Bitcoin is over $100k
tradingview.com
tradingview.com
Anytime we see a dollar symbol we assume something has value like a traditional asset, tied to tangible or measurable things like material costs, a company’s quarterly earnings, etc. But cryptocurrencies are totally different. This thing’s dollar value per unit wildly fluctuates literally hourly, because it’s based purely on human emotion and speculation.
If bitcoin reaches $1B it will be through some combination of dollar depreciation and bitcoin appreciation.
I too played with bitcoin many years ago, mining on my CPU. Like a sucker I got rid of it because it clearly was not useful at its stated purpose.
Why have we created an economy where this kind of speculation is rewarded so highly, while it contributes nothing back to society? It's nonsensical.
But once you accept that finance is kind of ridiculous (and completely decoupled from any meaningful work in the real world), you can see that there is no limit to how high it can go.
Not entirely true. The value is driven by number of people invested x average amount they have invested. Most of the historic increase has been as the number of people involved increased. Currently that's probably in the 100 - 200 million people range. It could 10x from here to $1M per bitcoin but is unlikely to go to $1B or $1.
From what I remember, the amount of BTC is finite, so eventually we will run out of new BTCs, and by then, most will be held by big institutions and some individuals who didn't want to sell, and it will become yet another luxury commodity like diamonds or gold. Hence, the entire premise of "Bitcoin is the future of money" is kind of stupid, unless it's money for the ultrarich/lucky, because it's not available to the common folks.
And even if it was available to the common folks, how do you expect to live in a world where your currency changes value drastically from day to day? Isn't that a characteristic of a defaulted state/currency?
But let's say it's not the money of the future, but rather a speculative investment that is "not tied to greedy institutions". How does one sell 10 BTC and cash it out, bypassing the "greedy banks"? Last time I checked, most reputable exchanges are somewhat regulated, and in any way, getting a sudden $1M won't go unnoticed by the government.
So yes, I am failing to understand the premise of bitcoin. It seems to fail on both as the currency of the future, as well as unregulated investment instrument.
It is "digital gold" at this point.
it's money for the ultrarich/lucky
Now 21 million minus one ultrarich lucky guys hold one Bitcoin and one stupid poor guy (you) holds one bitcoin? Or would it make you part of the ultrarich lucky club?
What I wanted to say, is that in its current form, bitcoin IS money for some ultrarich people who have enough of it AND are able to access a commerce world where you can actually buy stuff with it without converting it to fiat currencies. Because last time I checked, I can't buy milk with BTC in my local supermarket, but I bet I can buy some luxury/illegal thing that cost absurd amounts of money (for the common folk) with BTC.
Therefor, the mantra of "Bitcoin is the future of money" that's being pushed by BTC/crypto enthusiasts, is false. It MIGHT be a form of money for people who have lots of it, but not the common folk, doing everyday purchases.
the mantra of "Bitcoin is the future of
money" that's being pushed
In the concept of value, the aspects of Bitcoin that are relevant is that it has a broad ownership strucure, is finite in supply, is easy to store, validate and transfer.
As the financial system is set up right now, Bitcoin has a lot of potential to reduce friction. For cross-country payments as well as for buying coffee:
Speed, fees, finality.
But the lightning network will have to mature first. We will see if the global financial system evolves faster than the Bitcoin ecosystem. I would expect Bitcoin's ecosystem to evolve faster.
As for Lightning being unreliable and slow - I don't see a technical reason for it to stay this way.
What do you consider a "better-designed currency"?
BTC was "advertised" as either the money of the future, which it is not, or an investment instrument that allows you to bypass government restrictions, which again, it is not, at least not for the common folks.
At this point, it's just a very volatile investment/speculation instrument.
You keep casually dismissing it as money. Give it about 2 years and you’ll realize you were incredibly wrong about this take. Between country adoption, lightning, infrastructure, integrations - bitcoin is already there now but it will become undeniable in roughly 2 years time.
