“Bitcoin let’s you store $1T USD of dollars in your head, transport it anywhere in the world, and there’s not a single thing anyone else can do about it.”
As of now the $1T can also disappear and nobody will even notice.
As of now the $1T can also disappear and nobody will even notice.
Bus factor and too many single points of failure. How many lost wallets are out there with a few hundred or thousands of coins from before Bitcoin hit $100?
Lots of Bitcoin has been lost. Good key hygiene should not be taken lightly. What is unfortunate for those losers is fortunate for Bitcoin. As the supply of lost Bitcoin increases the overall scarcity of the asset increases.
With bitcoin the single point of failure is always your key. That's why every random walk down the timeline leads to 100% of keys lost over the full course of time.
As for backups, the Bitcoin ledger is likely the most durable dataset that has ever existed. Backups are made daily at every layer across the world and there is no central point of failure in the network.
Shutting down the Bitcoin network would take a world war, and even then the network would survive through backups and the will of network participants to bring it back.
Which means that it’s just a gamble of some insiders.
Speculation is by definition gambling. Investing is also speculation. You have a thesis, and you make returns if that plays out. You lose capital when you are wrong.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "insiders" - most of the world can purchase Bitcoin, the software is OSS, the network inspectable, and the evolving thesis and narrative is fully available online.
Bitcoin is the people's money.
>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.