Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record
wsj.com
wsj.com
The amount of energy being wasted (reportedly more than seven nuclear power plants worth) on what is essentially an unproductive project is quite absurd.
In a world where we should all be increasingly concerned about the looming climate catastrophe, it's wholly irresponsible for Bitcoin to exist other than as an academic curiosity.
Also I reckon if recreational drugs were legalised, there would be no real reason to use Bitcoin at all. I mean what would be left except for just buying into the pyramid scheme, and ransomware payments?
Reply: To be fair, the US’ currency has no intrinsic value either. Prior to the removal of the gold standard, your $20 bill was backed by exactly $20 worth of gold in some vault. Mid-1970s, the gold standard was stopped and the US’ currency became “fiat”; it only has value because the US says it does. Should the US’ economy collapse, the bills become literally worthless.
It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison.
Absolutely not. There's nothing "fiat" about Bitcoin. Fiat means by decree—there's no Bitcoin nation or organization that decreed that Bitcoin is valuable.
There's no authority that says what a Bitcoin is worth; the market decides.
Bitcoin, like gold, is hard money.
https://tradesmithdaily.com/educational/bitcoin-is-the-pures...
https://www.realvision.com/shows/the-interview-crypto/videos...
This is perhaps the best podcast for Bitcoin skeptics: "Bitcoin Common Misconceptions w/ Robert Breedlove"—https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/btc001-bitcoin-common-...
Despite what Bitcoin proponents want to believe, there is no intrinsic value in Bitcoin - hence why its “exchange rate” fluctuates so much. When a new block is mined, ~$20k of gold don’t magically get added to a vault - because there’s no backing currency.
It can't be inflated and it can't be counterfeited. It's not subject to political pressure or the whims of a government.
To the extent that anything has intrinsic value, since value is subjective at the end of the day, Bitcoin certainly does, especially now as we have Great Depression levels of unemployment during a global pandemic. The more the global reserve currency is inflated—that would be the trillions and trillions of dollars that have been printed in the past year—the more valuable Bitcoin becomes.
Saying that PoS offers zero security seems a bit extreme but there's definitely a trade-off.
Honestly if it runs successfully for multiple staking periods I don't think there will be much of an argument for PoW cryptocurrencies that aren't the dominate coin in their respective type of work. Essentially all coins that share a proof of work with a larger coin are constantly at risk of a 51% attack. We've seen it before with bitcoin forks.
Proof of work's security properties are broken for everything that isn't BTC, ETH (although this will change soon) and whatever the dominate CPU coin is (Monero?)
PoW secures any coin that dominates the daily issuance of all coins (efficiently) using the same hardware. So the different hardware classes are
CPUs
GPUs
SHA256 ASICs
scrypt ASICs
Equihash ASICs
X11 ASICs
etc...
and each one can secure one dominant coin.
I'm not aware of any insurmountable problems having been found. With Eth2.0 steadily approaching launch and other networks in various stages of progression, it seems increasingly unlikely we'll find one.
Most post-launch cryptocurrencies were designed a long time ago, though. If you look at recent credible projects, most involve proof of stake: NEAR, Solana, Coda (Mina), Cosmos, Celo, Polkadot, etc.
I can only think of a couple recent blockchain designs based on proof of work: Grin and Iron Fish.
Still sounds wasteful, except slightly less massively so.
Some newer projects (including the one I work on, mirprotocol.org) are using cryptographic proofs to verify each computation, to avoid re-execution entirely.
As opposed to the energy and pollution generated by digging up yellow rocks or shiny crystals? What about billionares flying around the world in private jets or cruising in their yachts?
Moreover, if carbon emissions are the issue, why not tax it directly (aka carbon tax), rather than indirectly via a "sin" tax? That would have the effect of incentivizing the reduction of carbon emissions economy wide, rather than in a tiny sector.
Using excess hydro power (china) or renewables like geothermal doesn't hurt the planet. Most bitcoin is mined using marginal energy that would be wasted otherwise. It has to be, as mining is an extremely cutthroat industry where burning actual fossil fuels is generally not cost effective.
> First, it's clean. Energy can be extracted without burning a fossil fuel such as coal, gas, or oil. Geothermal fields produce only about one-sixth of the carbon dioxide that a relatively clean natural-gas-fueled power plant produces, and very little if any, of the nitrous oxide or sulfur-bearing gases. Binary plants, which are closed cycle operations, release essentially no emissions.
> WHY IS GEOTHERMAL ENERGY A RENEWABLE RESOURCE?
> Answer: Because its source is the almost unlimited amount of heat generated by the Earth's core. Even in geothermal areas dependent on a reservoir of hot water, the volume taken out can be reinjected, making it a sustainable energy source.
Orders of magnitude less than the amount of energy being "wasted" sustaining the millions of employees of the banking industry. I use scare quotes because the energy is being spent, not wasted.
> I mean what would be left except for just buying into the pyramid scheme, and ransomware payments
It's hard to give you the benefit of the doubt when you clearly haven't bothered to understand the argument for Bitcoin's value proposition.
Hard money (i.e. money which cannot be inflated) has valuable economic properties, and many people think that a hard money is concomitantly a valuable long-term investment/store of value.
The reality is that Bitcoin already objectively uses a lot of energy by design, and the problem will only get worse if its price goes up.
They seem to be saying that traditional finance uses a lot of energy but we're mostly okay with that because we find financial products and services useful.
Bitcoin also uses a lot of energy, but it's only a "waste" if you think it's providing no value. Bitcoin is one of the few ways to buy "hard money" and if you value that the energy is not being wasted, it's being spent on provisioning a valuable service.
1) Bitcoin has never not been in an inflationary period. Every 10 minutes or so, more gets printed.
2) There's no technical reason this can't continue forever - whoever controls 51% of the network can dictate the rules. Yes, the network could fork if the rules changed, but its impossible to say which network would be more successful.
Bitcoin is far from perfect, but it is important to place it in context with other systems that achieve the same ends. As bitcoin-mining technology matures, it is increasingly reasonable to think about home-heating/data-furnace ways to make use of the waste heat.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cripple+Creek,+CO/@38.7295...
This is a classic pro Bitcoin argument that’s trivially falsifiable.
The fact folks here think their transactions in the online economy should heat their homes is so bananas to me. What is this, the industrial revolution? I mean, I know we’ve got our plague doctor masks on but that’s not intentional.
