Bitcoin as a store of value

Most people give little to no thought on what is money. It's simply paper in your wallet or numbers in your bank account... and you want more of it. You want more of "it" because "it" can be used as a medium of exchange. That is, you can take those numbers in your bank account or papers in your wallet and exchange them for goods or services. This is the primary function of money that people concern themselves with; can i use it to buy things that I want. However, the most important function of money is not the medium of exchange, it's the store of value. Do the dollars, yen, gold, bitcoin or whatever retain their value or increase in value over time. A money that has a better store of value will inevitably replace monies that are a poor store of value and become the primary medium of exchange. When looking towards the future of money, one must understand this concept. Currencies printed by central banks are the common mediums of exchange, but they will not last as they are a poor store of value.So what makes something a good store of value? In one word, scarcity. In prisons, cigarettes were often used as money because they were scarce. Once you were out of prison, cigarettes were easily produced and obtained so they no longer functioned as a store of value. Seashells were used as currencies in pacific islands because finding pretty shells were difficult. That is until Europeans on ships came with a boatload of shells rendering seashells worthless. History has shown us again and again that when a harder money (more scarce) enters your economy, it will render other monies worth nothing more than their intrinsic value. This is why gold has been the backbone of money for millennia. Civilizations have come and gone while gold carried on. No other natural resource in the world performs the function of a store of value better than gold. The scarcity of gold ensures this. With gold being used as the standard for currencies around the world for thousands of years, the output of gold being mined has always remained constant (at approximately 2%).In 1971, the United States dollar abandoned the gold standard. Since this time, money as we currently know it, has completely detached itself from the principle of scarcity. We are living in a make believe economy where dollars are printed like baseball cards with no intrinsic value. The value of your dollar is being destroyed at an ever increasing rate as central banks continue to flood the economy with unbacked paper. Why would a government do this? Because the political systems of today are unable to see beyond the next few years. True an increase in the money supply will destroy that money's store of value, but in the short term it will stimulate spending by creating an illusion of wealth. And as with all illusions and deceptions, they will be exposed with devastating consequences.As fiat money continues to lose it's function as a store of value, people, businesses, even governments and their central banks search for alternatives. This is not a new phenomena, it began the day the world got off the gold standard. If one simply looks at the value of gold in dollar terms since the world moved off the gold standard, it has increased dramatically rather than falling.Now a new player has entered the game. This player brings something to the table that the world has never seen before. A truly finite resource. The ultimate store of value. No matter what anyone does, there will only be 21 million bitcoins in existence. There are 43 million millionaires in the world today. There are not even enough bitcoins for each millionaire to own 0.5 btc and there never will be. Bitcoin is harder than gold. It is completely decentralized, completely incorruptible and it is unstoppable. via /r/Bitcoin http://bit.ly/34uENnz