Spending your BTC will not make you lose money. Laszlo was correct.

[d5000]

When I was new in the forum, I became confused because a hodler is being praised in the forum and in the same time, anyone who purchases with bitcoin will also be praised. It seems we don't know what we want for BTC.

I've also praised hodlers and still am doing it sometimes HODLing itself isn't harmful, as it's the equivalent to save money in the fiat world.

"Hodlers" however should be strictly restricted to people who do not try to ride bullish waves (mostly) but hodling through them. Not those who only hold from low to high and then sell. The problem is that this "wave-riding", if you really manage to time highs and lows, is the optimal strategy to achieve a high ROI on Bitcoin. But it is the most harmful for the acceptance of Bitcoin as money, because it exaggerates FOMO in the bubble phase and fear in the crypto winter.

And yes, I'm also trying to ride some waves, spending when I feel the price is high and re-accumulate when I feel it's low. Currently it's simply too beneficial to do that to some extent. But I always HODL a part too.

But the strategy presented in the OP is almost equivalent to hodling. It gives some opportunity to rebalance and speculate a bit but as long as you don't speculate with the large majority of your BTC, if you take a bad decision you won't lose too many BTC.

The ideal way to use Bitcoin currently, for me is:

- HODLing a part.
- Spending from time to time. Ideally you support trustworthy merchants offering good value for Bitcoin, not "simply everyone who accept Bitcoin". To optimize the "circulation" effect it's also preferrable, if possible, to support those who accept Bitcoin directly and not via a payment processor like BitPay.
- Re-buy the spent BTC with the strategy matching your risk profile (if you want to gamble a bit and try to "buy dips" or benefit from bubbles and winters it can also be okay of course, but it's best not to exaggerate that, because Bitcoin's price is less predictable as it looks today).

[hd49728]

I've also praised hodlers and still am doing it sometimes HODLing itself isn't harmful, as it's the equivalent to save money in the fiat world.

The ideal way to use Bitcoin currently, for me is:

- HODLing a part.
- Spending from time to time. Ideally you support trustworthy merchants offering good value for Bitcoin, not "simply everyone who accept Bitcoin". To optimize the "circulation" effect it's also preferrable, if possible, to support those who accept Bitcoin directly and not via a payment processor like BitPay.
- Re-buy the spent BTC with the strategy matching your risk profile (if you want to gamble a bit and try to "buy dips" or benefit from bubbles and winters it can also be okay of course, but it's best not to exaggerate that, because Bitcoin's price is less predictable as it looks today).

We work for money or for bitcoin, and hold our bitcoin to separate us from fiat currencies and their declines of purchasing power over time. Hodling bitcoin (in long term) saves us from inflationary or hyperinflationary issues of fiat currencies. For example Purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar over time.

However we always need to have money or bitcoin for spendings and it can be from our part of saving in fiat currency or from part of our bitcoins that is in our plans for withdrawals over time.

There is nothing wrong or bad by withdrawing our bitcoins over time and we only need to have good plans for it.
[ANN] JJG Sustainable Bitcoin Withdrawal Strategy.
https://bitcoindata.science/withdrawal-strategy

[Darker45]

Laszlo was a hero until the price x50, x100, x2,000, x10,000, x40,000, x100,000, and so on. That's when people started looking at the price alone. Laszlo slowly became that clueless guy, an early adopter who wasted his precious coins on pizza.

Various publications continue to denigrate Laszlo until now as that man who bought two pizzas for 10,000BTC, emphasizing that those coins are worth hundreds of millions now.

The story of Laszlo is the story of Bitcoin, once a monetary technology offering freedom, now a new asset class worth investing and hodling. During Laszlo's time, adoption was about using Bitcoin as money. Today, adoption is about BlackRock offering Bitcoin spot ETF.

Despite that, Bitcoin remains the same, though. And it remains an option to celebrate Laszlo as that man who made the first real-world transaction using Bitcoin as payment. The day those pizzas were bought was the day Bitcoin was made a real-world money.

[Free Market Capitalist]

Sorry, but I don't have time for this low-level discussion that goes in circles because you can't acknowledge basic facts.

Exactly, you are another gold bug like Peter Schiff who refuses to acknowledge basic facts and that is why this is a low level discussion, and the most basic fact here is that bitcoin is like gold but much better. Everything else is bullshit from a gold bug who is not worth wasting time with.