I recall reading similar statements more than 2 years ago...
The story of Cryptocurrencies reminds me a bit of Linux: "it was a cancer to society" until it was not. And now everyone is adopting it and corps have fucked it with their "open core" offerings.
I myself think that the use case of "trustless store and transfer of value" has a LOT of more attraction to what detractors see.
I run one of the early Bitcoin exchanges in 2013.
We had users from 200 countries, mostly common folks with small amounts.
Everyone had a change to make 1000x. Bitcoin has been mostly widely available asset in the world.
It's fine that common folk can buy fractions of BTC, but these amounts won't change their lives. And anyone who can afford to buy >= 1 BTC today, is already wealthy (or stupid).
big mistake in hindsight
If this price was truely guaranteed, then investors would have bought in as soon as the information became available.
Congrats to the people who held through thick and thin, I speculate (my own opinion) that we will likely not see 80% drawdowns anymore due to all the institutional money that flew in, just “standard” 40-50% dips. Fantastic to witness, an asset class out of thin air.
Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!
It seems we are truly ducking poor here in the EU. My parents have been running a farm for 40 years in the Netherlands and they’re doing well financially. Still, $100k is not inconsequential for them!
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-r...
One fourth have no savings at all. European stats are similar:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1221416/households-witho...
This group is further split into two kinds of people: Those who had an opportunity to take advantage of the massive financialization of the world, and those who weren't afforded that opportunity.
Just remind yourself this place is an extreme outlier whenever you hear someone here treating life-changing sums of money for 90-95% of the global population as "inconsequential".
Would love to see some data, as anecdotally, living in the Bay Area, I cannot at all relate to your comment given the massive amount of wealth virtually anyone I know has. People routinely drop $1k on a couple of mid-tier restaurant dinners around here (restaurant prices show that a drink these days is $25, crazy, good thing I stopped consuming alcohol), which I do understand is an outlier. Thanks.
> When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 63 percent of all adults in 2023 said they would have covered it exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement [...] 37 percent of adults [...] would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent
they said exactly that in 2018, 2021, and 2022 too
Still, I did get a payout from the mtgox disaster and its a decent amount really, considering I put in less than 100$ from the start. Just far from life-changing amount, more like "ok, this gets us a nice vacation trip!"-money.
If I had saved them, I could pay off my mortgage now.
They were lost when I had to re-install Windows to play games and formatted the whole hard drive. I don't think much about it because it's so long ago but I'd have enough money to start realistically considering to retire...
There's a ton of things I could regret.
BTC price going up makes the counterfactual very easy to imagine in rough outlines, and thus more and more appealing.
But that's a fool's errand. There's absolutely no guarantee that in all the alternate timelines where you had not sold you would be better off now. Even with all the extra money. Windfalls tend to cause problems for lottery winners for example.
There was some person who invested $30 everyday in BTC since 2017, and has $1 million right now.
The tweet had gone viral on Twitter.
BTC bull/bear cycles have taught a lot of people many things about regular investing.
Like what this person did is called DCA(Dollar Cost Averaging).
>>>>Cheers to the next 10X in 8 years, $1M in 2032!
Seems like showing up everyday is all there is to success. Mostly. Every once in a while, someone makes it big due to luck/help. But showing up everything is all.
"Invested" is a generous way to put it.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/09/compare-inve...
Im sure you can invest $30/day in Index funds too. Given its basically 2 hours of minimum wage/day.
I don't know if I would even consider buying an NFT of a pointless thing gambling. There is a misguided expectation that just because it has a price tag it has value. The actual perceived value(as in market price) increasing reinforces that viewpoint, but it is an artifact of a pool of misguided people that has not been exhausted.
The point is, these people have an expectation of an increase in value. For most gambling there are two categories. The most skilled wins, and the House wins. There is no rising tide raising all boats. Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional.
