Clearly, are shown by the site here, these aren't nearly as liquid as fiat currencies, nor are they really used to purchase anything.
So... What is it?
EDIT: upon thinking about it, MLM wasn't the term I meant.
During that same time I transferred 15k$ from one crypto-wallet to another. It took 10 minutes all told.
Sure there are lots of people who are buying crypto because they think they'll make loads of money but a significant portion of us are in it because we dislike the infantilizing ways the current banks hold us hostage.
People do certified checks whenever they buy a house, a car or transfer significant money from one institution to another.
And don't get me started on sending money to family members overseas!
If we're talking about other currencies, you have a good point. I think lumen (XLM) is the best right now, ~$0.0000015 fee, ~3 second average right now
Sure, but if someone scoops your crypto coins, or you leave them in an exchange that's hacked, you basically have no way to get it back.
This is trading a serious amount of security granted to us by world governments for convenience. It also increases your cognitive load of handling your crypto safely.
That bank sounds terrible, and it can vary from branch-to-branch which is frustrating.
...But if you were beaten and robbed on your way to the bank, that check would be worthless to the thief. If your bank went insolvent, the FDIC would cover your $60k. What happened to depositors when Mt. Gox went belly up? What happens when that same thief hacks your wallet instead? There are many positives to our current banking system which you seem to be dismissing. Namely accountability. Perhaps once these things are well regulated and backed by legitimate business it will see mainstream use. But crypto is literally nothing but a speculative game and means for laundering money at the moment.
My first hand experience (2017) is that US banking oferring (from a european guy perspective) is a eyes opening experience.
* There is no instant bank wires (free ones) between major banks. Or at least the same days ones, working reliably through most of banks.
* You get paper checks from your bank :)))))
* Small business (sold a car, got a return from landlord) give you money on checks, also accept only paper checks if you need to pay them on the spot (in the office).
* your bank charges you a monthly fee, to protect you from overdraft (wtf is this on debit account??), he shall block from happening at the begining - we call it "protection racket" in Italy.
* boa/citi and others have websites with design from 2005, not to mention mobile apps..
* you can't send money from bank account to a different bank to your unsophisticated friend (plumber, maid, or mr sandwich) just knowing his phone.
* when you withdraw money from coinbase to your connected US bank account, you pay 1,5% of face value. WHAT? PERCENTAGE FEE? This is USA banking thing, as the very same coinbase, charges fixed 0.15 EUR fee per no matter how big wire if you're european.
* major us banks got two factor just two years ago in terms of security.
* tap to pay (we call it paypass) is also almost 10 years after europe.
* first chip card in citi was offered to me in 2015 or 2016? Still magnetic (easily copied) card is used in majority of points in the USA
etc..
Some of them are chaning in the last two years, but mostly for sophisticated customers, small banks, and people not being able to use those features between different banks. It will still take a lot of time to catch up with a Kenya from Africa...
Banks in the USA do not allow deposits into accounts without account holder permission. They won't let you stop by a branch and deposit into a friend's account (to pay them back) without a formal arrangement, so it's easier just to find your unsophisticated friend and give them cash directly. I'm not sure if this is due to a law, or our culture of security theater.
This is not (universally) true. I've had many friends/family deposit checks for me at my local branch when I'm out of town/on vacation/whatever. I've done it myself for other people. I believe the banks in question were Wells Fargo and US Bank.
YMMV based on bank, but there is no regulation preventing this.
The reasoning presented was a little suspicious - they envisioned someone "forcing" you to unwillingly take a loan (of like $100) by depositing it into your account. Then they would demand their $100 back and use this as leverage to blackmail or otherwise disrupt your life.
But I don't totally disagree. To me, depositing money into another person's bank feels...improper - like performing an oil change on someone else's car, or taking someone else's books back to the library, or walking into your neighbor's unlocked house to lock all the doors. There are very good reasons someone would want these done for them, and also edge cases where these would cause an issue for the other person. It's a moral grey area to me.
Definitely not the case in many (most?) banks. I've done this multiple times and never been turned down.
Transfers are free and fast here in the UK.
You conveniently skipped over how much it cost in fees to transfer that much. I'd wager it was significantly more than $7.50.