I've already written in the OP that the reason to spend Bitcoin and then re-buy is to strengthen the circulation. The main goal is to incentive merchants to accept Bitcoin. AFAIK there has been a bit of a decrease lately of shops who accept Bitcoin or even other cryptocurrencies (in my country there are only few left), and this is not a coincidence as people aren't using this feature that much.

Circulation strenghtens Bitcoin in various ways. If it's widely used for payments it can stop downward volatility a bit, as it increases liquidity. It also can lead to a perception as a unit of account if merchants begin to use Bitcoin prices for some goods. This effect would be at first only temporary - when Bitcoin moves sideways - but then could get stronger over time. And third, the argument of many Bitcoin critics that "it's only used to gamble/speculate" would be refuted, which has also psychological effects and should be great for the price evolution (and thus also for the "digital gold" camp).

Nobody is going to do what you say, or if you prefer, a percentage of people so low that it is insignificant. A currency is used if it is useful to use and there are too many reasons not to use bitcoin as a currency, at least as of today.

[davis196]

Why should we keep repeating the same old stuff about the legendary "Bitcoin pizza purchase"?
Nobody expected that Bitcoin could hit absurd price levels back in the day, when the BTC was spent for purchasing a pizza.
Why is everyone so focused on the guy, who spent the BTC for the pizza? Why nobody cares about the pizza seller, who received the BTC?
Did he become a millionaire by HODLing the BTC and selling them for 100K USD? Hell no, I'm sure that he sold the BTC at a price of several dollars per BTC.

[MeGold666]

But serious question: Are you considering "upcoming" technologies like BitVM and Ark? Many of these solutions depend on, or are drastically "facilitated" by covenants which is actually one of the hottest topics among the Bitcoin devs, and once it is implemented, then the L2 situation could drastically improve on Bitcoin.

I haven't read about this tech, I think there's no point if Bitcoin L1 is so limited by the protocol.
But I'm not interested in tech that isn't out yet - too many promises have been made over the years, and most of them turned out to be worthless (just look at LN).
So, when I see "Upcoming" what I really see is: "We got nothing".

I will read more into it when it comes out and matures a bit, so all shortcomings and bottlenecks unfold.

Monero could also be a good "prepaid card" replacement, but be aware that it also has bandwidth limits. If Monero was the only "payment coin" and its block sizes would explode, even if it has a dynamic block size, it would lose decentralization. I would love XMR to be used much more though, and it still seems to have leeway.

Yes, Monero is limited by infrastructure as opposed to being limited by the protocol, like in Bitcoin.  

Would decentralization suffer? Sure, but only a bit - many people have fiber connections nowadays, and hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper.  

Statistically, many people still run on slow connections, but these people probably haven't even heard of Monero.  

I use a 5G network for my connection; it averages 600 to 800 Mbit just by connecting my phone to the laptop.

The point is, Monero is ready for the future with its protocol, while Bitcoin is very limited so it can run on outdated computers that don't contribute anything to security by being just passive nodes.

Internet infrastructure is only getting faster, personal computers are getting more powerful, and almost every kid today has the computing power of a supercomputer from yesterday.  

Using Bitcoin today is like using Windows 3.11.

[uchegod-21]

When I was new in the forum, I became confused because a hodler is being praised in the forum and in the same time, anyone who purchases with bitcoin will also be praised. It seems we don't know what we want for BTC.

I've also praised hodlers and still am doing it sometimes HODLing itself isn't harmful, as it's the equivalent to save money in the fiat world.

"Hodlers" however should be strictly restricted to people who do not try to ride bullish waves (mostly) but hodling through them. Not those who only hold from low to high and then sell. The problem is that this "wave-riding", if you really manage to time highs and lows, is the optimal strategy to achieve a high ROI on Bitcoin. But it is the most harmful for the acceptance of Bitcoin as money, because it exaggerates FOMO in the bubble phase and fear in the crypto winter.

And yes, I'm also trying to ride some waves, spending when I feel the price is high and re-accumulate when I feel it's low. Currently it's simply too beneficial to do that to some extent. But I always HODL a part too.

But the strategy presented in the OP is almost equivalent to hodling. It gives some opportunity to rebalance and speculate a bit but as long as you don't speculate with the large majority of your BTC, if you take a bad decision you won't lose too many BTC.