'Investing' in NFTs, I feel is distinct because it relies on the sincere belief of a false premise. Participants believe that neither skill nor luck is a requirement and just being in the game is sufficient.
Coming back to Bitcoin, I think there are multiple levels of expectation based upon multiple premises. The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money. I don't think you can say this is outright false, merely quite unlikely. Others believe that Bitcoin will, at least, retain it's value. This premise is on sturdier ground but also not certain.
You could think of this as skill-based form of gambling if you think that the skill is in the ability to more accurately determine the truth of the premises. That puts it in the same field as a high risk investment though.
- The most skilled wins: btc participants probably believe they're appying skill (with a heavy dose of luck) to know when to get in and get out of bitcoin. after all $1 million in btc is only useful if at some future time you can do something with it ("cash out").
- Believing that simply getting on the bandwagon of gambling will make you money is outright delusional: this sounds like a pretty accurate description of crypto "investing" as a whole.
> The premise that Bitcoin, one day, replaces money
If that happens, how many btc will it take to buy a toyota? Nobody knows. Sure, USD may be worthless one day, or it may take $1 billion USD to buy a pencil. But (most) crypto investors weren't "investing" in USD before, the were using it as a stand-in for things of real value.
Feb 2024: +50%. Approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States
Nov 2024: +50%. US election results
??? ????: ???%. ????
BTC used as El-Salvador style sovereign wealth reserve
Is it really that intellectually honest to compare tulips, which can be grown everywhere, by anyone, with "something" that has been designed, on purpose, to have a diminishing issuance rate?
Satoshi made it very clear, in the very first Bitcoin block, that Bitcoin was a middle finger to politicians ever printing more money to bail out the banks.
I see Bitcoin has the "anti tulip".
If you want to argue that people could theoretically discover a lot more gold or bring in an asteroid one day full of it, okay, but then why not just by land then? Even better than gold, there's a potential for some income too. Or why not just go with something that's equally as scarce like vintage wine? You literally can't make anymore wine of a particular year; it's inherently scarce.
One is more stable and the other more lucrative.
The same can be said about money or cash.
It HAS a physical tie: it is the energy spent to run the chain, which is, however, backward to gold being a material. And it's not to the advantage of the owners, but of the miners.
I can easily see a catastrophic scenario out of this: a downward spiral of value happens for XY reason, and then a halving happens. That makes the mining of it suddenly highly costly, which makes it uninteresting, or less and less profitable to mine, which renders the chain slower and less popular, etc.
However, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin is still on the rise, and we won't see such a downward spiral before many halvings (20 years? That's a lot of GWh lost to useless computing...)
Only 11% of gold is for industrial purposes, so I think that if the thousands of years of cultural association of gold with wealth suddenly disappeared and people decided it was a bad investment, then it would be basically worthless.
There is no such thing as "instrinsic worth".
There's only supply and demand.
Why there is demand for a certain good is a many-colored and complicated affair.
But I'm skeptical about the usefulness of this definition.
The (scientific) word æther exists too, but you would only use it in a historical context.
- easy to transmit
- easy to store (but both gold and BTC are dangerous to store at home from the security standpoint)
- easy to buy and sell
- BTC is actually limited (capped). There's no practical limit to the amount of gold. You're always one tech breakthrough away from gold becoming very common - read the history of aluminum, they used to make jewelry out of it.
- impossible to counterfeit. Even banks struggle to detect counterfeit gold
- gold for payments is completely impractical, BTC has Lightning network that seems to work.
- BTC is programmable
“It is but numbers on a ledger,” they said at first, dismissive of its allure. Yet the numbers grew, and their hearts darkened with greed.
I remember the great split—the Hard Fork Wars. Brothers turned against brothers, chains rent asunder, each claiming to be the true heir of Nakamoto's vision. But it was a war without banners, fought not with swords, but with hash rates and cryptographic fire. Many were the tokens that fell, discarded like the leaves of autumn, their worth reduced to naught.