In theory, since there is no notion of a Bitcoin chargeback and no need to extend credit to any party in the transaction, the intrinsic cost of a bitcoin transaction should be lower.
Believe it or not chargebacks and credit are good things. This you can find out if you ask literally anyone why they use their credit card instead of their debit card.
This seems to be a misunderstanding of how mining works. The amount of energy used for mining is largely disconnected from transaction volume. Mining a block with one transaction takes about the same amount of energy (within a few watts) as mining a block with 10000 transactions.
The hope for scaling bitcoin is on stuff like the lightning network and other more esoteric stuff like coinjoin. That being said lighting network could scale arbitrarily in theory, but the security properties depend on being able to tx on the main chain in a timely manner. In the case that there is a wide spread theft attempt on the lighting network we could see many LN channels trying to be closed at the same time and shooting the fees up beyond the attack value.
> you could conceivably implement lightning with classical assets.
Not with the same security properties. The idea of building a money transfer service where you simply have many people with liquidity that transfer IOUs instead of the actual money has been around since at least the 8th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
There was no formal ultimate settlement layer though.
I personally think that we need to continue to investigate ways to push what we trust and eventually have a workable system that actually trusts individual public keys to not double spend on pain of losing their reputation.
Until that happens I'll continue to hold some BTC.
That's not blockchain, and it's not crypto. You can do that right now with literally any asset in an InteractiveBrokers account.
The first is that scaling Bitcoin up to the size of visa is not particularly possible. You might be able to match visa's throughput by greatly increasing the block interval (e.x. one block every week) but the protocol cannot reasonably scale past a couple hundred transactions per second without taking a massive hit to transaction latency. So, in this sense the question of how much energy Bitcoin would consume if you scaled it up is meaningless, it cannot be scaled up.
The second mistake is that Bitcoin's energy consumption has no relationship with its scale. Say you built a hypothetical MiniBitcoin which was exactly the same except each block was so small they could fit just one transaction, MiniBitcoin would consume almost exactly the same amount of energy as Bitcoin does now. The energy usage goes up as competition between miners increases. The energy usage does not go up as more transactions are processed.
That’s no mistake, folks are suggesting that on a per transaction basis - today - Bitcoin is cheaper or more efficient if you take into account hand wavey externalities not captured in the classical transaction cost model of a payment processor like visa.
What I’ve done is invalidate that argument not by scaling visa down to a single transaction (as that doesn’t capture externalities, per the argument posited) but scale BTC up as the argument is BTC captures all externalities. By then showing that it’s physically impossible I’ve disproved the thesis.
You’re making a different argument about avenues for scaling and that deserves its own conversation.
Good point, you're right, I was forgetting this.
> since the value of each unit would have to increase to satisfy the demand.
I didn't follow this though, what do you mean?
> In a world where Bitcoin replaces gold or visa
It doesn't seem very meaningful to me to talk about energy usage in this world because Bitcoin can't replace visa. To replace visa we would have to make enough changes to it that I don't have much of an idea of what the energy usage of the modified system will look like.
Though let's consider Nervos' NC-Max, which gets a lot closer to replacing visa than an unmodified Bitcoin can. It works by, effectively, massively increasing the block size limit. In a NC-Max world energy usage would still be proportional to the coinbase but the coinbase might stay small because there's so much room in each block that transaction fees stay low.
I should have worded it better, I just mean that if Bitcoin were to replace gold as the primary store of value, the price of Bitcoin would have to rise significantly to absorb the demand, since supply is inelastic. This in turn would increase the environmental externalities.
Since transaction inclusion is a marketplace and since most products we care about will continue to be denominated in local currencies I don't think transaction fees will change much as the price of bitcoin changes.
As the dollar-denominated value of a 0.01btc fee increases people will become less willing to spend that 0.01btc. There might be some stickiness but I expect the kwh-denominated fees will grow much more slowly than the price of bitcoin.
You’re also leaving out two steps in your calculus that really tilt the scales. You’re not paid in Bitcoin and your recipient cannot spent Bitcoin, therefore you need to pay a 1-2% fee at origin, $6 for a BTC TX, $90 in electricity socialized across the block reward and a 1-2% fee at destination.
Moving $10,000 USD to CAD on the blockchain is roughly $399 not $6.
I am not trying to say that Bitcoin solves every problem. I agree with you that there are many problems it does not solve. The $399 number is disingenuous though, you're ignoring that there are situations where bitcoin really does have lower fees than the alternatives.
There may be times when it’s less expensive, although it is also riskier, just ask the dude who lost $400K to the Quadriaga collapse.
Hardware wallets and safe deposit boxes and multisig let you build a system which is far better than storing your money in an unsecured bank and far less vulnerable to theft/loss than the mattress strategy.
but that only covers conversion, right? Or does IB also allow you to send to arbitrary accounts?
>therefore you need to pay a 1-2% fee at origin [...] and a 1-2% fee at destination.
That's only if you use the managed exchange service. If use the trading interface (ie. placing bids/asks manually), it's much lower. eg. 0.5% for coinbase pro[1], 0.25% for gemini activetrader[2]
[1] https://help.coinbase.com/en/pro/trading-and-funding/trading...
[2] https://gemini.com/fees/activetrader-fee-schedule#section-ac...
If you’re sending comparatively smaller quantities then the delta between that and TransferWise is negligible, and it is a one stop shop.
This is so disingenuous it's not even funny.
There are so many countries that US residents can't send to without going through a middleman, which takes a cut. Bitcoin isn't for sending money to CAD, which of course you can do. It really shines to sending money to places that don't have nearly as much financial infrastructure.
A regular wire transfer can take up to 3 days and cost 5-10%.
A bitcoin transaction that takes 1 day is cost 1 satoshi per byte. A satoshi is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin. Checking a realtime dashboard (https://bitbo.io), a satoshi is worth $0.00019225.
(2) the countries without infrastructure generally can’t afford to be spending even $6 on a transaction. Venezuela’s minimum wage is $2 per month.
(3) Bitcoin isn't for sending money to CAD, which of course you can do.
Funny how it’s always not for the thing I point out it doesn’t work for haha. Nobody can quite figure out what it is for except speculation and crime.
Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value. It’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.
After all, Chuck-E-Cheese tokens fit a large part of the definition in part (1). After all they're non-sovereign, limited issuance, global, immutable and decentralized. But you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes that implies Chuck-E-Cheese tokens are an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.