The ideal way to use Bitcoin currently, for me is:

- HODLing a part.
- Spending from time to time. Ideally you support trustworthy merchants offering good value for Bitcoin, not "simply everyone who accept Bitcoin". To optimize the "circulation" effect it's also preferrable, if possible, to support those who accept Bitcoin directly and not via a payment processor like BitPay.
- Re-buy the spent BTC with the strategy matching your risk profile (if you want to gamble a bit and try to "buy dips" or benefit from bubbles and winters it can also be okay of course, but it's best not to exaggerate that, because Bitcoin's price is less predictable as it looks today).

The problem identified in OP is more like an ideology problem. I say so because, if someone holds bitcoin until a certain time sells, this can be seen as the person has used it for buying or making payment (using bitcoin as a currency). So, whether the person used it to buy something, or sold to fiat, the truth is that the person is no longer in possession of that bitcoin.

So, in all what matters is that we are into bitcoin. I don't think Satoshi's original idea for bitcoin can be reclaimed at this time. Wait for a major bill run and see how high transaction fees will be.

[d5000]

A currency is used if it is useful to use and there are too many reasons not to use bitcoin as a currency, at least as of today.

IMO that's too fatalist, I think current payment usage is low mainly by psychological reasons, but if you don't want to go into detail here let's agree to disagree. If you want you can however list your reasons to "not" use it - if it's only "fees", then I've already written my answer in the OP.

So, when I see "Upcoming" what I really see is: "We got nothing".

The main reason why covenants aren't implemented is that there are several competing options and there's a debate which one is the best, because of Bitcoin's conservative development model oriented on stability.

The code for covenants has already been written several years ago (OP_CTV is 5 years old, OP_CAT was even already enabled in Satoshi's version but got disabled) and there are several BIPs. Taproot also was discussed during many years.

In addition, some developers are now more cautious because they think Taproot enabled Ordinals (although I dispute this), and thus they first want to investigate more in depth if there are undesirable use cases which should be prevented to exist (like MEV extraction, some also don't like hashrate escrows for Drivechains, etc.).

Your decision to review these solutions when they're more mature is of course okay - but saying something is impossible without any proof, is not.

[Botnake]

Laszlo was a pioneer and he lives more care free than we all do. See to one of his interviews and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Spending bitcoin isn't wrong but it's not right either. You should prioritise spending the form of money that is more likely to lose value and that si FIAT money. Other than that you can not blame Laszlo in specific because he was a pioneer in making bitcoin popular.

In any case, if your only reliable way of spending money is BTC, might as well spend it with no regrets.

While bitcoin is as good as buy and sell, but the fact that it’s way more valuable than fiat, which we all know depreciates in the long run, then it’s safer to say to just buy bitcoin and then hold, and just decide to sell when your fiat on hand is not enough to cater to your own needs and even wants.

We don’t want to lose the purpose of why we want to invest in bitcoin, but we shouldn’t be deceived also and weigh things carefully if bitcoin is actually good to spend along with fiat, or just hold it for future bigger purposes.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

Mmh, you seemed to have misundestood something, because that's exactly what I wrote. Again: The thread is directed to / trying to educate (see below) those who think that the "cash/currency" aspect of Bitcoin is outdated or flawed.

Thank you, it is still one of Bitcoin usecases, I have no doubt about it now and in future.

Correct, but sometimes there are simple misunderstandings that can be "corrected" by providing a little bit of context. That's, in my opinion (like everything here), the case with the conception that Laszlo shouldn't have bought the pizzas and instead held the 10.000 BTC, and that nobody should spend their Bitcoins but hodl. The benefits of "circulating" Bitcoins are not that trivial to understand in comparison to the benefits of hodling and get rich.

I am sure there are people who regret or very regret about their past Bitcoin spendings and I can understand their feelings.

With me, I don't have that feeling or more frankly to say, I used to have that feeling but when I have more experience with Bitcoin and this market, as well as when I get older, I become a different person (with more experience in life, not only with Bitcoin), my feeling about it changed entirely. There is nothing to regret, as said in my previous post, if you spent your bitcoin in the past for something meaningful with you or your family at that moment. Think about it like if you did not sell bitcoin for that important spending, what will you do?

Of course there are many big reasons to be regretful if your spendings in the past are for something not too important. I don't know laszlo feels regretful or not, deeply in his heart, but in many interviews, he said he does not regret about it.

[MeGold666]

Your decision to review these solutions when they're more mature is of course okay - but saying something is impossible without any proof, is not.

I'm not saying it's impossible to implement, just saying I'm not going to go live on promises.

