Pure commodities – gold and silver – haven’t done the job of money well for a few hundred years, and Bitcoin wants to be money but was set up to work like a commodity. Nakamoto put a strict limit on the supply of bitcoins: there will only ever be 21 million BTC. So advocates claim Bitcoin is thus, somehow, sufficiently similar to gold to serve as a “store of value” in the desired manner, even “an Internet of true value” (whatever “true” means there). This is despite its extreme volatility making it almost useless as a store of value, and despite it being way harder to use as money than any currency should be, even for its few use cases.
Bitcoin ideology bought into the entire Federal Reserve conspiracy package. The Fed is a plot to use inflation to steal value from the people and hand it to a shadowy cabal of elites who also control the government; the worldwide economy is in danger of collapse at any moment due to central banking and fractional reserve banking; gold – sorry, Bitcoin – has intrinsic value that will protect you from this collapse. Advocates repackage and propagate these ideas almost verbatim, even when they almost certainly don’t know who or where they trace back to.
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Conventional economics views inflation – a decline in money’s purchasing power – as a phenomenon of consumer prices, consumer confidence, productivity, commodity and asset prices, etc., which a central bank then responds to with monetary policy. Printing more money can cause inflation, but it’s not the usual cause. The conspiracy theorist view is that it’s the central bank intervention causing the inflation. Bitcoin ideology assumes that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon that can only be caused by printing more money, and that Bitcoin is immune due to its strictly limited supply. This was demonstrated trivially false when the price of a bitcoin dropped from $1000 in late 2013 to $200 in early 2015 – 400% inflation – while supply only went up 10%.
Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper alluded to these ideas, but the 2009 release announcement for Bitcoin 0.1 states them outright:
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The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted
not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money
and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them
with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
Bitcoin failed at every one of Nakamoto’s aspirations here...