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justboxing

> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology.

> But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is.

and

>... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment.

I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die.

For the last 8 years, various sources have been predicting a Bitcoin collapse over and over again. It's still here, alive and well and quite high.

3 years ago: Business Week - Bitcoin Is Collapsing => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893616

4 years ago: latimes.com - Bitcoin virtual currency is on verge of collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7306035

6 years ago: theatlantic.com - The Bitcoin Economy Is Collapsing with No Sign of Recovery (2011) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8431092

6 years ago: Bitcoin & Gresham's Law - the economic inevitability of Collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623549

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In one sense, it's already dead.

In theory, Bitcoin is supposed to be a payment system, digital cash. But that seems to be pretty much dead. Consider the opinion of Fred Wilson, a big Bitcoin booster, who has stopped using it for payments: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat: http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit...

It is still being used for speculation, of course. And for some crime. But the 2010 vision of a digital cash that replaces Western Union, Visa, etc? It certainly hasn't arrived, and it seems farther off than ever.

This might still change, but you're likely right; as a payment system it's probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

It's other description, as a form of digital gold, applies now more than ever though and I think that's how the market is treating it: largely as a hedge and store of fungible value.

It was set to die by design.

Bitcoin has a predetermined graph of coin production with time that converges soon. In 2022, 90% of all bitcoins will be produced, and the ideal inflation will be lower than most fiat currencies.

But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably

All in all, it will be as volatile as currently traded gold (which is not as good a long-term store of value as fiat money as a result), and slower to use in transactions (in November, the European Central Bank will launch SCT Inst, a SEPA mechanism that provides transactions in less than 15 seconds, which is better than Bitcoin's recommended 2 hours).

Beating the improvements of traditional systems will require new cryptocurrency designs.

> But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably

Maybe a bit late, but you finally understood why Bitcoins get more valuable over time: their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases.

That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised.

Ok put your entire life savings in BC, i will put mine in the SP500. Lets see how things look in 40 years?

How has the SP500 compared to BC since its inception in 2009?

The SP500 has been growing consistently, has for quite a long time, and it's a bet on the future growth of the American economy. There will be ups and downs, but by enlarge, steady growth.

BTC has been on a wild ride, and could evaporate at any moment. I don't think it will, but it could, since there's no reason for anyone anywhere to own it.

There's no question the safer bet is S&P 500.

Now - in the range of outcomes, admittedly, the BTC owns the higher end of the spectrum - no doubt, there are possibilities where BTC completely outraces the S&P, however, it also owns the lower end of the spectrum of outcomes, where a lot of those outcomes are 0.

It surprises me to see this downvoted.

One fundamental of investing is that stocks represent an economically productive asset. In contrast, commodities just sit there. If I buy a chunk of a company, that company is working to become a bigger, more effective, more value-generating company. If I buy an ounce of gold, it stays an ounce of gold.

Index funds represent a broader bet still. Because they're composed of many things, volatility is lower and you're betting on whatever the common factors of the index are. So buying an SP500 index fund could easily be said to be a bet on the American economy.

And in many ways, Bitcoin is worse than gold. The historical value of gold is known. Bitcoin is new. Gold's floor price is set by the practical use value of it, both industrial and decorative. Bitcoin's floor price is that of bits. That is, zero. The gold market is broad, with producers and consumers all over the world, and open markets in many countries. Bitcoin is effectively controlled by a relatively small number of people and requires careful long-term cooperation of those people.

So it seems pretty obvious to me that Bitcoin is much higher risk. Which can mean higher reward. But as anybody who has shares in a failed startup knows, higher risk doesn't guarantee higher reward.

It doesn't surprise me. HN is very pro tech, even when they don't understand the foundation of what they are betting on.

I own 1 share of a SP500 ETF. That gives me an actual fractional ownership of Apple. That gives me an actual cut of the dividends of real american companies. It has an actual meaning of what you own.

What does 1 BTC give you? What is the fundamental purpose of a BTC?

