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In The Media

Playing Hot Potato With Your Money

by Larry Chiang on February 2, 2025

Hot Potato Syndrome 
Altcoiners promote reasons to transact with altcoins instead of bitcoin. 
But they all fail at explaining why you should hold altcoins instead of bitcoin.
Someone could hold bitcoin until the moment they need to transact, and then convert it into whatever altcoin or fiat currency happens to be temporarily useful or accepted.
The recipient could then immediately convert it back to bitcoin for the purposes of holding.
Therefore, if bitcoin is objectively the best tool for holding (saving), there’s really no good reason to hold any other money/currency/token. 
In a rational environment, everything else would suffer from HPS, Hot Potato Syndrome.
The most logical move for someone caught holding an altcoin would be to trade it for bitcoin ASAP.
Why should anyone want to hold onto something that’s good at being spent, but worse at being held?
Now listen: the market capitalization of a money (and the market value per unit) represents how much demand there is for holding it.
If there’s zero demand to hold a form of money, the market cap would also be zero. 
The value per unit would be zero. 
It doesn’t matter how theoretically useful it is for transactions, smart contracts, apps, etc.
Nobody wants a hot potato on their balance sheet.
If bitcoin is objectively the best tool for holding (saving), then the market cap for all other forms of money is unjustified. 
The long-term investment thesis for these alternatives would be nonexistent. 
They would all eventually trend toward a value of zero.
As people realize this, they’d be less inclined to accept the alternatives as payment, no matter what fancy bells and whistles are attached to them. 
They’d be a pure liability, or a short-term gamble.
Only bitcoin, and perhaps bitcoin-backed currencies, would retain reliable market demand.
Now, is it the truth that bitcoin is objectively the best tool for holding (saving)?
Well, we know that the supply of bitcoin is more certain than anything else, both now and in the future. 
There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin, with each coin mined into circulation at a known pace.
Nothing else in existence beats bitcoin in this regard. 
Definitely not gold or fiat currencies, which have supplies that are estimated and less predictable.
Not altcoins either. Any altcoin that claims “a fixed supply” is making a less reliable claim than bitcoin. 
It’s more susceptible to eventual changes.
That’s because bitcoin is provably more decentralized than any other cryptocurrency.
There are more bitcoin users and bitcoin nodes than any other cryptocurrency.
The risk of this ever changing is extremely low.
In summary: if you don’t want your hard-earned savings eventually burned to a crisp by HPS, study bitcoin.

Author Tom Honzik 

 
 
Tom Honzik
⁦‪@tom_honzik‬⁩
Hot Potato Syndrome (HPS):

Altcoiners promote reasons to transact with altcoins instead of bitcoin.

But they all fail at explaining why you should hold altcoins instead of bitcoin.

Someone could hold bitcoin until the moment they need to transact, and then convert it into pic.x.com/iolWZM2uDa

 
2/1/25, 2:08 PM
 
 


WordPress’d from my personal iPhone, 650-283-8008, number that Steve Jobs texted me on
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