And anyone that "accepts" bitcoin as payment probably takes more than that due to Bitcoin's volatility.
If at the moment of a transaction, 1 BTC = 20k USD and I go to buy something that is $20k USD, it's not going to show up as "1 BTC" on the checkout.. it will probably be like 1.05 BTC.
Also, credit-card companies give guarantees to both the buyers and sellers, so they are providing a service. Buyers get extra protection with extra warranties, ability to reverse fraudulent/deceptive sellers. Sellers get extra revenue with people buying stuff they don't have cash for, and don't have to worry about fraudulent cash/checks etc. Yeah sellers overall take a bit of a hit, but the argument can be made the couple percent is worth it to never have to worry about getting scammed by a buyer.
Anyway.. crypto offers absolutely NONE of that. So comparing it to credit card companies is honestly quite laughable.
The only thing you can try to argue is crypto offers anonymity to a degree? Although it sure seems like you have to jump through a lot of hoops for this to even be true since it's a public ledger...
In my experience the spread is usually under 1% of the 24 avg.
>[...] and don't have to worry about fraudulent cash/checks etc. Yeah sellers overall take a bit of a hit, but the argument can be made the couple percent is worth it to never have to worry about getting scammed by a buyer.
But how are you going to get scammed accepting bitcoin? It's not like it's easy to forge a bitcoin.
And how does that work? For example, the last 24hr bitcoin is up like 10%.. Let's call 5% below the current price the 24hr average.. are you suggesting that the exchange rate is 1% above the 24avg, or 4% below the current price, meaning the seller is eating 4% of the current price? That certainly does not make any sense.
>But how are you going to get scammed accepting bitcoin? It's not like it's easy to forge a bitcoin.
I agree the seller can't really get scammed, but the buyer has --zero-- recourse. So sure the seller loves it because there is no recourse and they can add a nice spread (my first point). But the buyer does not.
Whereas credit cards- both parties get benefits (even if it skews toward the buyer, however that is a good thing, it shouldn't be equal.. the seller has more information about the transaction thus the buyer should have more recourse).
That was based on how I remembered some merchants handled conversion a few years ago. I just did a test with coingate and the spread between their rate and the market rate is under 0.05% (yes that's a fraction of a percent, not 5%).
>I agree the seller can't really get scammed, but the buyer has --zero-- recourse
I don't disagree that credit card protections are good for the consumer. The problem is that there's no opt out (eg. horror stories about people's paypal accounts being frozen because of a surge in donations), and you're forced to use the bank (or credit card company) as the escrow.
Who are you to judge? There are lots of things that I find useless that the world uses a lot more energy on.
The liberation of the most important asset in a capitalist society, money, from the tragedy that has been the current fiat system can not be over emphasized.
Money touches everything and is about time the market takes control of it, takes it away from the crony-states destroying the value of our savings, hence destroying our productivity, undermining the law at every turn in defense of a faux-egalitarianism when in reality that power has only been used to inflict (unwillingly or not) more pain to the marginalized sectors propping up a financialized economy that only exacerbates the wealth gap and radicalizes society to a dangerous level that sadly we all know where it ends up.
Bitcoin may not end up succeeding, but its fight is worthwhile, and necessary, and in the end inevitable, and because of that if the price now is 7 nuclear power plants we should pay it, as god knows we waste enough resources in lobbying, war and corruption already, because the cost to society of not doing it will be even greater in the future, and most probably, bloodier too.
Savings are meant to be assets not currency, whether that’s stock, bonds, real estate - whatever. Even a savings account collateralizes loans. You’re not supposed to save cash. Whoever told you that has misled you. You’re supposed to keep a small stockpile to see you through a rainy few months. No more.
The issue is that people don’t have money, and they don’t have wealth. This is strictly a social problem. This is not true in all countries but it certainly is true in the US which has a worse wealth and income distribution than your average banana republic. However there’s zero political will to change it. By anyone, on either side of the political spectrum (with the possible exception of the centre-left Bernie Sanders). Social policy is the only and I do mean only way to make real meaningful progress here.
Replacing one inflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic, with a different deflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic changes nothing.
If only.
The problematic part of a fiat system is not that is fiat, but that is in the hands of the government who knows not how to exercise constraint and inflates it at will to "pay" for things, more realistically, to promise to pay for things that if it had to actually pay for it will never be able to afford.
> The issue is that people don’t have money, and they don’t have wealth. This is strictly a social problem.
What do you think money is? Money is how societies choose to interact with each other; in a sense, money IS society, at the very least money is the first brick on which to build one. The government printing money and using it to pay for political favors (via military or natural resources contracts, monopoly markets, etc.) is at the core of the wealth gap.
> Replacing one inflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic, with a different deflationary currency with a worse distribution than a banana republic changes nothing.
You don't understand what bitcoin is. Bitcoin's advantage is that the inflation rate is not controlled by the government, ie. they can't print money to buy stuff they can't afford, With bitcoin, governments can't print the wealth gap.
If economic growth outpaces debt growth then it does not ever have to be paid back.
> ...what do you think money is?
Money is an intentionally lossy temporary store or value and a medium of exchange. Interact, yes. Store long term, no.
If you have problems with monetary policy vote in a new government, just taking your ball to the BVI isn’t a solution.
> ...you don’t understand what Bitcoin is.
I understand full well, and I believe those are bad things. Deflation is bad, for the reason I stated, and an inability to print means an inability to respond to geopolitical shocks (like COVID, for instance Canada has been paying everyone $2000/month this whole time). Not to mention an inability to grow supply with the entry of new market participants.
Bitcoin cannot and will not change the wealth gap when it’s overwhelmingly spoken for already. The best you can do is sentence your children to fight for scraps while the new moneyed class of criminals and lowlifes continues to grow in relative wealth as a fraction of economic activity by doing literally nothing with their money - backed on an inflation schedule created and managed not by economists or experts but a narcotics smuggler and a bunch of random GitHub contributors.
If you really want to change society for the better, run for office, don’t shill magic beans.
Inflation vs deflation debate is a complicated one, I don't know which is best in terms of enabling technical progress. One is more short termist, another is more long termist.
But fiat/inflated currencies won't go away. It's just that those kinds of currencies just tends to blow up at some point because of inflation and human nature. It's more than nice to have other options, especially digital. The idea to have some kind of worldwide standard that is open and won't change is also nice.