Tulips went up in price too, but they were not a very smart investments. Tulip chases do not win in the long term.

What if you owned a US dollar (an actual dollar bill)? That gives you an actual fractional ownership of what? An American government? No. You have a currency, a store of value that can be used to pay a debt.

Owning a BTC is the same as owning a dollar, functionally. The main difference is that dollars, on the whole, tend to lose value, and that BTC tends to gain.

Ya. As per my comment below, it's a) the dissonance between a 'tech view of BTC' and an 'economic/financial' view of BTC and b) the religious nature of BTC hype. And by 'religious' I don't actually mean 'religious' rather, the old 'religious arguments over programming languages and frameworks' kind of trope.

Commenting against BTC is sure to get you down-voted.

It's ok though, it's just one of many HN quirks we're all used to :)

I beg to differ with regards to your valuation of Bitcoin. It, like gold, has a practical use value. It, also like gold, has a value attributed to it due to it's rarity. However, Bitcoin has an advantage over gold, in that it can be traded without having to be transported _at cost_. This is why so many people are bullish on it.

Oh, and so many people "who are in control of it" have too much of their own money invested into it to allow it to fail.

The advantage of gold over Bitcoin is that you can evaluate the non-"it's gold!" uses of gold and make a good guess of its floor value, what it'd be worth if people weren't hoarding it, and say something like "it might be 2-3x overpriced right now, but probably not more than 10x overpriced right now". So you can say, worst case, you probably won't lose more than half the money you put in gold, and almost certainly not all of it.

What is the floor price of Bitcoin, once you eliminate all speculation/hoarding?

Sorry, I missed this in all the noise.

Gold has use value in that even if the commodity speculation activity drops to zero, I can still turn the gold into jewelery and sell that. Or I could sell it to somebody who needs it for industrial purposes. Heck, I could sell it to the people who put gold leaf on candy.

Bitcoin has no such intrinsic floor. It only has exchange value. If people stop accepting it as a medium of exchange, you're left with bits. Bits are approximately free.

That is the wrong measure. The counter argument to that is something like "How did going 100% all in to pets.com in 2000-2001 go?"

You cannot judge future performance by past results. That is the fundamental thing you need to understand before investing. Zoom in on the right part of 2000, and pets.com and a really nice upswing. There have been other stocks that had a nice and steady growth for years and years.. before exploding.

Honestly, and this is coming from a Bitcoin bear, it will probably generate outsized returns in comparison to the S&P500 over the next 2 to 4 years. If it truly is a bubble then it will have a long way to run. The market cap at the moment is tiny, but probably too high to disregard now, and if institutional money starts buying in, it can probably easily go 10-20-30x again.

Don't forget it's still relatively hard for average folk to purchase crypto. But once you have acceptable ETFs and funds that you can purchase at a click of a button through your brokerage account -- a lot of people (and pension funds!) will probably allocate 1-2% of their portfolio to crypto. That is 1-2% of $300tn or so, or 30 to 60 times the amount of money in the space today (in terms of market cap).

If you think this bubble will run for a while, then I also think it's not unreasonable to assume you can multiple your initial investment by 10x by investing in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. But that's my opinion (and this is obviously not investment advice).

Whether it'll be around in 40+ years, I don't dare make that bet. But no one is saying you can't move money around to the better investment opportunity at a specific time.

Having your life savings in BC is just as stupid as having no cryptocurrency at all.

Having your life savings in cold fusion juice presses is just as stupid as having no stock in the above at all.

You need to think of the reason for an investment. If you are set for life, and want to gamble on it... cool, buy BC. You could also go to vegas, or bet on horses, or start a HFT trading shop. All are reasonable ways to gamble for fun and possibly profit.

If you are looking to build a nest egg to retire when you are old, it is very unlikely that BTC is a good route for that ;)

Investing in BTC is like investing in startups. And a lot of people are making money with that. And so are a lot of people in BTC.

Please don't compare this to Vegas, where the odds are known to be against you.