I see two problems with L2s on Bitcoin:

1. As I already said, Bitcoin is not capable of handling mainstream-level L2s of any kind due to its tiny block bottleneck.
2. Bitcoin is supposed to live off fees on L1, if people used L2 instead of L1, fees would go down, and mining companies would abandon the project.

Funny how a successful L2 would basically kill revenue for miners when block reward gets lower.

because of Bitcoin's conservative development model oriented on stability.

It's oriented toward milking money out of investors' pockets. If it were oriented toward stability, it would already have an adaptive block size to ensure it works the same way when there is a high transaction count.

They don't want to upset investors by making any changes that could trigger a split or regulatory issues.

[re-start]

Laszlo showed us all that we should spend some of our Bitcoin. Four years ago, I sold a part of my Bitcoin to buy a laptop. Today, that same amount of Bitcoin might be enough to buy a car!  However, I have no regrets. If I had thousands of Bitcoins but couldn't spend them, I wouldn’t really have any Bitcoin.

[mirakal]

The idea not to ever sell your bitcoin is unscrupulous; it lacks the ethics of what bitcoin stands for. If you don't sell your bitcoin, how can it serve its purpose, and what's the use and value for what's not supposed to be solved?

Bitcoin Pizza purchase, which many are describing as a costly mistake; if that deal was never carried out, I don't think we could be where we are today, or if everyone is holding onto what they have as bitcoin, how can value be attached to it? If we don't sell, it remains stable in one place, and the envisioned idea of P2P by Satoshi won't have come to light.

If Bitcoin was worthless today, the pizza seller could have been added in the wrong size of the history book.

Bitcoin is an investment, aside from being a currency, one who dares to invest in bitcoin does not only mean buying and long term hodling, the end goal should be selling bitcoin in order to enjoy the profits after long stretch of patience without getting bothered to sell at the wrong time. Those who think to buy and hold bitcoin forever like there’s no chances of selling, that is only a hallucination. No one dares to buy and hold without selling in the end, and just buy back again when there’s a perfect opportunity to buy.

[d5000]

1. As I already said, Bitcoin is not capable of handling mainstream-level L2s of any kind due to its tiny block bottleneck.
2. Bitcoin is supposed to live off fees on L1, if people used L2 instead of L1, fees would go down, and mining companies would abandon the project.

For 1, sidechain-style and Ark-style L2s do need much less L1 transactions to work than LN needs because users don't need to refill liquidity that frequently, and they can onboard without any L1 transaction. Yes, they're not "mainstream" still, so at least if you're talking about handling "billions of txes per day", at a whole your argument is valid and we have to continue to wait a bit.

For 2, I'm aware of that that dilemma and it will be interesting how it plays out in 15-20 years when rewards will begin to become quite small. The idea of many developers is that a massive adoption for payments would still lead to significant fees on L1 (sidechain peg-outs, Lightning channel openings and closures). And as a L1 transaction always is safer than a L2 transaction, the demand for L1 should still be there for high-volume txes. I however don't rule out that L2s indeed could bring fees down definitely. In this case, and only if this becomes dangerous for the security budget (this moment is still quite far away), I would support a switch to a tail emission.

They don't want to upset investors by making any changes that could trigger a split

This is true, but that wouldn't only "upset investors". A Bitcoin hard fork would set a precedent and could lead to more afterwards, and some think it's dangerous if Bitcoin chooses the path many altcoins (like ETH) simply incorporate hundreds of new features via hardforks every couple of months. A split with significant value on the minority chain would also mean practical problems for all users as they will have to manage two differnet coins. And that at each fork. So I personally think this stability-oriented path is correct, and a hardfork should only be carried out in an extreme emergency.

The adaptive block size is something I would support if necessary. But I don't think we'll see it if there are no massive throughput problems in the next years. If LN was more popular Bitcoin would have even less days with more than 10 sats/vbyte than now. These kind of experiments is where altcoins can shine.

And also additionally: I'm sometimes looking onto the devs mailing lists and the discussions there seem sincere and fundamented with technical reasons, not with some concern about some investor.

[FinneysTrueVision]

If it were oriented toward stability, it would already have an adaptive block size to ensure it works the same way when there is a high transaction count.

The only time Monero has really been tested with a large wave of transactions during last year’s spam attack, many users had to wait several hours for their transactions to confirm. Even at the peak of the spam attack, it was still only getting a fraction of Bitcoin’s average daily transaction volume, yet it still struggled with that much demand. As a remedy to the attack, developers even discussed limiting block sizes and allowing fees to increase.