One side note though. Consider that inflation doesn’t affect the poor as the poor live paycheck to paycheck and wages in the US have kept pace with inflation. The wealthy don’t hold cash, they invest. Even cash tends to be held in a savings account with at least partially offsets inflationary pressure. Has it impacted anyone materially? I’d love to see some quantification.
As for inflation, it makes it harder for the poor workers to become wealthier, but the issue is more when it stops being sustainable. Inflationary fiat has proven that it could fail. I personally don't trust those persons handling it and I feel that such sentiment is growing among people. There's reasons behind that. That is terrible for a currency. Governments may or may not start having a better monetary policy. We don't have guarantees and much control over it, that's the issue for me. I'd rather avoid an economical disaster and keep a business running than having to deal with the failure of others.
Re inflation again, has no impact on poor workers. The amount of value transferred to them in exchange for work is purely social policy and fiscal policy not monetary policy. You can improve workers mobility by supporting unions and minimum wage, not by changing the inflation characteristics of their medium of exchange they don’t get to hold on to anyways. None of your criticisms matter if you’ve invested your fiat.
As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times. Investing the fiat is a good idea, not something remotely popular in my country alas. Here, saving mostly means saving money at the bank (which devalues over time). No wonder why they feel they're losing purchasing power. People who work shall earn wealth simply put, not diminished wealth if they don't learn about financial tricks from someone they trust.
No? In what way.
> As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times.
A collapse in finance would affect the people who have money and value, that'd be the rich who'd be affected. It would not affect those who don't have money. Like inflation.
As for bitcoin, well, you can audit the commits on github if you want. There's plenty of things added lately. Miners or other entities like nodes can decide to fork the protocol into another chain (already happened, the protocol is then developed differently in those chains). Rules are subject to a consensus. Also if a user is not happy with a change, he's free to stop using it or to exchange his bitcoins for something else. All in all there's no reasons for participants to refuse modifying and improving the protocol over time.
If Bitcoiners are right, Satoshi has been the trim tab of the century thus far. Time will tell :)
Either way my point remains that Bitcoin solves nothing other than making criminals wealthy.
Time will tell.
I suspect I may be insufferable when I see something that's just a giant waste of time, power, energy, effort and brain power, and I'm not mad about that.
I do wish you the best of luck making money, however you choose to do so!
Bernie Maddoff said the same thing. He also tried to create a perpetual motion machine.
> Canada has been paying everyone $2000/month this whole time)
Canada has been lending everyone $2000/month this whole time.
> Bitcoin cannot and will not change the wealth gap when it’s overwhelmingly spoken for already.
Again, you don't understand what bitcoin is, nor money apparently. People don't stash money away, not all of it anyways, and specially not when its inflation rate is limited (as in there is not a lot of excess to stash like right now), they use it to buy stuff, to pay for stuff, to invest in stuff, they enjoy it, that is why you want money in the first place! Money is, was and always will be exchanged, which means it changes hands. Odd concept, I know.
> backed on an inflation schedule created and managed not by economists or experts but a narcotics smuggler and a bunch of random GitHub contributors.
Yes, the "experts" managing the "economy" right now are doing such a great job.
> just taking your ball to the BVI isn’t a solution.
At some point, sooner rather than later by the looks of it, it will be the only solution.
> If you really want to change society for the better, run for office, don’t shill magic beans.
Weird advice from someone convinced we'll never have to pay back our debts.
Bernie Madoff doesn't get to print his own currency, you see why that's different right? You know who does though? Tether.
> Canada has been lending everyone $2000/month this whole time.
Paying. Lending implies that it has to be returned, it does not.
> Again, you don't understand what bitcoin is, nor money apparently.
Incorrect, I know what money is for and how it works. I don't disagree with anything you said about money. What I disagree with is that inflation matters in that context. It does not. I also see Bitcoin as having been spoken for already, and it has. with a worse wealth distribution than a banana republic, which it has.
> Yes, the "experts" managing the "economy" right now are doing such a great job.
Inflation has been in a tightly controlled 1-2% range in the US since the 1970s. They are. So forgive me for not giving a bunch of un-elected, un-accountable randos with commit privileges and a narcotics trafficker the steering wheel lol.
> At some point, sooner rather than later by the looks of it, it will be the only solution.
Agree to disagree.
> Weird advice from someone convinced we'll never have to pay back our debts.
Who is "our" and why does one have anything to do with the other?
As I said, you don’t understand money. Currency is not wealth. Purchasing power cannot be printed, despite what MMT claims real wealth has to be produced using real resources. You can print all the dollars you want, in fact, that is exactly what the monopoly board game creators do.
> Paying. Lending implies that it has to be returned, it does not.
As I said, again, you don’t understand what money is. Under the current system all money is debt. And governments have no purchasing power to give but what they confiscate from citizens via taxes in the present, or take via inflation from the future. Either way, canadians are paying those $2000 back.
> Inflation has been in a tightly controlled 1-2% range in the US since the 1970s. They are. So forgive me for not giving a bunch of un-elected, un-accountable randos with commit privileges and a narcotics trafficker the steering wheel lol.
Which is why the FED came out saying they are gonna increase the rate of inflation that has actually been lower than reported all these past years right? The inflation metrics do not represent real inflation and even the FED admitted it, nor do they capture the wealth inequality even if they did. The riots on the streets, the uncertainty, most americans living paycheck to paycheck, miles of lines at food banks, most americans not having even $400 in savings, all signs of how the experts are such experts at managing the economy right? Not even 1 week of trouble could handle this wonderful economy when covid started they had to print trillions to bail out mega corporations. Such a well managed economy right?
> Who is "our" and why does one have anything to do with the other?
You, the one that claims having a printing press and growing gdp faster than inflation means governments will outrun debts. Don’t shill magic beans.
The rest of the world is going mint a set of new global elite because they mined a stack a coins when the computational cost was tiny? If crypto dream of having Bitcoin as some global reserve currency is achieved that is what will happen.
To be honest that situation is not far off the inherited wealth of a lot of the super rich families that exist now. But at least you know somewhere along the family tree something worthwhile was achieved. Their claim to wealth is not simply being on the right internet forum in 2010.
