> I meant what most other people would call an inflation hedge in common parlance
In 2021, "Inflation Hedge" meant that if inflation would happen, BTC would protect you from it. Inflation then happened, and BTC failed to protect anyone. Now that its been disproven, people are changing the term "inflation hedge" to mean things that they never meant before.
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If it takes over 18-months for an "Inflation Hedge" to protect you from inflation, I think I can safely say it fails at its job. (A hedge is supposed to protect you from the event, so that you can reallocate your money from the hedge into all the assets that drop during said event).
Now if you want to argue to me that "inflation hedge" never meant anything with regards to inflation or hedging, then sure, we're both in agreement there. Its a meaningless term inside of the cryptocoin community.
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Meanwhile, the people who actually were worried about Inflation bought TIPS, and then sold TIPS during their height (making money, that they could use to purchase other assets). That's what a hedge actually looks like.
I mean, we (probably) do agree and this is an exercise in talking past each other - but the issue here is that Bitcoin appears to be preserving its value and, all else equal, something that preserves it's value is going to appreciate in price faster than the inflation rate [0].
So if someone is worried about monetary creation devaluing the currency, based on what we've seen so far, they'd be doing well to buy Bitcoin. Now you are correct that that isn't an inflation hedge. But typing out all that is a lot of words so unless someone invents a new short phrase to describe "monetary creation devaluing the currency" people are going to keep misusing the word "inflation" to mean that. And, frankly, that is what the word should mean in monetary contexts; the technocrats can go hang. Hopefully not literally, but they seem on a mission to upset people.
[0] Assuming the situation snaps back to pre-COVID trends, anyway. At the moment there is a lot of excitement and the M2 is going down.