Have a small/tiny % of your investment in cryptocurrency is a smart move.

> Investing in BTC is like investing in startups.

So something that only people with significant incomes and the ability to lose 98% of their investments should touch it? I am fine with that definition. Not sure most BTC investors would qualify to invest in a startup though (see qualified investors law)

> Please don't compare this to Vegas, where the odds are known to be against you.

The odds are against you in many markets. I would argue the odds are against you in BTC. It is a zero sum game, and there are many people looking to steal or scam. In a zero sum game with scammers, your EV is negative unless you yourself also want to steal or scam (which is a different conversation to head down.

> Have a small/tiny % of your investment in cryptocurrency is a smart move.

Why? Should you put a tiny % of your investment in horse races? For most people, a small bet with an unknown payoff is not something they should touch.

> only people with significant incomes and the ability to lose 98% of their investments

If you only invest 1%, you can only lose 1%. And with bitcoin, you can invest at $1 if you want.

> I would argue the odds are against you in BTC.

Seems that in reality they weren't.

> Should you put a tiny % of your investment in horse races?

Still talking about Vegas? In that case you don't seem to understand risk-return. NOBODY should invest in horse races or Vegas, or the lottery. Nobody! Not rich, not poor. Why? Because the risk-return ratio is known to be < 1. Why? Because casino's and bookmakers make sure it is < 1.

The risk-return of Bitcoin is not known to be < 1, and neither are that of startups. Therefore people can actually make money investing in these high risk things, by averaging them out.

Let me put this in another way, if you place a huge amount of Vegas bets, you average out the risk-return, and you will end up with < 1 return. If you place a huge amount of 'bets' on startups and similar investments, you can end up with > 1. That's why people are making money with it.

Instead of arguing with me, maybe you should consider that there might be a tiny bit in truth to all of this. And then maybe that wisdom can make you some decent money in the future. But I won't lose any sleep over it if you don't. I have a sane, pretty conservative investment strategy, and it's doing fine.

"their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases."

Yes - you are right to point out that as BTC's disappear, it's not such a bad thing.

But why do you assume people would continue wanting them?

"That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised."

It's currently one of the worst 'stores of value' possible.

It's massively volatile, and inherently risky: governments could decide to regulate it tomorrow - or even ban it. It's highly susceptible to popular whims. It has massive chunks owned by individual investors who could 'change their minds' on something.

If you have $X USD and want to 'diversify' and have 'strong store of value' - there are many other better options. Real estate being on the top of the list. Over the long-haul, there are innumerable places in the world where real estate will hold it's value for hundreds of years. Baskets of commodities, currencies, decent bonds.

Bitcoin is a very speculative asset, which makes it the 'opposite' of a 'store of value'. And if it's not a currency, then why are we using it again?

Let me put it differently:

In 200 years - do you think there will be demand for real estate in London? There has been for 1000 years. What about Tokyo? Shanghai? Of course there will. Maybe less, but certainly some, and probably more.

Will there be demand for BTC in 100 years? It's hard to say. Possibly, but there's a decent chance nobody will know what it is then.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. People argue that Bitcoin is a great investment because it's going to go up, up, up! And people argue that it's a good store of value. But they can't both be true.

Reward and risk are strongly related. Nobody should know that better than startup people.

"I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. "

Bitcoin is a religious subject among the tech crowd.

The most fascinating thing about BTC has nothing to do with 'block-chain' - it's the manner in which it has created hype among tech circles.

Techies look at it from a tech perspective, financial types from a financial perspective.

From a financial perspective, BTC is downright bizarre. Even the 'threat of disruption' aside, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But from a tech perspective, is uber-cool.

So it's hard to have a discussion about BTC because almost nobody talks about it as a financial instrument - it's always about tech.

The amount of systematic hype is surreal - constant streams of articles etc. etc..

It's going to get bigger before it gets smaller as the hype is just starting to reach mainstream.

Excellent point.

I am really impressed with it as a technology. It's absolutely brilliant.

