Topic: Is hoarding bitcoins good or bad for it's growth? (Read 1524 times)

You don't need millions to hoard bitcoins. You can hoard the few bitcoins that you have. Even the people scraping satoshis off faucets contribute to hoarding. In the end, it reduces the available supply and price increases.

Hoarding from my point of view is the worst thing to happen to bitcoin and I am sure its not the intention of the founder because it would mean just restricting it to function as a "store of value" which will not increase the amount of users needed for it to achieve full potential of becoming a global currency.

Hoarding will mean if I want to come into fresh in bitcoin because of what I have heard, I then cannot do that because I can't get to buy when no one is willing to sell.

In the end all hoarders HAVE to "unhoard", i.e. offer. You can't live on bitcoins. On the off chance that you put every one of your belonging, reserve funds and income in BTC, each day of the year, you would even now need to exchange some of those BTC for sustenance and asylum - else you'd be dead.

So even the most insatiable hoarders should trade BTC for physical wares and services. The economy won't experience the ill effects of an "hoarding to death" situation - there will dependably be exchange!

These days it is very hard to hoard Bitcoins. Truly, you would need millions in order to do so. However, it is good for Bitcoin because maybe there will only be 15,000,000 coins because many coins will be lost over time (there are supposed to be 21,000,000) but if you keep them the demand will rise and therefore the price will rise too.

Now there are many hodlers among us Is the practice of holding bitcoins good or bad for it's growth?

I had recently come across a statement that bitcoin is a settlement system rather than store of value/digital gold and holding bitcoins is somewhat making it accessible to rich people only.

Arguments in favor of hoarding bitcoins:

1. Since bitcoins are limited in numbers, holding would obviously increase the demand and thus the price.

2. Bitcoin as a commodity/hoarding, as a currency/spending. So once the price increases, what we earlier bought for 1 BTC can buy it now for 0.5.

3. Merchants would prefer BTC over USD. (In the hopes that prices would increase)

4. Bitcoin is divisible. Everyone cannot own 5 or 10 BTC, but still holding on to a few satoshis would be profitable in the long-term.

Now there are some arguments against holding:

1. Deflation.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral


2. If the elites gets hold of majority of bitcoins, the demand and price would be high, but since the common man would not be able to afford it, demand decreases, elites dump, price crashes, common man buys some, market stabilizes a bit, and elites buys back more. It kind of becomes a centralized holding affair.

3. Rather than hoarding, an environment where bitcoins are more used as a mode of payment for buying goods or services is more beneficial for it's growth.

So what do you think, is hoarding bitcoins good or bad for it's growth?

Edited the poll.

All the reason stated on your list are all true.  If people will hold, keep holding their bitcoins, its price would go up because its supply is less.  People who continue to know bitcoins and got interested will become many thus, the demand would be really high.  High demand less supply equals high price.  But as you also stated its main purpose was altered because everyone holds bitcoin.