thejohnnycrypto on Nostr: My grandmother kept two things in the house. A checkbook in the kitchen drawer and a ...

My grandmother kept two things in the house. A checkbook in the kitchen drawer and a few gold rings in a box upstairs. She used the checkbook every week. She never once bought anything with the rings, and nobody in the family thought that meant the rings had failed.

That is roughly where bitcoin sits right now, and it is why two reasonable people can argue about it all day and both sound right.

Some setup. When somebody says bitcoin failed as money, they usually mean one thing. Hardly anyone buys coffee with it. Behind that sits a real measurement: how much moves across the base layer, which is the main ledger that every full copy of the network agrees on. Behind the other side sits a different measurement: how much people will pay to hold it and then leave it alone.

Those are two products, not one. A savings asset is something you buy expecting it to hold value while you do nothing with it. A payment rail is plumbing that carries money from one person to another. Bitcoin is trying to be both, and it is much further along as the first.

Worth knowing: on September 6 the network confirmed 893,391 transactions, its fourth busiest day ever, and roughly 80 percent of this year's transactions moved less than 0.01 bitcoin, against 44 percent in 2023.

I would not call that a payments victory. A transaction is not a purchase. Consolidating your own coins, an exchange doing housekeeping, and somebody posting data all look identical from the outside.

So my claim is this. The savings story and the payments story need separate scoreboards, and most arguments about bitcoin are one side quoting the other side's numbers.

The strongest case against me is that money which never circulates stops being money. For somebody living under a currency that loses a third of its value in a year, the thing you hold is the thing you spend, and a bitcoin that works only as a vault is no help to them at all.

What would show me wrong: holding demand keeps climbing for a few years while the cost of a small payment on that main ledger climbs right along with it. That would mean the vault is crowding out the rail, and the split I am describing is imaginary.

I keep both numbers on the same page now, and I have stopped expecting either one to answer for the other.

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