This is a gold rush[1]. People that were early in BitCoin already cashed, now profit is made on exchanges and by hardware suppliers. It is even worse than Gold because you can't just hold when market crash.
You can hold and you can dollar cost average, and if you weren't buying with the intention of holding for 5 or more years you weren't really investing you were speculating and if you're speculating you should be hedged or have a strategy that can handle a dynamic market.
I know people who were early in bitcoin and they are still HODLing and using their BTC wealth to invest in other things like ETH and startups.
Bitcoin has significantly higher transaction fees than paypal and a much less mature, much harder to use API.
However, simply holding bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and central bank currency risk is a legitimate use.
One of the big rallies in bitcoin coincided very precisely with the Cyprus collapse where the government simply confiscated a percentage of everyone's money in the banks.. and in places like Venezuela bitcoin is literally a life saver.
So remittances may be the biggest market, but hedging against incompetent government is not an illegitimate use of it... and I would separate that from "speculation" as a use case.
Speculation tends to get a bad rap, but remember, speculators sell when prices are high and buy when prices are low-- they tend to moderate prices.
I think I understand what you mean, but I also think that you underestimate the impact that the introduction of the tulip to Europe had on the economy. If you browse through the Wikipedia page, I think you will find it interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Also interesting is the effect that it still has on the economy. Some of the big flower monopolies that still exist today (nearly 400 years later!) were created by people who speculated on tulip bulbs and diversified quickly enough (mostly by using profits to buy up land).
We tend to think about things from our own perspectives, but when you are looking at that time period, imports of agricultural products to the wealthy is what ruled the world. Just like they were able to saturate their market, so will we with abstract financial products. Those who are able to diversify quickly enough will probably be the next big winners. Those who keep buying graphic cards will probably be the next big losers.
I heard that last time before the crash. Kind of a weird statement to make now that it's at $2800.
Could you elaborate?
Bitcoin could hypothetically be replaced by Dogecoin and bitcoin would have no value.
A cryptotoken is still a cryptotoken as long as the network is propagating tx & blocks. The whole point of them is that they continue to function regardless of if the "developer" is around.