&gt;Even at a casual glance, your statement is flatly wrong; the peak of the last BTC bubble was 2013-11-30, 1163 USD, a couple months later that bubble had deflated to 826.40 USD, a loss of just over 29%. In the last 20 years, the USD has lost 31.38% of its value, so no, a 29% is not &quot;much worse&quot; than a 31.38% It has rough parity, if we want to get pedantic about it, over the two periods you nominated, the USD actually technically did worse.<p>Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That&#x27;s terrible. Follow it out until the fall of 2014 if you like and it has declined another 50%. Add another few months an in a year from december to december, your wonderful currency has lost nearly 70% of its value. But wait, there&#x27;s more, let&#x27;s say you loaded up then because you have so much faith that this is the future (TM). Ride it for just another month and it will lose 30% of the value between December and Jan (~$330-&gt;$220).<p>Methinks you also forgot that money in a bank earns interest and you forgot to deduct that from your devaluation of the USD. $1000 USD in a savings bank in 1996 with a withdrawal now would be about $1500, which essentially nullifies your entire devaluation when talking about holding value over long term.<p>&gt;would assuage the sense that one had made a bad investment purchasing<p>Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that.<p>&gt;price you&#x27;re dimly aware of from your shallow knowledge<p>You can just pull prices from here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;price&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;price&#x2F;</a><p>You don&#x27;t need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works.<p>&gt;The pessimistic projection is a lot less rosy, and involves a massive sovereign debt bust and the collapse of fiat currencies and the corrupt world central banking apparatus, all expenses paid courtesy of your shallow, misplaced faith in the benighted institutions of the modern status quo.<p>If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead. Also, a massive debt bust across the global financial system would imply a shortage of cash, not a surplus (a.k.a. deflation and not inflation).