Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018
theblockcrypto.com
theblockcrypto.com
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
Quite a bit has changed with the prevalance of Segwit transactions, some-to-many Lightning transactions, a lot of Liquid transactions, and transaction bundling. Specifically in reaction to how the network convulsed last bull market and correction.
Yeah it still sucks and is hardly competitive especially on the layer-2 front, but lets at least be accurate about why it sucks lol.
Wrapped Bitcoin offerings are better than native Bitcoin. There is a lot of money being made in helping people wrap and unwrap their Bitcoin for use and trade (not for custody though). It will be very prevalent this cycle. There are a lot of options for people to be unburdened by Bitcoin's layer-1 while being able to manage risk and capture alpha with the market gyrations, in unlimited amounts. All comes down to if people want to learn, this time, but the landscape is extremely different.
The honest reality is that you will want to watch is if Ethereum's capacity can keep up fast enough. If mentioning the Ethereum Network caused a convulsion, then you really need to re-evaluate what is going on. It is acting as a trading portal and center that has almost nothing to do with the Ether cryptocurrency. It has robust Layer-1 trading systems, 10 competing Layer-2 offerings that already work right now which the Layer-1 systems will very quickly upgrade to (bitcoin has 1 Layer-2 system called Lightning, in incremental progress for 5 years and it doesn't work very well), while also being in the process of updating its own Layer-1 consensus layer to increase throughput by two-three orders of magnitude.
Any layer-2 solution is just a dead end as you still have to pay the high fees to enter and exit. And it's funny, and sad, that you bring up Liquid as a potential solution because it's a centralized solution and we might as well be content with PayPal if we're going that route.
If you want to transact in unlimited amounts very quickly, there are extremely viable options. If you then want to pay a little bit more to custody your asset in the most secure way onchain, you can do that. Let's step back and look at the criticism: we are still talking about nearly instant on-chain settlement, and by instant I mean within an hour, at any time of day any day of the week.
We are talking about fees lower than what trading commissions were for decades, but being mad that it isn't simultaneously better than merchant processing fees or for poor people all the time.
There is just a parallel world here with plenty of options, completely accessible now with atomic swaps or bonded minting/burning in a way that wasn't available even just two years ago. The exchanges are mostly irrelevant except the largest fiat onramps, which have recently expanded too.
That's where we are. If the market really wants to get frothy this time, I think the capacity is quite ready. And for things that aren't ready due to programming or people just not using them, they incentivize is there to be a catalyst.
Did I mention that if you open a channel to the wrong hub, you must open yet another channel, with all associated costs?
It's ridiculous to even entertain Lightning as a viable option when there are other low-fee and fully functioning cryptocurrencies that aren't gimped by a tiny blocksize.
The only thing missing in the BTC ecosystem is smart contracts, but I am happy for that to be a separate ecosystem (ETH or otherwise).
A lot of retrospective analysis of the 2018 run found price painting and similar shady tactics by just a few actors drove the prices up substantially, used as an undergirding to the news hype cycle.
If you had a billion dollars in today's bitcoin value to move, how much could you increase your take for say, $50 million 'invested' in paying price-painting experts to generate bitcoin hype news?
The shady tactic being the Department of Justice doing it for free?
DOJ has flagged the billion dollar wallet for seizure, effectively tainting a large supply of bitcoin until it is magically washed by the US Marshalls when they collect it and auction it off again.
Edit: Now we know its actually US gov that moved it, so not market manipulation: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdgz8/us-feds-seize-1-billi...
It's not that different from Fed stimulus creating money that ends up being used to buy stocks and inflating prices across the market. Fed does it in the open, Tether is doing it surreptitiously. Caveat emptor.
I wonder if the end game has a Tether collapse?
So it's basically an asset class correlated with stocks?
Gold had a bit of dip too even, but not as severe ...
If they are remotely right that bitcoin is a liquid inflation protected asset then the demand for such an asset should increase in a world of more and more QE from central banks.
Assets have been rallying across the board after Biden looked like he was going to win. The theory is that because it appears the Republicans will still hold on to the Senate, the government will effectively be gridlocked and the Fed will have no choice but to increase asset buying in absence of big fiscal stimulus.
You can see that in rates crashing Tuesday/Wednesday after rising in anticipation of a "Blue Wave" that never happened and risk assets increasing across the board.
Can you link raw data?
At this point, the marginal buyer is a leveraged investment firm. So, the hypothesis is not a crazy one.
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2017/1/1 2018/11/25 2020/10/11But that's not what you said. You said $15,000 usdT, which is incorrect.
Admit it and move on because changing topics midstream doesn't fool anyone and just exposes how flimsy your reasoning was to begin with.
I am not changing topics, my point is that when you see a price of $15000 on the exchanges, what you are actually seeing is mostly btc/usdt pairs, that is, you are getting 15k usdt for a bitcoin, not USD. You can see it in e.g. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/markets/
It is currently pegged 1:1, so you can exchange it for actual US dollars for the most part, which allows exchanges to claim that USDT=USD and they merge them all into a single thing. But there is no reason to believe USDT is actually equal to USD as they keep printing billions of them without any proof that there's any real money behind it.
Until it isn't. There is zero proof those guys are actually holding their claimed $16,866,411,506 USD in cash somewhere, considering they were kicked out of all the banks years ago
Bitcoin is valuable because it represents an immutable data store which is difficult to change - much like "stocks". The value an immutable-like data stores presents to some business models is more valuable than the idea of publicly traded stock to others.
For example, I could hook up a Bitcoin transaction to this POST, and do it without any authentication or credit card number, yet it would still be paid and secure. That is available to everyone today in the form of Lightning. Once more business models, such as those backed by ML adopt these types of micropayments, there will be no stopping Bitcoin, whether you lick stocks or not.
In Bitcoin's case, it's distributed consensus. In the case of startups, it's the investors that control consensus. In the case of the market, it's the market manipulators that do it, in conjunction with public opinion.
As long as public opinion holds that Bitcoin is valuable and it continues to be a secure solution that doesn't require edge case handling (which increases risk) then there's no reason anyone shouldn't think it's a reliable store of immutable values in the near term.
perma-bulls should never be in the commodities markets and typically aren't.
they should stay married to the framed stock certificate their grandma gave them and stay out of this market.