But when I put on my business hat, I'm still not seeing it. For quite a number of years I've been asking for proof of daily use among significant market segments. For just as many years, I've been getting, "OMG THINK OF THE FUTURE!!!" as an answer.

I have some hope that we're at peak BTC hype, though. A lot of the enthusiasm (and the bigger scams) seem to have moved on to smart contracts, ICOs, etc. It's much harder now to ignore Bitcoin's years of not being very useful.

BTC valuation is pretty strongly correlated to it's Google Search popularity.

There are an amazing number of people who own a little BTC and are in on the hype.

And this is like Facebook 2007, where I already thought 'everyone was on it'. No. The 'rest of America' is just learning about it - then the 'rest of the world' - and then the other 3 billion or so people who are barely on the Internet. FB grew for quite a very long time after 'we thought we all were on it'.

BTC though is tricky to access, my Mother is on FB, she will never buy a Bitcoin.

But I do believe BTC has a lot of popular hype to ride yet.

I suggest it will start to wane quite a long while after the press stops talking about it daily. A lot of people will just 'hold' so I don't think we'll see a crash though.

There are caveats:

The press is notorious for flipping on things. They could turn on BTC and make enough noise. Since it's highly speulative, it's easy to see a flood of people rushing out to 'cash in'.

And of course governments: A Scandinavian country could opt to regulate it, or treat it like 'real currency' and require transparency etc. - which for any other currency would be 'great' because it's validation, but really, the whole point of BTC is anonymity etc. - esp. for black market transactions, so really, it's not a good thing.

It's a brilliant and fun excercise we're going through, but since it's doubtful BTC can ever be an actual currency or medium of exchange, I really wish we would 'move on' because it's not really a useful thing in the end.

Somebody may come along with an actually useful crypto - but i don't think that BTC or the ICO's we're seeing are it.

People also don't appreciate that Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, so the total numbers are meaningless. At the same time, inflation is super low and decreases over time, giving it more and more edge over nation-state currencies.

Bitcoin is NOT infinitely divisible. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 10^8. There were reasons to choose this number and isn't arbitrary [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/31933/why-is-bit...

It is arbitrarily divisible. Fitting inside 64 bits is convenient, but hardly an insurmountable engineering challenge. There's libraries that handle this sort of thing with ease.

Isn't inflation strongly negative? In the link I posted above, Fred Wilson exhibits behavior typical of deflationary times: people hoard the currency.

That's a strong disadvantage vs nation-state currencies, which have clear inflation targets (generally in the 0-2% range) and the ability to hit them. It may be great for speculation, but it's terrible for a medium of exchange. For that, you want the value to be constant or very slightly decreasing.

And I don't think that's fixable. If the Bitcoin supply is limited but those tokens are used in a world of continuous economic growth, then Bitcoin will always be deflationary.

Deflationary assets can be good investments but are terrible mediums of exchange. The Fed has an inflation target and not a deflation target for a reason. Or did I miss the sarcasm here?

Yes, the number of coins in circulation decreases over time.

But the precision can be increased from the current 8 decimals. Even if all but 1 Satoshi/0.00000001 BTC is lost, it could still be split into smaller units, or used to bootstrap a chain with higher precision. It can be fixed as required.

Volatility decreases as the number of users and therefore liquidity increases. It should decline further with rising use of the network for payments instead of a pure store of value.

I agree that "viability as a payment system" is where Bitcoin is stuck right now, but scaling the system is the stated goal of all current Bitcoin developer groups. One of them will get it right eventually.

«Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat»

Wrong. Bitcoin payments processors report growth, eg. BitPay processes $1 billion in payments per year, up 328%! https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

The source you quoted is laughably bad: it tries to estimate payment growth by looking at how many of 500 retailers accept Bitcoin. That's like saying "out of 500 persons only 3 own (not bought) a Porsche this year compared to 4 last year, so worldwide Porsche sales are down."

No, they are looking at merchant growth by looking at use among top retailers. It's a perfectly fine metric if what you care about is daily consumer use for common transactions.

