Source: BTCNovosti

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Bitcoin — Store of Value is a Useless Use Case

Why Digital Gold Won’t be a Thing

Matt Ward
6 min readFeb 7, 2018

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Prior to August 15th, 1971, a US dollar was worth 1/35th of an ounce of gold — known as the gold standard (actually the Gold Window, FDR had started the process of removing the gold standard in 1993).

This was a monumental moment. The gold standard kept the US (and other governments honest) — because there was only so much gold in the ground, there could only be so much Fiat — preventing rapid inflation.

Changing this dynamic was a paradigm shift…

The concept of money

Historically “money” has served three purposes:

  1. medium of exchange (ability to trade)
  2. unit of account (standardization)
  3. store of value (risk management).

In practice, the first two are linked. Because the US issues US dollars and while the UK works with British pounds (GBP), there are standards of exchange across currencies. Due to the number currencies worldwide, it would be impractical to peg every fiat currency to every other, and thus the US dollar is the primary pegging mechanism (as is BTC in crypto).

Rather than maintaining exchange rates with 180+ currencies worldwide, everyone trades into (and out…

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Matt Ward
Matt Ward

Written by Matt Ward

Founder @ 4WARD.earth - building the largest local-to-global ecosystem of climate & sustainability DOERs in 45+ cities to collaboratively move our world forward

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