Bitcoin surges past $100k for first time
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
With that said, the more I think about BTC, the less sense it makes to me. Exceedingly few people actually use it for anything practical. The “store of value” functionality has completely eclipsed the practical use that Bitcoin maxis were preaching back then.
Since 2016-2017, it seems like people have bought it for the sole purpose of seeing someone else pay more for it.
It will never become some “universal” currency that overtakes national fiats. Right now it seems like people are only hoping for governments to hoard up BTC, to moon the price and provide exit liquidity for early holders - which IMO would be reckless spending.
It is the ultimate make-believe asset.
Edit: also, when I ran the numbers, I figured a realistic max value for 1 BTC would be 500k-1M. So the big money has been made, imo.
Right, but that use case could be enough to see the price continue to increase. Gold is also generally used as a store of value. The average person hasn't been going into a store using gold to buy things in the US in more than 100 years. But gold's market cap (~ $17T) is still greater than Bitcoin (~$2T). So, if Bitcoin is a better store of value than gold (debatable), then the price still has plenty of room to grow.
All sorts of thugs use bitcoin. 14 years ago it was gamblers and drug users. Now it is for people who want to steal billions.
Like when London real estate was used by Russian oligarchy 20 years ago.
Value is there, it is just sad state of things.
Perhaps that will change one day, perhaps it won't. Unless the price keeps going up greater than 20% per year perpetually(no exponential growth is perpetual) the electricity use will eventually drop. The people who are angry about the idea of it will eventually not care enough to be angry.
>* I figured a realistic max value for 1 BTC would be 500k-1M. So the big money has been made, imo.*
I agree that the big money has been made. If it did actually replace money it might be worth a few million. That's not going to happen anytime soon though, even if things went well for bitcoin it would take decades more to reach that point. It's a high risk investment with a possible yield of 10x to 100x in a timeframe that you could probably get a better return from something far more secure.
Sure you could make heaps buying and selling at just the right time, but trading on volatility can be done in any market, and usually results in people losing all their money to the inside traders.
Are you going to reply pretending that isn't a big deal?
The mining reward currently dictates how much one can spend on electricity and still turn a profit. The mining reward halves every 4 years. The total usage over time woul be the area under the curve. If the price were 100k in 100 years time, the bulk of the electricy used mining would probably already have been spent.
To maintain its generation rate it would have to double in value every 4 years, forever, that comes to about a 20% rise on average per year.
0.0125 is hard to imagine as a big warming, however it becomes part of an overall contribution to global warming. Everything we do contributes in some fashion to warming (or occasionally cooling). Everyone has their own opinion on the value of things as well.
Some people believe that Bitcoin will be transformational to the world economy, some people feel like it is worthless. Who are we to decide if 0.0125 degrees is an acceptable cost to pay or not? Feeling that you are right and others are wrong cannot be a basis for dictating the behaviour of others.
The best we can do is provide the most accurate data we can so that the costs are clear for people to make their own value judgements.
If you believe bitcoin is, as they say, going to the moon, the answer to the energy cost is obvious. Buy bitcoin and sell at the top and use the money to build solar plants, carbon credits, environmental repair etc. Proponents of bitcoin believe that this will happen anyway as a product of the global economic benefit of bitcoin.
I am more skeptical of the future price, and of the future economical benefit. Nevertheless I still don't think it is my place to say they can't try and make the world a better place even if I don't think it will work. Many massively beneficial things came from endeavours that others thought were futile before those things occurred. If we had nomalised cancelling things that others didn't believe in, we would be much worse off now. We certainly wouldn't have most of the infrastructure that supports this platform to communicate on