> When this [rally to near $20,000] happened in 2017, there was a real lack of products for the new converts to experience, whereas today there are endless uses, protocols, services across farming, lending, standard trading, etc
Is this really true though? My first instinct isn’t at all to go to blockchain/cryptocurrency for farming.
institutions are now buying bitcoin as a diversified asset class
I 100% understand what you are saying but I also 100% disagree with it.
This is all greed with no substance. Wealthy people and those who desire to be wealthy are doing everything they can to arbitrarily prop up something which does not really have value. And they seem to be winning- which is everything that is wrong with the world right now.
The pricing mechanism for crypto is always going to be screwed by PoW, I think, because it naturally concentrates power into the hands of a few that can coordinate relatively easily.
The very topic of this post "Bitcoin breaks above $20k or $20,000 USD / BTC". How can something that can only be quoted in terms of another currency be inflation resistant?
it’s an inflation protected asset, perhaps even more so than gold since there’s a known quantity of it that will never change.
I don't understand why you make this comparison?
Gold is a physical item with real-world use cases. Gold is rare and has physical applications which is why it's valuable. We can't magically create more gold.
Now you are going to say bitcoin is fixed as well. Fine, but it has basically no use case. Also, it can be replicated a billion times over with any other cryptocurrency. So I would even say it's debatable to call it 'rare' or 'fixed', even though I know what you mean.
The amount of gold which has been mined in the entire human history is about a 20m cube. That's it. Gold is used in very useful in many industries around the world and is visually appealing. THAT is why it has value.
If Gold was "rare" but looked like garbage and had no physical application then it would NOT be valuable. I don't get how you are trying to make this argument.
All of human history (and perhaps biology) has always been about continually trying to accumulate more even at expense of others. Bitcoin doesn't detract or contribute to this human nature.
If you really want to talk about profiting off the backs of others, look no further than interest bearing loans. It isn't for no reason that parasitic and immoral practice had been declared prohibited in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Most, if not all of the economy today is based off of interest, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
Well what I find ironic is you are against the concept of interest but consider a cool technology like blockchain an "investment". If you were really so righteous about economics you would realize turning cryptos into "investing" is a total scam.
Right now, bitcoin is the best medium of exchange for the modern world. It beats physical stuff like gold, because it can be transferred digitally, across physical boundaries. It beats sovereign currencies, because you don't have to depend on the policies of arbitrary governments.
Bitcoin's scarcity is artificial, but that is a red herring. Bitcoin has the value that it has because the scarcity is real and believable. No one in a position to manipulate the network or protocol (a position that it is doubtful anyone could ever achieve at this point) would stand to gain from 'hacking' it, since that would instantly destroy it.
All that said, yeah, the price rises are probably driven to a large extent by greed and ignorance. But so is a lot of the stock market and other investment vehicles.
That I completely agree with and have almost as much issue with. But at least the underlying's have some value. The actual value is up for debate, but it's actual value of something (like an underlying company and their cash/IP/other assets etc) or a commodity which is physically useful (an ounce of gold, a barrel of oil).
Bitcoin has no underlying value. You equate that to conch shells- ok, but that's all they had when they used it. We already have currencies. So comparing it to a situation where a civilization may have used conch shells is pretty laughable. If all we had was conch shells and you came up with bitcoin? Great! Seems like a nice idea, it's an improvement. Bitcoin, however, is not an improvement by any stretch of the imagination.
>The world wants and needs a medium of exchange, otherwise we are back to bartering fish for sheep skins.
That's what... currencies are for especially the USD in particular. You say otherwise we are back to bartering fish for sheep skins.. huh? We are not there, we have currencies... Are they perfect? Of course not. But we have a few extremely large currencies (like USD, EUR) that do exactly what you say.
And now here's the humorous thing. You will tell related to currencies- "well, what good does USD do to me, I'm in Country X and can't use it or don't have it!" The fucking price of crypto is being quoted RELATIVE TO CURRENCIES so... wtf?
If you are in Country X and want to send some value to the person in Country Y.. ok so yes you can send bitcoin. Great. But what if you actually want to use your money? You have to convert bitcoin into X or Y?? There is no point to all of this!
And because of different costs of living all throughout the world, the 'amount' of bitcoin you pay someone would still 'relative' to their underlying currencies worth.
I'm just getting tired even trying to type this insane circular logic.
If there were no thieves and people were perfect, then crypto might make sense. But because there is no recourse for accidentally sending money to the wrong person, literally losing your hard drive or whatever and you can't recover, someone hacking into your account etc.. crypto is MEANINGLESS for any normal use.
anyway, it makes digital assets and cryptocurrencies yield producing instruments and it is predictably popular.
along side that there is a fast growing autonomous insurance sector too.
But I wouldn't say these are the _main_ reason why Bitcoin is going up. More likely reasons:
- Inflation concerns from the massive QE efforts in 2020 - Equities market are very overvalued right now, people are looking for alternate asset classes and fiat isn't a great option (see point #1) - Institutional (more risk adverse) names are getting in. Ex: Mass Mutual bought $100M of BTC last week. Because this was for their general account it needed Fed approval, which is a big milestone. - The idea of BTC as a true alternate store of value to gold is becoming more widely accepted.
Specifically in regard to the point around Bitcoin as an alternative to gold, the market cap of gold is around $9T. If even half of that moves to BTC we'd hit about $130k/BTC.