know will loose value (due to experience and due to the expressed goal of the managers of that money), you will tend to invest. This is staging the scene by the managers of the money system, in reality they extract value out of the holdings of the constituents. The value is extracted on all levels: The money itself, bank deposits through the reduced interest rate, and investments through the low expected return, which might seem better than holding money and bank deposit, but which carries increased risk of asset value destruction.
So your answer to the diminishing value of the standard money is to hold less money and find some other way.
My answer is change to better money.
There is no ethical problem: The forced investments are often bad investments with negative wealth creation, the effects on investments are socialized anyway, so it does not make much difference who in society does it, and you could even view holding bitcoin as an investment creating a new and better money system.