I saw the rise of the altcoins, a thousand pretenders clamoring for a place in the sun. "To the moon!" they cried, their banners bright and hopeful. But most found only ruin, their holders wandering the barren wastes of forgotten wallets, muttering of rug pulls and false prophets.
Then came the age of DeFi, and the people rejoiced, for they thought they had found a new power—a magic to rival the centralized lords of old. But it was a perilous path, anon, filled with cunning contracts and exploits that devoured the unwary. I saw kingdoms built on leverage crumble in a single night, their rulers cast out into the dark.
And the NFTs! Ah, the NFTs… Each token a promise, a glimpse of eternity, they said. Men and elves alike paid dearly for these fragments of art and culture, yet many were cursed to hold only shadows, their treasures mocked by the uncaring markets.
Through it all, the Bitcoin endured, its ledger immutable, its purpose unyielding. But even it was not free from the grasping hands of fate. I remember the fall of Mt. Gox, the poisoned chalice of FTX, and the whispers of whales who moved the tides unseen. Each event a lesson, each loss a tale of hubris and folly.
Now, anon, as we stand upon the precipice of a new cycle, the wise and the weary tread cautiously. For the Bitcoin, though a gift, is also a burden. Those who seek it must be strong of will and sharp of mind, lest they too fall prey to its power.
I have seen the rise and fall of many. I have borne witness to fortunes made and lost, dreams forged and shattered. And still, the blockchain spins, unending, unyielding, like the great Eye ever watching.
Beware, anon. For the world of crypto is not for the faint of heart. It is a realm of shadow and light, where one must navigate with care, or be consumed by the fire of their own greed.
You want to own something? You need to be capable of keeping it safe. If not entrust it to someone who is and hope they don't steal it.
The same goes for everything in life.
The fiat banking system has demonstrated what it does when we trust it with our fiat money. It steals it (through zero-reserve banking aka infinite debasement).
With bitcoin I can audit the wallet they hold for me at any time (public keys) and know that they can't debase it.
It's easy to see that this is nonsense: I could buy a widget from someone for $1, then turn around and sell it to my brother for $10000, does that really mean the widget is now magically worth $10000, and we doubled our collective holdings? No, what actually happened is that we together still have that same $10000, plus a worthless $1 widget.
Derivatives like options can be zero sum, options expire worthless.
I just wish they would drop the energy consuming ones...
You could use something like Litecoin, Solana, maybe even Ethereum if you’re willing to pay the fee.
You can use bitcoin completely/as anonymously as cash if you wanted to, the same way you’d have to put in a bit of effort to have a completely anonymous cash transaction.
Monero (XMR) which is a fork of bitcoin, is much closer to actual cash
You can buy ETH, then you can use a TOR crypto exchange to swap it from ETH -> BTC into your wallet.
Just an idea though
There was a very contentious split many years ago now (Bitcoin Cash vs Core fork) regarding this point. Until then, it was taken for granted that block size would continue increasing in proportion to transaction volume in order to facilitate such use. This was Satoshi's expectation, and there was little-to-no discussion otherwise. Quite suddenly, a few powerful, well-positioned people (with conflicting interests in the form of their Lightning side-chain solution) conspired to form a consensus of limiting on-chain transaction bandwidth via astroturfing and comprehensive censorship.
Whether they were responsible visionaries with the foresight to avert disaster using a novel solution, or spiteful saboteurs driven by greed and power, is up to the reader. Un/fortunately, they were very successful.
The idea that everyone will run custodial BTC/Lightning wallets is also rubbish. In the future, there will be institutions that do what banks do today: Give out accounts, which are non-custodial wallets like your todays online banking, and settle transfers with other banks in bulk by doing actual BTC onchain transactions.
Average Joe in 2040 will not run his own wallet but use an external service provider - just as Joe is not a member of the SWIFT transaction network, he will not be settling debt with BTC transactions but rather have an "account" and pay with whatever L2/L3 technology we will come up with.