The claim that “Purchasing power cannot be printed, despite what MMT claims real wealth has to be produced using real resources” is trivially falsifiable. The M2 money supply is 15X what it was in the 1970s but inflation caused the value to drop to 1/7th. That means net new buying power was in fact created - doubled even. The reason is you have too simplistic an understanding of money. Velocity of money matters.
There’s actually a term for excess value created through the addition of new money into the supply which eludes me right now.
> Either way, canadians are paying those $2000 back.
You have way too simplistic a take on the current financial system. Money is a social construct.
> The inflation metrics do not represent real inflation and even the FED admitted it, nor do they capture the wealth inequality even if they did.
lol, inflation is defined in terms of a specific basket of goods and services. If they want to redefine the baskets that’s fine but there’s no such thing as real inflation and fake inflation any more than there’s real math and fake math. If you want, talking about quality of life, standard of living, all that — that’s a much more interesting topic and again 100% social policy not monetary.
> Such a well managed economy right?
Yep! Well managed money supply. Well managed economy, I’m not sure Id go that far but they are two different things.
> You, the one that claims having a printing press and growing gdp faster than inflation means governments will outrun debts. Don’t shill magic beans.
You’ve hopelessly entangled a temporary medium of exchange and a long-term store of value in your brain. This has confused your understanding of economics. Spend less time in Bitcoin subreddits.
Growing gdp faster than debt does allow you never to pay it off, this principal is one that extends from personal finance. If you have an interest only loan all you ever need to pay is the interest. If the growth in the loan interest remains lower than the growth in your income (or inflation) it’s not in your interest to pay back that loan. Doing so increases opportunity cost. You get that right?
I could pay off my whole mortgage today but I won’t. Because I can do more with that money, and expect a better return than mortgage interest minus inflation. So, I refinanced. Thanks to inflation and tax deductions, my real interest rate is almost 0%.
For this use case, the amount of energy used to secure Bitcoin should be compared to the amount of energy used to secure the USD. Not just the energy to print cash, maintain digital system, etc, but the energy and human lives spent on war to maintain dominance.
This is a really important point that I want to emphasize. Maintaining the value and scarcity of a fiat currency such as the dollar requires strong law enforcement and ultimately, for a global reserve currency, dominating military power. Bitcoin mining is a rounding error compared to the peacetime US defense budget, let alone all the externalities associated with militaries and war.
This is still a big if, but if the function of establishing a scarce digital global reserve currency can be done by an algorithm without relying on law enforcement or militaries, at a fraction of the cost, that is a huge win for the world.
All of the excess gas and oil that's currently wasted but goes into the atmosphere is starting to be used for Bitcoin mining:https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b...
Sia currently beats S3 at 1/6th the price.
"Ultimately it’s just a matter of opinion as to whether the existence of a non-state, synthetic monetary commodity is a good idea. The truth is that blockspace is a service which is paid for, and that’s where its resource cost is derived. Something duly purchased cannot, by definition, be a waste. Its buyer derives benefit from its existence, regardless of anyone else’s subjective opinion of the merit of the transaction. These same arguments have been made countless times about perceived “costs” of the gold standard, and rebutted on similar grounds before. Fundamentally, millions of individuals the world over still value physical, bank-independent savings, so it still gets pulled out of the ground with regularity. As long as people value Bitcoin, so, too, will the block-space auction continue in perpetuity.
The Bitcoin-energy worriers need not despair, however. There is a solution. All they must do is persuade Bitcoin fans to use and value an alternative settlement medium. Their best bet will be to devise a system that is even more secure, offers stronger assurances, settles faster, is more privacy preserving and is more censor resistant – all without using Proof-of-Work. Such a system would be miraculous. I’m waiting with bated breath."
A ton of electricity is wasted. Maybe outlaw giant SUVs with 1 person in them?
If you have a lot of assets, it's honestly the best time. Especially if you owned a lot of tech stocks the past decade.
If covid and the worldwide economic disruption can't put a dent in asset prices, then what will happen when the pandemic passes and the economy recovers in the next few years? I used to laugh when people said bezos or elon might be the first trillionaire in a few years, but now I think it's possible. Just have to cross your fingers and hope the good times continue.
If you've got time for it between working two jobs and driving Uber to make rent, of course.
Pure speculation, and I am not an economist, but I'd imagine that those with wealth will acquire more wealth. And those without wealth will encounter more difficult means to acquiring wealth.
The last time the housing market crashed, investors bought a lot of the single family homes to use as wealth storage and rent them out. If housing prices go down or stabilize (we'll see what happens after forbearance periods), this will most certainly happen again, consolidating more wealth to the top while market rates for rent steadily climb. Housing shortages are high, and growing in the US. Other assets like stocks will likely increase as they have done, but entering into this market will be more difficult as consumers are spending more of their income on necessities (shelter, cars in the US, etc). All of which are becoming more expensive, and funnily enough, these assets aren't included in the Consumer Price Index, which is meant to measure inflation.
Basically, I just see this as expediting wealth consolidation. Times will be more difficult for a lot of people for a long time. Strong cultural shifts and policy changes will likely be needed to avoid furthering the divide of the wealth gap. Neither of which is easy.
“Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.”
https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homel...
If it breaks over $20k I expect a new wave of publicity that will drive the price higher, as has happened in the past. Now it is far more accessible as an impulse buy with PayPal, Robinhood, Cash app, etc offering instant purchases.
- being deflationary is not a feature, it's a bug. An inflationary currency incentivises you to invest it, otherwise you lose real purchasing power. With a deflationary currency, you can just stuff it anywhere and see gains. You steal from tomorrow. As the material wealth of the world increases, our money supply should increase to match. AFAIK there isn't any popular crypto that can easily adjust how many tokens are mined each year.
- almost every crypto's transaction throughput is ~4 orders of magnitude below what Amex/Mastercard/Visa can process.
- most of the ease of using crypto is only because it bypasses AML/KYC laws. Venmo and Zelle would be far more convenient otherwise.
I can't see it as anything other than speculation.
Still not convinced that is a good thing. It perpetuates a cycle that rewards people who already have excess income to "invest" and keep making more money. Meanwhile those without any significant income to invest are left even further in the dust.
I'm not arguing for crypto at all here- just commenting specifically on that inflationary point.
We already know what happens when people aren't incentivised to invest - it's called a recession.
