>4.4. The digital tavern

>Recall the story we began with. The man in the 12th century tavern sought to give you an ambiguous ‘token’ whilst taking your ducats. If you gave him your ducats, the net effect would not be an attack on the ducat system. It would be an attack on the tavern owner, who might otherwise have got those ducats from you for board and beer. To use a more recent example, it is the promoters of Gamestop shares that lose out when people start using their disposable income to buy Bitcoin tokens from crypto promoters instead. The decision to buy either of those might be a response to an uncertain environment affected by monetary policy, but neither action is a direct ‘attack’ on the dollar, because the dollar system is the pricing hub for both objects, rather than the thing being traded.

I love this paragraph. You have to consider that fiat currencies are "artificially" kept stable i.e. price stability is a political goal.
This means that the savings risk has been externalized to government institutions that will take over debts from the failing banking system. If the government is doing this to maintain price stability then where is all the instability coming from? As dollars are created through debt and we want those debts to be repaid (again this is what we want because of our human nature) they must fulfill their function of medium of exchange. Those dollars must keep flowing. They aren't allowed to stagnate in a bank account for all eternity where they actually interrupt the repayment of debts and that interruption is what is causing instability.

The ability to save in USD is at odds with the ability to use it as a medium of exchange. This is because savings represent a certain amount of value in the real world that has not been consumed. Because the real world keeps changing that real value is extremely volatile but the dollar isn't. It's extremely stable. How does saving in USD impact real world value? Saved money is money that is not being spent, meaning you delayed someone's paycheck and they were unemployed for the time being. Unemployment doesn't increase real value, therefore saving in USD has a negative impact. If the value of the dollar must stay stable (0%) inflation then the obvious answer is that the number of dollars must decrease to represent the loss in real value. You know, the thing that should have happened in 2008. People who had deposits at those banks should have lost their money. Of course telling people without warning that they lost all their deposits is terrible news. It would make more sense to fix the problem in the short term and clean things up over the long term and give people time to make the right decision. Of course that doesn't change the fact that their money must disappear through negative interest rates. Of course we can also loosen price stability and erode the value of each individual USD via inflation.

This introduction got much longer than I intended. Now back to the article.

When people buy Bitcoin and start saving in Bitcoin they stop saving in USD. The moral hazard is gone. When you save in BTC there is no entity protecting your investment, you shoulder the savings risk yourself. The volatility of BTC (and gold) isn't actually a bug. No government will ever bail out BTC. If people are unemployed because of you (assuming there was a BTC economy in El Salvador), you take the hit yourself. Thus saving in BTC is not an attack on the USD. You are actually making the USD more stable, you are reducing the need for government interventions to keep the system going. Of course it would be more sensible to invest into bonds and the stock market but simply taking on the savings risk while saving into nothing is better than saving into something with a moral hazard.

Edit: I failed to mention that holding onto savings beyond the duration of the debt is what is harmful about saving. Given enough debt saving is ok but as mentioned governments have to create artificial debt when there isn't enough "natural" debt.