The reason why adaptive block sizes aren’t adopted by Bitcoin is because it is not an effective scaling solution. Even with small blocks an high fees, we’ve seen that Inscription spam can be sustained for many months. Had block sizes been allowed to increase to keep fees low, the size of the blockchain might have grown exponentially to the point where nobody can run a node, like with BSV and other centralized networks.

[FortuneFollower]

Laszlo showed us all that we should spend some of our Bitcoin. Four years ago, I sold a part of my Bitcoin to buy a laptop. Today, that same amount of Bitcoin might be enough to buy a car!  However, I have no regrets. If I had thousands of Bitcoins but couldn't spend them, I wouldn’t really have any Bitcoin.

Yep. Just as it was said in the OP, for some bigger purchases, BTC is a great option, and we should be shy to use it that way too, apart from only hodling and hoarding it.

[Lucius]

~snip~
The ideal way to use Bitcoin currently, for me is:

- HODLing a part.
- Spending from time to time. Ideally you support trustworthy merchants offering good value for Bitcoin, not "simply everyone who accept Bitcoin". To optimize the "circulation" effect it's also preferrable, if possible, to support those who accept Bitcoin directly and not via a payment processor like BitPay.
- Re-buy the spent BTC with the strategy matching your risk profile (if you want to gamble a bit and try to "buy dips" or benefit from bubbles and winters it can also be okay of course, but it's best not to exaggerate that, because Bitcoin's price is less predictable as it looks today).

I have a similar strategy as you, because even though I understand that most people invest in BTC exclusively in order to sell it at some point and make a profit, I think it is important to keep at least some semblance that BTC can and should be used as a currency. I often read that people write on the forum that they don't actually have anywhere to spend BTC, but merchants often react only if they receive a large number of inquiries regarding payment with BTC, so sometimes it is necessary to take the first step in order for something to happen.

However, I wonder if the number of transactions would increase significantly even if BTC became a means of payment literally everywhere, because people have a very hard time deciding to spend something that in the future may have a much higher value than today.

For me, it's ideal to keep my value in BTC as a hedge against inflation, and spend some of it on goods or services from time to time, although I must admit that it's very difficult or almost impossible to avoid payment processors because volatility is still something that scares merchants from accepting BTC directly.

[Reatim]

I often read that people write on the forum that they don't actually have anywhere to spend BTC, but merchants often react only if they receive a large number of inquiries regarding payment with BTC, so sometimes it is necessary to take the first step in order for something to happen.

that is true but we shouldn’t limit our payment method to bitcoin because it is possible that the merchants really have no idea about bitcoin yet and if we keep being too persistent they might get a bad impression of bitcoin

instead we should ask if they accept bitcoin if yes then great and if not then we should kindly recommend it to them

[fikrett]

I often read that people write on the forum that they don't actually have anywhere to spend BTC, but merchants often react only if they receive a large number of inquiries regarding payment with BTC, so sometimes it is necessary to take the first step in order for something to happen.

that is true but we shouldn’t limit our payment method to bitcoin because it is possible that the merchants really have no idea about bitcoin yet and if we keep being too persistent they might get a bad impression of bitcoin

instead we should ask if they accept bitcoin if yes then great and if not then we should kindly recommend it to them

I do think that's the case.

Nobody loves when somebody enforces something on them..

[348Judah]

I often read that people write on the forum that they don't actually have anywhere to spend BTC, but merchants often react only if they receive a large number of inquiries regarding payment with BTC, so sometimes it is necessary to take the first step in order for something to happen.

that is true but we shouldn’t limit our payment method to bitcoin because it is possible that the merchants really have no idea about bitcoin yet and if we keep being too persistent they might get a bad impression of bitcoin

instead we should ask if they accept bitcoin if yes then great and if not then we should kindly recommend it to them

I do think that's the case.

Nobody loves when somebody enforces something on them..

This is not about enforcement, but having an alternative to making payment aside the use of fiat, if the institution or platform you're using allows for that, then there's nothing too difficult to having it as part of the available options we can have in making payment, after all, i have a list here from the link am about to share on where you can spend your bitcoin, so using it to make a payment is just an alternative and not a compulsory thing to do, holding is not what everyone of us will all have to do at the same time as well, some are buying while some selling and at the same time we have people that are holding.

where to spend bitcoin
https://asktom.cf/index.php?topic=5467964.msg62902489#msg62902489