I think every cycle has dramatic stories. To me this is just another downturn where I buy with confidence and wait till the tides shift. I maybe wrong and that's fine. But history often rhymes.
Assets that generate value (cash flow) will fluctuate in value per the moods of Mr. Market, but over their long run will hew to the present value of their future earnings power.
There's no similar number for crypto. Might as well be tulips. In that case, perhaps it is true that history will rhyme.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semper_Augustus_Tuli...
Next you're going to say that gold has some magical property called "intrinsic value" which Bitcoin doesn't have.
Well, Bitcoin has absolute scarcity and a global permissionless and trustless payments network. Despite the protestations of many, it's a form of money and useful to many people.
Easy to hide a billion dollars of bitcoin on a USB stick for 10 years. Good luck storing a billion dollars of gold, you couldn't even physically move it by yourself.
Wampum didn't do so well either
Beyond that, the less rational reasons people value gold as if it had intrinsic value are at least deeply rooted in our history & culture.
Gold is gold because it is useless and also rare. And can't be produced. And spread widely. All these little features are its value because they are what you want in a currency. And the good currencies try to replicate that. It its perfect in this regard, but closer than any other phsyical item.
BTC has some of these and its properties are still in flux. And BTC is only part of the cryptofx world might wind up being the same thing financially.
> At minimum, it's a heavy physical object, and heavy objects also have a variety of uses.
Quite possibly the dumbest explanation of gold I've ever read.
Though I admit that a large portion of it's price is due to people valuing for it's properties as a financial instrument. The fact that the price would be lower if it did not have that purpose is irrelevant to valuing it at that price for other purposes. Otherwise you might say then precise thing about any other object with multiple purposes: "if not for oil being useful as fuels and instead only plastics and other pretro chemicals it's price would not be so high."
Further, I don't deny the potential for BTC or other cryptocurrencies to be used for similar financial purposes as gold, only that such uses remain theoretical, and it is uncertain whether-- given it's track record & the potential for governments to regulate it into something indistinguishable from traditional financial tools-- that it could ever achieve those uses on a wide scale. Certainly to date it has been completely useless for the financial purposes that gold currently fills. And, as this conversation started, unlike other traditional financial instruments it has absolutely no underlying asset for which it is an abstraction & which, no asset that, absent any specific financial instrument would still be utilized for its value.
It's current price is a function of two variables: 1) speculation that it's price will increase. 2) it's expected future value for the theoretical purposes already mentioned. These are abstract reasons in which it differs significantly from the concrete underlying value of traditional finance. I don't mean this as an insult. Playing video games for fun or reading books for pleasure doesn't have a separate value apart from the abstract reasons reasons for doing so either. But unlike legions of crypto advocates I don't insist on it.
Maybe Doge because it's the original meme coin, but everything else will die. Just like the billions of random tokens I hold from 100s of ICOS from 2017. They're all worthless.
The casino will be back in another 3 years.