Who said 5% sitting on money? I'm talking about a situation where there is basically no real inflation or deflation. $100 is $100. You can still choose to take your money and invest it if you want, but you aren't forced to GAMBLE your money (you can use the word invest all you want, but 99% of the time it's simply gambling).
>How many fewer tech giants and unicorns would we see?
So first of all, you are completely butchering what I said per above.. but in any case, maybe that's a good thing not to see all the tech giants and unicorns? People are so obsessed with doing things so they can "make it big" it's really just sad. HN in particular, I see it all the time here. All most people seem to care about is trying to make the most money possible and less about things that are actual helpful.
Greed is a hell of a drug.
>We already know what happens when people aren't incentivized to invest - it's called a recession.
That is quite a stretch. You will always have people that want to gamble their money. My point is you should not be FORCED to gamble your money to play the game the rich people who set the rules want you to.
You don't understand the WHY of those gains.
A deflationary environment is the only real environment, that is why central banks are set up to fight deflation, because deflation is the natural order of things.
And in that real environment, gains in productivity are only possible because of savings, people invest not because of fear, the investments takes place because people truly believe the business proposals will produce VALUE, and hence REAL GAINS, which necessitates that people be not drowning in debt. That is why an inflationary system is a bubble system, it cannot be sustained on its own. It is a perpetual motion machine, or tries to be anyways.
Society has made a lot of progress, but the price has been an unprecedented amount of debt. In essence, we've mortgage the future, and at some point those bills will be paid either by will of by force.
This happens because the poor continue to transact hand to mouth and are unable to save while the wealthy accreted value on their idle cash. Invested cash creates economic activity. The cash in your mattress does not. The opposite is true in a deflationary environment.
Debt in an inflationary environment benefits the debtor, as the loans are denominated in the dollars at the time of loan issuance. To the extent that the economy grows faster than your debt load you do not in fact ever have to pay it off.
That is nonsense. Sadly by repeating it enough people have started to actually believe it, and repeat it without looking at the evidence of the real world.
A cheap pair of jeans, adjusted for inflation was ~$150 in 1980. Now you can get one for $10. Did no one wore jeans for 40 years? Meat, it has never been so cheap IN HISTORY to buy meat, and if the trend continues, next year you could buy even more meat with the same money! (adjusting for inflation of course) Are you not gonna eat for a year?
That is not even talking about tech, were a cheap laptop 20 years ago adjusted for inflation was over $1000 and now is $300.
People prefer things now not later, that is why if you offer them $50 today instead of $100 in 10 $10 monthly payments most people pick the $50. The same thing happens when buying stuff. Sadly evidence is not as marketable as propaganda.
So as I said, nonsense.
I mean you can just do the simple mathematics. Suppose there are 100 utility units of wealth in the world - machinery, homes, anything tangible to improve lives - and 100 units of currency to match. Through human labour we produce another 100 utility units. Now each unit of currency can provide me 2 utility units. This is just a system that rewards wealth more than work, even more so than our current system.
Let's look at capital flows. Why in the world would I ever loan to a small business if I could see gains just by holding the money? Why would I ever give companies money in IPOs? There is much less of an incentive to direct capital to those who can be the most productive with it.
That is why things get cheaper all the time, yes.
> Why in the world would I ever loan to a small business if I could see gains just by holding the money?
The same reason you do now, which is the only reason you ever lend money: by lending it (to someone more productive than yourself of course) you gain more.
No, you repeated propaganda that told you to think you did, but as with the rest of your “points”, too many lols very little substance.
> that’s what happens when technology increases productivity.
Not when, technology ALWAYS increases productivity, that is the point of technology. Deflation is inevitable because productivity increases are inevitable.
And the poor have benefitted immensely from deflation, despite central banks doing everything they can to rob you of its benefits. More people than ever can now afford to eat meat, or drink single malt scotch, or whatever. More people eat lobster now than in any other time in history, that is the power and benefit of deflation.
> Not when, technology ALWAYS increases productivity, that is the point of technology.
Well, not bitcoin lol, it's anti-efficient.
Any deflationary nature is a council level imposition on an otherwise pretty neutral asset class.
> the price of real estate in the US has not changed.
That's just ludicrous.
> By that definition Bitcoin is a neutral asset class as well since it's deflationary nature is also artificially imposed.
Deflationary is not neutral, it’s deflationary. That’s an artificial imposition of directionality. Further that’s only in isolation. Once you consider the economy expanding and contracting around it, externalities, shocks and the addition and removal of market participants - and loss of coins - its claim to neutrality is like that of a baby fighting Muhammad Ali. It requires positive control to match market conditions. It’s only neutral if you pretend the rest of the world and the economy don’t exist.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/new-homes-toda...
Normally, real estate markets are tracked in isolation.
We don't take home values from the Detroit market, Beverly Hills market and San Antonio market to price a house in New York.
Real estate is deflationary because each asset is unique - like fine art or a 1 in millions baseball card misprint.
Not home prices, but the trend in home prices. I think we do, that's why the BLS is tracking this number. I don't work in the industry though, so I can't say for sure.
> Real estate is deflationary because each asset is unique - like fine art or a 1 in millions baseball card misprint.
Respectfully I disagree. Real estate is only deflationary if you're looking at the square footage on the ground alone, but if you can build up a practically unlimited amount (and we really, really can) then it's not a relevant thing to look at. Each square foot on the ground turns into more and more square feet of real estate over time as you build higher and higher.
And those at higher locations will be more costly because they'd be both desirable and scarce.
If your theory were true all homes would be priced on some square footage price constant. They're not.
USD dollar hasn't seen intense inflation recently. Or a kleptocratic government like most of the world.
That said there are large issues using it as a payment mechanism due to volatility in USD.
Rather than an attempt at designing a currency with really desirable properties, it seems like intent behind bitcoin was to take the WORST aspects of currency: scarcity, extreme volatility, unground it from reality, and computerize all that to make it even faster and more reckless.
Economic crashes devaste the working class when inflation skyrockets or goes into manic up-down bulimic cycles that seem to benefit only financiers. ... Yet this is what people have made as a _CENTRAL_ feature of cryptocurrency?
Bitcoin/crypto-currency makes me question even the most fundamental notions of what money "is". Whatever it becomes, I wish that crypto-currency was just a way to exchange goods and services with some useful features rather than a thrill-toy for wealthy speculators. I guess that would be too boring for people?
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...
[2] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...
