at the prices of bitcoin right now, about every day I wonder if it's the day to cash out. While I see these changes are to stop money laundering, I wonder what percentage of the bitcoin worth is from it being used for money laundering.
I state all this as my "credentials" for making the statement that theoretically it is not a house of cards. Transactions could take 72 hours to clear. The blockchain could be 1.7 terabytes in size. And transactions could cost hundreds of dollars. None of this would stop bitgold from having a market capitalization in the hundreds of billions. (What could stop it is some technical bugs or mismanagement.)
It is emphatically not a house of cards. (But I don't like it.)
In what way is it a house of cards? It is a legitimately scarce resource being legitimately used exactly as designed.
Did you know that all fiat (government issued/backed) currency is inflationary by nature? The reason the Swiss used to be regarded for having the strongest currency was because it was still backed by gold. They are mostly fiat now sadly.
So you say Bitcoin has no long term foundation? How about a hedge against inflation? the USD will ALWAYS lose value over time ABSOLUTELY. If I don't want to lose the value of my fiat, and there is enough people who also feel the same way by exchanging it for cryptocurrency, in which direction can we expect the price of bitcoin to go ?
*sidenote - bitcoin is capped at 21 million tokens, hence NOT inflationary.