It will be like in the gold-standard days. You had the right to exchange your paper dollars for gold, but no-one ever did. Yet every transaction was backend by gold, just as every L2/L3 transaction will be backed by bitcoin, though no onchain transaction will happen.
It is one of the best instruments for speculating on the extent of human idiocy.
Any prediction of when this will come crashing back down?
People say Bitcoin is worth $100k but what they actually mean is it's worth 100,000 "USDT", because that's the thing you can actually exchange for it.
Are those 100,000 "USDT" worth $100k? Well, maybe. Tether claims every USDT is backed by a US dollar. It just can't tell you where they are or let you audit them. But they're there. Honest.
> And why isn't that being shorted?
How would you short it? Especially given that most crypto trading platforms are going to go bankrupt when it does crash.
You can until you can't. As long as people think 1 "USDT" is worth $1, and as long as the amounts you're selling aren't too big, it stays afloat.
> 3. Technically you can short USDT via various means but you won't be able to collect any profits.
How? If my thesis is that USDT is going to collapse and bring down the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem, what can I buy to express that and profit on it?
It looks like there aren't too many people comparing something that was designed, on purpose, with a fixed supply curve using a diminishing issuance rate and which exists since 16 years with "tulips", a mania that lasted 3 years (and everybody could grow tulips anywhere they want).
I stand my case: Satoshi made it very clear with his message in Bitcoin's genesis block that his invention was a gigantic middle finger to politicians bailing out banks by ever printing more money.
Bitcoin is the antithesis of tulips.
Bitcoin is the "fuck you" to QE / fractional reserve banking / helicopter money / physical bills printing / bonds issuance / etc.
And, so far, it's working.
What I find new about this recent bull run is that the usual "crypto will upend global financial systems/crypto will change the world" hype is conspicuously missing. All the "Blockchain startups" have basically disappeared. NFTs are worthless. There is little/no VC money going into the space. I think people are finally coming to terms with the fact that it is a speculative investment and nothing more.
1. Cross-border transfers without needing permission from banks or identification
2. A fungible digital asset you can hoard and nobody can physically take from you if you secure the keys.
3. If you are a business in a gray or black market industry, you can accept payments from customers online without needing permission from payment processors. Many types of businesses are effectively banned by the banking system.
4. It provides a way to obfuscate your wealth which can help protect against asset seizures. Similar to #2.
Probably most CEX don't allocate UTXOs upon buying, but only for withdrawals
It's not an equity, it's a currency.
The Bitcoin network is nigh "indestructible" as long as some folks still consider it useful. This delivers credibility towards the faith required to support some value. If its value dropped by 99% tomorrow (maybe from aggressive global legislation and cooperation among governments), it would still function (but perhaps primarily maintained by sanctioned countries).
I think there's significant pros and cons to cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin specifically. As the emission rate continues to decrease, I suspect its value will stay relatively high relative to what it is now.
EDIT: I said in (3) above that it's harder to secure bitcoin from destruction (than cash) but in some ways it's remarkably more robust than cash. You can make as many copies of the keys securing your bitcoins as you like (and/or use multi-sig). Your home burning down would destroy cash, but if you have a backup your bitcoins are preserved. However this is in tension with "secure from theft".
In the USA, spending cash doesn't require ~30 minutes of validation or a capital gains report.
New coins are minted with every block. But perhaps you mean to suggest that it's "stable" or "predictable." The emission rate of bitcoin is predictable - but this is predicated on the stability/predictability of the community of miners/stakers. It seems extremely irrational now, but if something were to change such that the community decided to drastically increase or decrease the block reward, they could indeed do so if they found consensus.
> its supply is not responsive to price.
While this is probably true, the value of mining equipment is directly related to the exchange rate of bitcoin (and perhaps its recent rate of increase/decrease). This doesn't impact supply, but it does impact the network OpEx.