If you're saying, as the blog post says, that it's getting used more for other things than typical ecommerce, that's a different argument.

Yes there is a difference between acceptance and payment use. However they extrapolate that it's declining based on a way too small sample size: 2 retailers stopped accepting BTC so they infer global acceptance is declining... That's just ridiculous.

For all we know the JPMorgan report making this claim could be wrong, as it doesn't even list which 500 retailers it studied, and which are the 2 that dropped Bitcoin. I wouldn't expect quality Bitcoin research coming from JPMorgan anyway, as their CEO is staunchly anti-Bitcoin, so their analysts are probably not enticed or instructed to spend that much time and effort studying it.

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of the largest 500 retailers. I think it's also a fine proxy for mainstream ecommerce.

That's certainly a metric that Bitcoin advocates would have been happy with, say, 5 years ago. Then they were agitating for major retailers to accept it as the obvious coming thing.

The fact that new major merchants are not joining and old merchants are going to the trouble of taking it out is a sign that earlier vision was flawed.

The largest 500 retailers are a poor representation of all retailers. Especially because Bitcoin tends to be more often accepted at small—as opposed to large—retailers.

And again the sample size is way too small. Two (2!) retailers dropping it means nothing, in particular because other larger more significant data points contradict this small sample size: BitPay doing 1B/yr at +328% growth... hardly a sign the "vision was flawed".

You seem to be working very hard not to understand their point. Or mine.

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of major retailers. It's also a reasonable indicator to use for general consumer behavior, because what makes retailers the largest is their use by consumers.

You could claim that a loss of 2 retailers isn't significant proof of decline, although since it's 2 of 5, a 40% decline seems notable to me. But regardless, having less than 1% market penetration in this segment (and declining) is a pretty good sign that it is not currently successful. If you pitched some VC partners with that as proof of traction, they'd laugh you out of the room.

The BitPay post is definitely interesting, but they're cagey enough about their numbers that it's hard to tell what's actually growing. You might be able to use it to make an argument that BitPay is succeeding in some other segment. But it definitely doesn't prove mainstream consumer ecommerce success. Which apparently isn't interesting to you, but to major ecommerce companies, it's very interesting indeed.

«isn't significant proof of decline, although since it's 2 of 5, a 40% decline seems notable to me»

Any percentage value is irrelevant because a change of ±2 among 500 retailers is statistically insignificant. If it was ±20 it would be significant.

What if we went from 1 to 2 accepting BTC, would you say "acceptance went up 50% among top 500 retailers?" It would be highly misleading and improper to report it as such.

Taking the one bit you want to argue with but ignoring the meat of my point certainly isn't something I'm finding useful. I'll take my leave here.

If they went from 1 to 2 accepting BTC, I would say "acceptance went up 100%".

Ah yes. Bitcoin died 172 times: https://99bitcoins.com/obituary-stats/

Like the latter part of an actuarial mortality table, it seems Bitcoin dies more often as time passes.

While bitcoin is no longer a good currency, it's still the best store of wealth - the crypto version of gold, due to massive PoW mining infrastructure.

While other cryptocurrencies may give you near perfect anonymity or sub-second transaction times with no fees, none of them are so secure and dependable.

To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it.

Edit To replies: It does if the SEC decides the concept of cryptocurrency is one which fundamentally exists to bypass regulations for the purpose of fraud. I’d disagree, you’d disagree, but only their agreement matters.

What does that have to do with bitcoin?

The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.

It would suffer a temporary drop then inevitably climb back up again. Bitcoin is global at this point. No one jurisdiction is going to shut it down.

There is nothing inevitable about it, but even if it were, the SEC has a long arm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-arm_jurisdiction

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgorgement

http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/04/argument-preview-long-arm-...