Here in Europe I can make a payment to any other EUR bank account in Europe, for free and it’ll usually arrive the same or next day. All I need is the recipients bank account number, and to enter that and the amount on my online banking - I don’t need to go and see anyone or fax anything over.
Recently a new initiative was launched where (between participating banks) you can transfer up to €15,000 in a maximum of 10 seconds:
https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
If I had to bet, there is still lots of upwards runway left, but at some point, it will come crashing down, the bad [companies][coins] will be worthless, and out of the ashes will rise a more sensible market with some of these [companies][coins] truly changing the world.
But apart from that I am not sure what the future of ETH or LTC will be. To me it seems some adaptations of ETH have a much clearer use-case and therefore are likely to raise a lot in value in the future. One of the ETH based coins that I really believe in is OmiseGo[0] (OMG) which will bring banking capabilities to many people that currently don't have a bank account.
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I'm bullish on blockchain technologies over the next decade or two, but we're gonna have to clean up for awhile.
My hope is that blockchain enthusiasts are taking their profits and using them to invest in building something better.
(There's also a lot to be said here about the hucksterism, shilling, get-rich-quick schemes, and an almost-fanatical belief in the power of a pure free market inherent in the BTC community from the beginning, but that's best left to another post)
Once the bubble burst then no one argues that they were in a bubble.
Worse, the people buying in now aren't true believers. They are "investing" because they think it is easy money. These folks represent a larger percentage of the market cap and are also least likely to have confidence in bitcoin for it's utility. They also stand to lose the most because their buy in point was so much higher. (people who bought in at say $1000, are just losing profits)
A panic sell will happen at some point.
As Bitcoin becomes extremely mainstream, those who hodl Bitcoin with religious fervor are increasingly becoming a smaller minority. Eventually it’ll reach critical mass and there will be enough disloyal Bitcoin ownership to cause a panic at the first significant sign of selling.
All asset appreciation is predicated on increases in demand for an asset. Asset appreciation isn’t a pyramid.
Pyramids have no source of value - even an ephemeral asset - just dues of new members being channeled into revenue for preceding members.
I understand the technical reasons why due to the 21M bitcoin limit, hashrate difficulty increasing, etc. It just seems like a rigged system with the people “on top” getting huge rewards for very little work whereas the people lower down who do many orders of magnitude more work are getting very little reward. From that perspective, it has the scent of MLM, if you will.
He took the risk initially so he gets to enjoy the spoils.
There will be many hundreds of coins flooding the market. There is no such equivalent in the real (offline) world. You have gold, silver, platinum, etc. - but that's about it. No one is inventing/digging up new types of metals.
Does one cryptocurrency increase 20x in a month? Then yes, it's a bubble, and it will likely crash pretty hard in another month or two (but probably not as much as it rose).
Does it increase 20x in a few years? Not necessarily a bubble because its value may simply be related to its adoption and potential.
The thing about cryptocurrencies is they have rather limited supply once they are launched on the market. So if their userbase/number of adopters increases by 10x overnight, and most of them intend to keep those coins, then it doesn't really qualify as a bubble, even if the value explodes.
That said, I can see a future for it if something like lightning network ever gets released (and actually works).
A big advantage of cryptocurrencies (I think) is that there is no regulation (no central bank injecting billions), but it is also its Achilles's heel because it can't be used ha s a commodity currency because it miss the stability of a currency backed by a central bank.
In multilevel marketing, people are being sold downstream profits directly from people they sign up. If you sign up another person you take a cut of their revenue. If you sign up enough people and they sign up enough people you stand to gain a lot of money with very little work.
When it falls apart, assuming you're not deep enough in that you're indited yourself, you keep that profit. It's the people at the tail end who lose because the only way to really profit is to sign people up.
On the other hand when you sell someone on bitcoin you aren't taking a cut of their 'revenue'. If you're invested in bitcoin you're as in the hock for a crash as they are.
It's an asset, though a somewhat different one to traditional assets. As such it's subject to the same kinds of asset bubbles as any other asset (ie. gold is not as liquid as fiat, nor is it really used to buy things). But it's not the same kind of thing as MLM.
It's not being used to buy things because its a deflationary currency which along with an adoption curve means it's more advantageous to sit on it.
The adoption is definitely increasing the value of it, its a more liquid gold to me, but like any other currency or asset the value is derived from the trust and value that people put in it.