(I don't think it's a sustainable model, as security essentially decays over time, unless fees become extremely high which doesn't seem like a great outcome either. But that's another matter...)
1) We could maintain fees through compression, that is, by making each on-chain transaction representative of many off-chain transactions. This is beginning to happen with the lightning network, and other technologies are in the works to advance this concept.
2) Mining will become more integrated with other industrial and residential processes, which will reduce the cost of security, from a compensation standpoint. Think bitcoin miner water and space heaters in many homes, etc.
3) It's also likely that in the future institutions that rely heavily on bitcoin will voluntarily subsidize security to some extent, for the same reason they invest in vaults for other instruments. Personally I'm planning to start running a lottery miner at home just for the fun of it.
Also this seems like a sort of free-electricity scenario (mining with electricity that was going to be used anyway), but I'm not sure free electricity would reduce mining costs? Wouldn't hardness adjust so that it then becomes all about hardware CapEx (assuming amortized CapEx remains significant)?
I figure mining costs are around 1% of the market cap, and can't go that much lower without serious security risks. So the ecosystem needs to fund that in some way, whether it's through inflation, fees, or donations.
With fees, I also worry they'll be too unpredictable. Like there might be enough demand to justify $20B/year in fees, but it's a function of supply as well, and if scaling solutions like Lightning Network work "too well" (with people rarely needing to settle on-chain) we might end up with way lower fees.
It would be more ideal to just regulate the credit card companies properly but that appears to be beyond current government bodies.
But Clifton and Camps Bay were super nice. One late night I made a sandwich for the security guard my friend's neighborhood had to hire to stand outside with a kalashankof at night, he was grateful.
Compare that to other more poor African nations, there isn't 1/1000 the tension in the air as there is in SA. The reason for that is the extreme difference in wealth tied to racial tensions.
Money is only powerful as long as it's useful. When the pitchforks come out, dollar bills won't stop them.
Some NFTs/art might appreciate in value, but most NFTs/"art" are worthless on the open market.
Buying Bitcoin right now involves speculating that others will also see this potential, which is why it’s accurate to describe it for the moment as a speculative asset. The reason buying Bitcoin is a smart bet is that its monetary properties are so good that it has the potential to store a significant percentage of the world’s savings. Once that happens, its volatility will be much lower, so it will be a good store of value. And of course its purchasing power in current U.S. dollars will be much, much higher, which is why it’s a good idea to buy some now.
The question is more like: Would you let everyone dictate the value of a currency and leave it decentralized? Or would you rather a government controlled centralized currency.
It’s preference and opinion at the end of the day
This is why the masses are always dazed and confused. Your water and food are full of poisons but the numbers in databases are what get the most airtime. Bitcoin is the purest distillation of fiat currencies because there is no longer any actual physical manifestation of it anywhere other than whatever paper key you keep on you as a reminder that there is a database with some numbers which you and those like you collectively believe to be "valuable".
that is why Bitcoin is valuable. It’s valuable because it stores value with all the important properties I listed above. Those properties are intrinsic to Bitcoin. Say that for any other asset.
If you’re worried about civilization crashing and Bitcoin becoming worthless. Fair enough, you should diversify into guns and toilet paper.
I'm not here to convince you that bitcoin is worthless because clearly there are enough people who think it is worth more than $100k so you'd be better off convincing those people to offer you services in exchange for bitcoins instead of arguing with a random stranger about the collapse of civilization.
Wait, are you saying dollars are good because you can wipe with them? I think you're in full agreement with the person you're replying to!
In a stateless society, how would the landed deal with squatters? Couples therapy?
There’s no universal, intrinsic value to life. It’s us that give it value.
Even basic survival varies acc ross culture and contexts. People die in the millions all the time for their countries, ideas, religions, offspring…
Bitcoin is not the symptom, Bitcoin is the answer. People are not longing Bitcoin, people are exiting the dollar, the euro, the yuan...
