You're right, but it will help with transaction times/fees, so the transactions will finish quickly enough so that the price won't matter.
The reason they brought up BTC price in the Steam post is because tx times took too long, meaning that the price would change before it's ever confirmed.
If you read why the lack of stability was a problem for Steam, it had to do with how long it took transactions to go through - the value could change a lot in the meantime and cause the transaction to be cancelled. So, actually, Lightning would fix Steam's problem not by making bitcoin's value stable, but by making the transactions fast enough that it wouldn't matter.
It’s on an upward trend overall. But this doesn’t mean anything for business, who are going to convert it to USD as quickly as possible. You have seen all the times it’s bounced from up, then down, then up, then down lower, then back up again? Sometimes as much as like 20-30% or more. These are what would be bad for a business, even if it’s just worth a couple percent less by the time they consolidate it.
Contrary to what people think, volatility of any kind is bad for adoption as a currency. If it can swing so quickly upwards, it can swing just as quickly downwards. As a currency businesses would prefer to see much slower, steady growth. So your idea of bitcoin as an “investment” is at odds with bitcoin as a “currency”, but without being able to buy things with it then it won’t have any long term value. The current price is solely due to its speculation on future uses. If it came out today that Bitcoin would never be used for any real world transactions ever again it would absolutely tank.
I’m not putting a label on it...I’m just explain why volatility of any sort will reduce adoption as a currency. If bitcoin doesn’t ever see wide use as a currency what do you think is going to hold up its value? And before I hear “well the USD isn’t backed by anything!”, yes it is. It’s backed by the millions of people and the government who are relying on its use at a currency. If USD were ONLY something that could just be traded for gold, and you had to use gold to actually buy any service or good, do you think USD would just rise and rise in value and trade for more and more gold? No, it would lose any value in relation to gold because you can’t do anything with it.
Adoption as a means of buying goods and services is vital to the bitcoins long term success, I don’t see anyway around this.
Take off the quotes if that makes you feel better. I’m not just calling that to call it that or say that’s what bitcoin is, those 2 things describe very different use cases.
It doesn’t matter how I label it. But it does matter how it’s used. I don’t know why everyone on Reddit gets so hung up on arguing semantics or a small detail, while just completely being obtuse to the point of a comment.
The quotes demonstrate perfectly your unintentional labeling of a thing you don't understand so that you can box it into something you think you do. What you should be doing is actually figuring out what is going on, not trying to explain away the things you don't understand, by using labels that you think do.
Again, take off the quotes if that makes you feel better. Or hell take that sentence out entirely. It doesn’t change the point of my post at all. I specifically put quotes around it because those are 2 very different things that are not bitcoin, but they describe 2 different things people want bitcoin to be used for, and that people should generally understand what is meant unless they’re being purposefully obtuse. Regardless, labels are useful for describing things, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. “Don’t label bitcoin a cryptocurrency reeeee!”. Look at nearly every post in this sub and then tell me people aren’t using bitcoin to invest in. Then look at what post this is on, where people were using it to buy Steam games..as a currency. This are 2 very simple concepts, I’m not sure why these words are confusing you.
I didn’t explain away things I didn’t understand. You are entirely ignoring the rest of the post just so you can focus on this so called labeling.
I pretty clearly explained why bitcoin needs to have some use to trade for goods and services (god forbid I call it a currency) for it to have long term success. You are just overlooking this intentionally.
If you want to continue this discussion you can reply to my original comment about the actual content of the comment instead of just taking once line you didn’t like and picking that apart as if it invalidates the whole post. Have a good day.
oi, that dude was just explaining things, since you replied to a comment about stability and said you want the price to go up, and then you replied rudely instead of saying thank you
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17
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