Bitcoin is a social phenomena - no government or company backs it. The only reason it has value is if people value it. Bitcoin promoters have convinced people it's a store of value, like gold except digital. As the Cult of Bitcoin spreads, it doesn't take that many new enthusiasts to push the price up, as unlike literally all other commodities on earth, the supply of bitcoin is truly constrained and there cannot be anymore made in response to demand above the normal rate of inflation.
This time, big money, institutions, and the very rich are coming in addition to the widespread purchase by retail. The price is going to rise a lot.
The Tether FUD is so dumb, but it's the last straw being grasped by perma-bears.
Don’t carry water for these scammers they literally don’t have a bank account and admitted in court [1] much of their reserves are IOUs and crypto. Audit or gtfo (to tether inc not you).
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theblockcrypto.com/amp/dail...
It’s the mother of all Ponzi schemes, clearly, and is definitely going to implode in the next big pullback.
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir...
I worked with Dan, I worked at Circle, we redeemed / minted billions and billions with Tether.
This is a classic strategy employed by scammers to legitimize a scam. You pick a prominent individual and you make the fraud work for them, so they can tell other people it’s legit.
Their last auditor quit, half way through the audit. No audit, no legitimacy, period.
If your claim is that you redeemed billions of dollars in tethers for fiat USD then that’s newsworthy.
Even if that were the case though, it does nothing to prove that Tether is able to cover its commitments. Especially not with the additional $16B USD on the books.
Why is this relevant when you can withdraw tethers for USD at any participating exchange? Or are you saying that None of the exchanges that support tether (eg. bitfinex) has never fulfilled a withdraw?
>It’s the mother of all Ponzi schemes, clearly, and is definitely going to implode in the next big pullback.
Sounds like a great way to make a lot of money. Tether is currently trading 1:1 with USD (yes, even at exchanges that offer real USD). It should be easy to short-sell a bunch of tether, and buy it back when in collapses. And unlike short-selling stocks, your downside should be relatively low as tethers can't realistically go above their current price.
> Sounds like a great way to make a lot of money. Tether is currently trading 1:1 with USD (yes, even at exchanges that offer real USD). It should be easy to short-sell a bunch of tether, and buy it back when in collapses. And unlike short-selling stocks, your downside should be relatively low as tethers can't realistically go above their current price.
All crypto exchanges are rigged casinos. The only way to win is not to play.
Tether absolutely swings up and down depending on how many people are fleeing into or out of cryptos at any given moment. We’ve seen like +5-7% and -20%. That’s enough to blow away any leveraged position.
Finally, of course, you neglect counterparty risk. I have to put up collateral on this short which any of these exchanges could simply run for the hills with, as they do, regularly. Seriously, who lets you short Tether except for Bitfinex - and what will they pay you out in, more Tether? They don’t have a bank account. That’s why they invented Tether.
Because if you're worried that they don't have enough real us dollars to back the USDTs that they've printed, being able to directly redeem USDT for USD isn't really going to make a difference.
>All crypto exchanges are rigged casinos. The only way to win is not to play.
That seems like an overly broad statement to make, especially there are a few exchanges that try to be as by-the-books as possible.
>Tether absolutely swings up and down depending on how many people are fleeing into or out of cryptos at any given moment. We’ve seen like +5-7% and -20%. That’s enough to blow away any leveraged position.
Or just don't leverage to the max? Short-selling $1000 worth of USDT with $1000 of USD in reserve and 3x leverage should allow you to withstand most shocks without being forced to liquidate.
>Seriously, who lets you short Tether except for Bitfinex
Kraken, for one.
>and what will they pay you out in, more Tether? They don’t have a bank account. That’s why they invented Tether.
Again, this goes back to my first comment. Are you claiming that bitfinex isn't processing fiat withdraws (eg. wire/ACH transfer to a real bank)?
The quintessential part is this: The New York attorney general’s filing refutes the extreme version of those doubts — Tether mostly had the dollars — but it is nonetheless a wild ride that alleges that Tether’s backing might not be as good as it claims.
"Credit bubble? Yes, there can no longer be serious doubt about this: people bought Bitcoin with money that didn’t exist, pushing up the price of Bitcoin. A lot of people currently think they are richer than they are."
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/
I'd be interested in reading a counter-take, most bitcoiners I know just look away.
The more macro stuff like worries about inflation due to the Fed printing $$$, easy money (0% interest rates), and yes, some FOMO speculation is increasing demand.
As far as I'm concerned this is working as intended. This is not the first boom / bust and this won't be the last.
I'm reminded of the example of the closing years of the Kuomintang in China, where they were suffering from massive hyperinflation. Small businesses and co-ops would bet temporary loans from the central government in its banknotes but immediately change it to silver if possible to do business with, so they wouldn't have to deal with the debasement of the real currency over the course of the year.
e.g., https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1333809716301094912
BTC's rise isn't all that out of line with any of those. I think you're seeing investors rush out of dollars and into anything that'll have hard value in the digital economy going forward. Inflation doesn't hit all markets evenly, so you may not see it in your paycheck yet (if you still have a paycheck) and areas without a lot of people seeing money come in won't have prices rise as much. But I think you should read this as a currency crisis for the dollar, not a bubble for Bitcoin.
Inflation as a concept itself is much broader than this.
The comment you're replying to is referring to asset price inflation, which has been happening hardcore.
You seem to be saying since the Fed's stupid basket hasn't shot up in price (based on what they're saying), that inflation hasn't happened?
I gave some examples of consumer goods inflating in my post - restaurant meals are up about 40%, housing up about 18%, groceries have also been up about 20% since the pandemic started. Also have friends that own or work in non-tech businesses (one owns a packaging factory, another sells hot tubs) that say that supply chains are in shambles and all of their producer prices are going up, significantly. You'll see that in consumer prices eventually, but it takes time to work its way through the economy.
If I had to speculate the current market froth has more to do with individuals access to leveraged investments via smartphone apps like Robinhood. The pandemic has turned them into a generation of gamblers. When you buy options from a market maker they hedge by purchasing the underlying. This has a positive feedback cycle effect causing them to purchase more and more to hedge. Look up a gamma squeeze.
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/is-the-gamm...
Part of the reason we've had an insane housing market valuation growth over the last ~40 years is that cost of capital has gone down from ~15% to 2.5% over that time frame. If rates were near the historical average right now, you would see very different asset prices.