All fiat currencies go to zero. BTC does the opposite using number go up technology.
Compared to what? Other government currencies?
The SingleFamilyHome/USD pair begs to differ
I'm not even sure what this means and what you're trying to say.
One can compare two things, say bitcoin and dollar. Dollar is at record lows compared to bitcoin. It's at record lows also compared to the stock market, commodities, real estate, etc.
You know why it is a headline?
Because the $ symbol in the headline is what people ACTUALLY care about. You don't even need to ask people: simply watch what people do, and you will learn what they care about.
And what they do is they buy nice things, like Lamborghinis, yachts, homes — and they do so using US dollars.
> What denial? It is an excellent way to gamble or launder money. That's not changed, but it's not expanded either.
It's actually quite functional for that speaking as someone who's used Polymarket.
Mainstream adoption seems farther away due to this recent price spike. The money is attracting the wrong people, as it usually does.
All of those people pivoted to AI.
That hype is nothing compared to the current hype, the idea that the US Government is going to buy a significant amount of Bitcoin to create a "strategic" reserve.
Every hype cycle gets bigger and bigger even as past ones never amount to anything
this makes sense. price inflation is out of control . it's like everything is being inflated in the name of scarcity
Mostly yes. The only true value I see is that Bitcoin is the new Swiss banking. So if you don’t trust your government then you get yourself some Bitcoins. I realized this while reading a book about Swiss banking. It also used to involve elaborate schemes to preserve client privacy.
Just like many bitcoins got irrevocably lost on broken hard drives.
They are real quiet today. No where to be seen this time and probably sulking that they ended up on the wrong side of the trade. (again)
Well done to those who did not listen to their cope.
None of that has anything at all to do with the current spot price. That's just an excuse to "debate" the topic again by pulling out the same old arguments.
Several other submissions intended to report the same simple fact were flagged and killed. Why not this one?
IMO BitCoin is designed to fail as a currency with it's mining costs, and a bad idea as an investment since exchanging it is such a house of cards. Never mind that holding any significant quantity invites dangerous people with wrenches.
Water might be other one. But now that is cheap enough, even with desalination.
And yes technological arms races exist but they are often power games between governments, although in some cases a tribe could become a genocide victim if nobody wants to participate in the military effort. So in that case I agree it's maybe not bullshit, but it depends on the behavior of the neighbors.
Energy is a free source of energy from the sun plus it gets stored for free in various ways (such as vegetation). So that doesn't really have to be factored into the discussion.
The bright side of this that has me excited is what seems to be a growing sense of optimism about the future, driven by AI entering the public conscious, Space X's "rocket catch" etc. There seems to be a growing belief that the future can and will be better, more so than a decade ago.
And wasn't the first SpaceX rocket retrieval even more impressive, and a decade ago ?
EDIT : Yep, in 2015. (And today, a rocket beat a record : doing its 24th flight and retrieval.)
Bitcoin improves a lot on all of these properties while introducing other properties (open/public network, borderless, public ledger, etc.). Its supply/issuance has also been much more stable than Gold ever was (and ever will be if we're to believe the predictions of giant mines and even future asteroid mining).
I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.
If anything, from my personal experience, "crypto" brought financial resources to minorities, especially PoC in the US. Some of them would never had that chance in the traditional world if you identify to that cause.
Lots of citizens of sanctioned countries aren’t able to use their credit/debit cards to shop online outside of their country, paying with crypto or even using something like a SolCard fixes that.
It’s also generally convenient, there’s no other realistic and accessible way to transfer any sum of money, whether $10 or $10M, for a $2 fee nearly instantly.
Hopefully this pulls competition away from the space I'm in and back into crypto. The last time crypto crashed, crypto folks flooded into generative media and we kind of became associated with them. I'm just trying to make tools.
Sell while it is still high.