Author here, I'm actually short BTC as a whole, but that's besides the point of this article.
Also, it is traditional (and a good self-preservation move), when posting financial opinion - positive or negative - about an asset or instrument to disclose one's position if any.
You may want to consider editing your article.
I'll edit the TLDR box when I physically can
How's that going for you?
;) Two consecutive flash crashes notwithstnading and the fact that we're all really enjoying our view at 30k+, I'd say says its all. I want more so let it dip longer, please!
We'll see by March or so how it's going for me.
You can always count on the market cap being inflated any time this story is endangered, both to make life difficult for critics and trigger a flood of free advertising in the form of low-effort stories by the fintech blogosphere.
An unregulated global lotto game camouflaged in slippery futurist memery, with zero accountability by its puppet masters as a primary design feature, may well turn out to be a safer play than, say, TSLA or anything starting with a dollar sign. What this implies for us as a species is probably best left unexamined.
I don't think you understand what decentralized means.
It has nothing to do with how concentrated Bitcoin ownership is.
Decentralized means there is no central authority. For example, should the SEC go after Bitcoin, there is no one to sue.
Or, if I decide to send 10M USD to someone on the other side of the planet, no one can prevent that from happening.
In both scenarios, how much BTC is owned by "whales" is irrelevant.
When Bitcoiners say decentralized they mean, in fact, that its value (through some gating mechanic like issue or "censorship") is not controlled by a government, as if this is somehow any better than the value of one's wallet being controlled by unknown parties, front running exchange operators or mining cartels.
Bitcoin proponents pretend that government centralization of money supply is the only kind of centralization of money that needs fixing, and its mechanisms are thus designed to make an elaborate show of diffusing operational accountability while doing nothing to counteract a pathological concentration of leverage.
As a result, it doesn't actually decentralize anything, it instead relocates all of the centralization under obfuscated cover. This in itself isn't a problem, if promoters would upfront about it. But then no decentralization meme would certainly mean no Bitcoin at $30k, and what's the fun in that?
(Disclaimer: Long Bitcoin, got in at prices between $6.5-8K in 2018. Previously sold @$11K in Dec 2017, after having bought in 2014 at $800. It tends to rise 10-40x from peak to trough each time, which means we could see $100-150K Bitcoin this cycle. There's also the chance that this is "the big one" - the cycle where the dollar collapses entirely and cryptocurrency becomes the new global unit of account and medium of exchange. IMHO the tail risks facing the dollar and the U.S's hegemonic position have never been higher.)
I really don't think life tends to be as exciting as you hope it is.
(I work as a consultant, and get most of my income in cryptocurrencies, so I don't see any of these problems as impactful).