I guess the relevant question today is "would it have been a good idea for a German in Weimar's republic to convert DMarks to BTC in 1930 to protect against the hyperinflation?"

What I am looking for is a mechanism to protect againt (imho highly probably future) US Dollar devaluation and potential SHTF political/societal conditions here. The historically time-tested approach (but not practical in USA) was to convert to physical gold that both retained value, was generally accepted by all, and could be easily transported across borders. BTC has the border/security angle covered but the value retention aspect is not clear.

In this hypothetical SHFT situation where the USD is worthless... what do you imagine the world looks like?

Let's say you bought an ounce of gold today for $1,955 and then the US economy craters and the USD is worthless. What are you going to do with that ounce of gold? Do you really think you'll be able to barter with that gold to get the rough equivalent of $2,000 in 2020 purchasing power?

Or in a true SHTF situation will there even be networks available for you to trade Bitcoin? Or servers to continue to mine and process transactions? I doubt it.

Optimally, one would leave before S truly HTF. In that case, you would have access to your BTC elsewhere. A few decades ago, Gold sewn into clothes served the same purpose.

I don't understand your money math there, btw. If 1 oz. of Gold will buy you a say tailored suit before SHTF, historically it will still buy you that suit after SHTF. That's one of the reasons there are Gold bugs (not I) out there. Conversely, your $2000.00 will buy you that suit today, but may only be enough to buy a carton of milk after SHTF.

>If 1 oz. of Gold will buy you a say tailored suit before SHTF, historically it will still buy you that suit after SHTF.

This has never really been tested, especially not after we left the gold standard. The utility value of gold has never been lower. I believe that in a situation where USD is worthless, the real world value of gold would plummet.

Let us say shit has truly hit the fan. USD is completely worthless. You have a year of dehydrated food that you bought for $2,000. Would you swap that food for an ounce of gold? Me personally, no fucking way.

I think gold is comically overvalued and completely detached from the reality of its worth as a shiny metal. People buy it because you can invest in gold contracts and watch your net worth tick up like it's a video game.

Look, if SHTF and USD is no longer reserve currency, converting your USD to something like Gold/BTC before that happens, and then leaving US of A, and then using your Gold or BTC somewhere else where Gold/BTC is accepted. This should preserve the current purchasing power/value of your savings. If you stay in USA post Dollar dethronement, sure, you have a point, unless we're taking golden guns ..

Yeah, using Bitcoin as a currency is "foolish". Back in the day people bought pizzas with Bitcoin that are worth millions today. If any other currency would behave like Bitcoin it would be considered dead and its associated economy would be in shambles because people hoard the currency instead of doing useful activity with it. Bitcoin is dead as a currency but people holding onto Bitcoin don't care anyway.

Bitcoin inherently is unsuitable to ve used as a currency. Transaction fees are to high and the hash rate means waiting for to long for a transactiom to be approved.

Imagine standing in the queue at your supermarket waiting for a bitcoin transaction approval.

This is a poor take. Bitcoin can be made almost instant if paying via the Lightning Network. The downside is that you must pre-load some channels with satoshis that you can spend, which involves a bitcoin transaction which may take a few hours/days depending on how much you're willing to pay to have it prioritized.

Before you complain that "this is too slow," consider what the equivalent is in the banking world. Imagine you walk into a shop which only takes cards, and you have no bank account.

You must go to a bank, talk to a rep, fill out a bunch of paper work, wait for some background checks to be done, then have a card issued to you via snail mail. Now you can go to the shop (days later).

Your initial, flawed assumption is that people have already done this and already have a card to pay with. Most people in the developed world have this access now, but it didn't come instantly - it has progressed over about 3 decades. Back in the 90s, if you weren't paying with cash, you would be writing out a cheque in the store and holding up the queue.

So when you unravel your assumption, it's actually much faster to acquire some bitcoin and load some payment channels. Just few people have done it yet, and the software for doing it is under heavy development.

Give it a decade or so, like we have allowed for payment cards to proliferate, and the assumption will be that people already have some loaded payment channels which are ready to make instant payments. There will be no standing in queues waiting to pay.

This is a beautiful response, clear and to the point, perfectly addressing the parent comment... but do you feel like you're making any progress with the explanations?

It seems like every bitcoin thread on hacker news endlessly generates nothing but 2013/14 era FUD. I don't see people installing lightning wallets and playing around.

You'd be using a 2nd layer solution like Lightning for that. Instant and nearly fee-less.

Sending physical dollars through the mail is also expensive and slow. That’s why there are additional layers built on top of the base layer, like lightning network and RGB.