A few things have changed. One is in choice few major metros, like SF, city councils abjectly refuse to allow new construction taller than existing construction to the benefit of landowners. This artificial supply constraint is pretty much solely responsible for the massive increase in pricing in these metros.
The other thing that’s changed is minimum setback rules, minimum sizing rules, and various other council ordinances - in addition to what Americans consider a suitable home for their living situation. As such new homes are on average twice as big now as they were in the 1970s.
Make no mistake though the average price per square foot for a home in the United States has tracked inflation almost precisely for the last 50 years.
This is purely supply, demand and artificial constraints - not monetary policy. Compare to Tokyo where housing downtown is a few hundred thousand dollars. I suspect if interest rates were lower you’d see smaller houses, not cheaper ones - that’s what happened there!
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
Perhaps the market is expecting more money printing.
American institutions are definitely going in. It's a solid ponzi, why would they shun that one when they went in all the others?
Am I saying crypto has no value at all and never will? No- but it's stupid that the "drive" for people to create new cryptos and hold current crypto is to uh.. make money off of it vs a currency like USD? That's stupid as hell.
Crypto that is not pegged to something like USD is made for gambling and to make the rich richer. If I were to "gamble" $1000 in crypto the last few years sure, maybe I make 50-100k. Whoopdydoo. Yeah that's great but it's not like mega life altering. Rich people can be like "Oh I'm going to throw $1 million into this.. oh look, I just made $50-100 million, now I can take this and buy a bunch of new businesses or buy my new mega mansion somewhere!". It's just sickening, honestly.
Envy is the thief of joy
Ironically, the ridiculous volatility fueled by baseless speculation from people who have no idea what they’re doing is one of the main reasons why crypto currency is not being adopted, because no merchant with any serious stake takes a currency seriously that can change by tens of percent in any direction between it entering and leaving your account.
Personally I thought crypto currency was an interesting idea when I first heard of it, but now I’m completely fatigued. The eternal September has come and gone and the credibility of the whole endeavour is a guilt-by-association dumpster fire.
However, she's invested in hundreds of companies, and it would be nearly impossible to do so at that point.
I learned a new term used on HN yesterday, 'bikeshedding'. It perfectly applies to bitcoin/blockchain.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology on the same level as the invention of the Internet. It is the first global, transparent, immutable ledger. We are only just beginning discovery on what we can do/improve from here.
With Bitcoin, anyone can start a cash-to-bitcoin/bitcoin-to-cash office. All you need is a phone with Internet.
Could Western Union solve the same problem? In theory, yes, in practice, the overhead cost of joining the network means the guy with a phone in some remote village isn't going to do it.
This is obviously mostly relevant where the classic solutions aren't already ubiquitous. Want to wire money from Germany to France? Just use SEPA. Want to wire money from Germany to the US? You're probably better off with some traditional money transfer service like TransferWise or (for bigger amounts) a Forex/brokerage account.
Want to "wire" money from a remote village in Africa to a remote village in Asia? That's where you might benefit from your neighbor having set up a physical crypto exchange.
And you don't use BTC as the fees are way too expensive.
This is what people are doing in Venezuela for example.
Cryptocurrency is a fascinating technology and social experiment but so far has no unique use case other than speculation.
The real use-case is transferring to and from places that you cannot normally do. Smartphones are prevalent in Venezuela for example, but it's basically impossible to send money in or out unless you use cryptocurrencies.
The charity eatBCH uses this to give food to Venezuelans for example: https://eatbch.org/. I think that's a pretty unique use case.
One of the point of cryptocurrencies is that some countries may think certain things are illegal, but that doesn't make them wrong. To me helping to feed starving Venezuelans by sending them help directly is morally right, even if it was illegal.
Yet it's nothing compared to hyperinflation. In May 2019 prices in Venezuela doubled in only two days... every day.
While Bitcoin is volatile it's relatively stable compared to what Venezuela and Lebanon are going through today.
To top it off, It's Gold vs BTC for store of value and Gold has many, many downsides as well that we just chose to ignore because it's a shiny metal and has been in use longer.
The problem those folks have isn’t bad currency it’s bad government. You can’t solve that by allowing people to violate sanctions suddenly.
Remember, sanctions are what’s preventing these folks from trading internationally and sanctions are what’s preventing these folks from using USD. That doesn’t go away in a Bitcoin world. Amazon isn’t going to deploy stealth C-130s to airdrop in their prime packages if they pay with Bitcoin.
When the government has failed your currency is the least of your problems, and once you change the government your currency returns to normalcy.
Allowing the transfer of value in violation of sanctions has allowed North Korea to accumulate billions of dollars of crypto to fund their nuclear weapons programs. The livelihood of the average citizen changes not at all, but the largesse of the rogue state increases.
cash
It still has some transactional use in online black markets for ease of purchase and name recognition- but it's considered 'legacy' and moving into unreccomended and unsupported territory on most markets.
I do believe that crypto does and will continue to gain use cases- but BTC is already on the tail end of it's useful life in any of those.
Could anyone provide a more methodical way of thinking about this?
See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 .
Relative to the early days of Bitcoin, the room to fluctuate upward is much smaller than the room to fluctuate downward. Bitcoin's market cap is ~$200B, while M1 is ~$6000B. Back in the day, Bitcoin's market cap was a few million dollars or less. That said, BTC now has a powerful brand in the eyes of many possible buyers/holders, which makes a retreat all the way to zero far less likely.
I suspect that the only things that could kill BTC completely these days are a compromise of the hash algorithm, a coordinated effort against it by a consortium of governments that must include the US, or a devastating 51% attack by a consortium of miners. The third is perhaps least-likely, as the miners would stand to lose a lot if BTC imploded.
Curious if you could recommend any good read on BTC upside potential given this framework -- for example, right now the M1:BTC ratio is 1:30, but what factors/behaviours would dictate that ratio to change? or is the idea that the ratio keeps constant with more inflation and thus pushes BTC higher?
This has already happened. Bitcoin is a permissioned blockchain, now. It may be used by permission of the chainalysis industry and the regulators.
That's not to say bitcoin won't become a widely-used currency.
Maybe governments will allow bitcoin but ban all cryptocurrencies they can't track.
Someone who thinks they can predict the future or at least have a strong opinion can go ahead and put their money on the line rather than just comment on a thread! It’s actually beautiful.