Here’s a thought experiment. Yes Bitcoin is global but like all other distributed systems, the CAP theorem applies. When there is a network partition, you can only choose between consistency and availability. Now what if tomorrow the Chinese government decided to totally block Bitcoin traffic, just like they block Facebook, Twitter, NYT, Tor and VPNs? Losing either consistency or availability would be a heavy blow. It’s either going to stop working at all, or fork into a Chinese and non-Chinese version. I don’t see how either of them inspires confidence.

I think it would be pretty difficult to block a P2P network at that layer of the stack to effectively partition the network. The list of peers is dynamic, so it would always be one step ahead of The Great Firewall.

Packet Inspection?

It wouldn't matter at all. It would inconvenience Chinese holders of Bitcoin. You can't really block Bitcoin traffic. There's ways around firewalls. For example, I could embed a bitcoin address into a JPG image, certain XY positions would contain the bits which could be decoded into an address or key. That could then be routed to the Bitcoin network once outside of China. As long as you can send bits, you can send bitcoin.

You can arrest people and seize their assets.

> Bitcoin is global at this point. No one jurisdiction is going to shut it down.

Especially as countries like Japan are embracing cryptocurrencies. That must make other countries wonder whether trying to attack cryptocurrencies will end up leaving them at a competitive disadvantage.

That's kind of an absurd claim to make. What exactly is your reasoning?

The price is 5x since after the ETH hype started a few months ago. Literally just look at the price history.

Correlation does not imply causation. Did I really have to tell someone on HN this?

You asked for reasoning, not evidence, so it might be helpful not to move those goalposts.

Reasoning can't have or be evidence?

They’re two words with different meanings, and I don’t find semantic arguments engaging, sorry.

Even though your whole contribution to this discussion was semantic.

The definition of reasoning is: "the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way."

As if evidence could not be a component of reasoning that leads one to logic and sense.

The only reason why you don't want to engage this further is because you knew your quip was fruitless from the start.

Have a nice life.

Or could the frothy ICO market be due to successful cryptocurrency investors throwing money at anything to try to "diversify" their portfolios?

That has no effect on Bitcoin.

> To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it.

They are already doing just that in the last couple of months, and bitcoin remains unaffected.

The SEC have only cracked down a handful of obvious scams from the pool of obvious scams. That’s worlds away from a global crackdown on the entire space, or worse, congressional action. Whether or not you agree with said action, I’m sure you can think of reasons, stated or otherwise, that such action might Be taken.

No they’ve been calling just about everyone operating in their jurisdiction. Many ‘reputable’ ICOs have halted their fundraising as a result of phone calls their lawyers received from the SEC. They’ve only filed suits agains the obvious scams so far, but that’s just a matter of priorities and the fact that they try to be soft handed with non-scams.

I believe it and a very good point. But do you have a source?

Not a quotable one no, although some like colony.io have blog posts explaining why they are changing the terms or schedule of their ICO. Others have refunded their ICO. But it is Back channel sources that tell me the others have received calls too (I work in this industry).

In that case, I doubly appreciate you sharing the info, it does fit with how the SEC likes to operate too.

«would do it»

The SEC only has jurisdiction in the US. I don't see how this would impact Bitcoin's use in the rest of the world. Bitcoin is a phenomenon that's worldwide.

"For the last 8 years, various sources have been predicting a Bitcoin collapse over and over again. It's still here, alive and well and quite high."

It's 'high' mostly because there are a large number of holders who are just sitting there on it.

If it's not being used as a currency, than I can't see how in the long term, people consider it to be a 'store of value' when it could be regulated, deemed illegal, or declared all sorts of things by regulatory bodies which fundamentally change it's nature.

And as an arbitrary store of value? We have tons of 'stores of value' available to us already that are considerably less volatile and more liquid.

So what is the point again? What problem does it solve, and why should anyone want it for a material reason?

I too agree that it will be around for a very long time, but what happens when the very speculative press - and even HN readers get 'bored' of all the news? When the Google queries start to wane (and BTW I think BTC will enjoy a huge surge in interest by 'everyday folks of the world' for a while before it wanes), but eventually, people will lose interest if it's just a 'store of value'.

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