MicroStrategy secures Nasdaq-100 inclusion after Bitcoin-fueled stock surge
reuters.com
reuters.com
There are multiple scenarios where Bitcoin becomes valueless, especially if people continue building on L2 chains instead of working systems.
1. Difficulty spiral where miners protest due to [Taiwan crisis/compute sanctions/Moore's Law dying, etc.] that causes miners to protest resulting in ballistic TX fees and latency.
2. Complexity spiral where the ledger becomes too large even if compute keeps up, necessitating special aid to keep the ledger moving even when it's unprofitable and excessively wasteful to do so.
3. Proof of work is imperfect and miners are already incentivized to conglomerate around cheap energy. If an adversary like China figured out the 51% attack, nobody could save their investments from going to zero.
4. Fraud and crime already jeopardize Bitcoin's legitimate applications, and if it continues the Justice system will inevitably be forced to regulate it or even outright ban it to protect consumers.
Bitcoin relies on a variety of cooperating elements on the social layer that have changed significantly since it's creation. People that earnestly believe society will change to suit Bitcoin rather than the other way around need to actually read the Bitcoin whitepaper and come to terms with how it failed today. It's going to zero, and it's been heading there since ~2013 if you're being honest with yourself.
that's empirically not true.
2. Storage and compute will scale to support the ledger and there can be software optimizations.
3. ETH would take over, it has more utility anyway. If you're so worried about BTC going to zero, the smart thing would be to hedge on ETH.
4. Not with this new admin and if they are successful, clearly going to last more than 4 years.
Pointing at the social consensus is interesting and time will always tell, but I'm willing to take that risk. The classic snarky response is "if you're so sure, then short it."
If the number of minable coins is fixed that doesn't sound like a perpetually appealing solution. People worry about it because it's still a problem, and you can't update things to fix it.
> Storage and compute will scale to support the ledger and there can be software optimizations.
Storage and compute are both pushed to their limits in terms of bandwidth today, it's not unheard of to find mining facilities that keep the entire ledger in-memory. A lot of the "easy" optimizations (eg. ASICs) as well as hacky ones (eg. CUDA implimentations) have already been exploited to middling success. I'll believe better optimization once I see it.
> ETH would take over, it has more utility anyway.
You know what has more utility than ETH? USD. This sort of "oh you need Xcoin to do Y" is exactly why all cryptocurrency is seen as the parasitic equivalent of sketchy credit card deals. Bitcoin isn't entirely bad, but if we start fighting each other over liquidity and utility then it's already lost compared to fiat. Once you factor in how much of an ass-pain self-custody and L1 txs are, you might as well not hold Bitcoin at all.
> Not with this new admin
My brother in Christ you are talking about an administration headed by a man convicted of 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records in the first degree. You need proof, not guesswork. Given that we are talking about a guilty criminal conspirator and accessory to fraud, I think it's hilarious that you're so willing to write off criminal intent.
> The classic snarky response is "if you're so sure, then short it."
I do short it - I sold my ETH, Chainlink and Bitcoin years ago. I fend off braindead extended family members accosting me during holiday dinner telling me I'm stupid for selling my crypto. I spend time with friends that mock me for selling my diamond hands and insist I need to buy $TSLA or I'll die poor. Now I read comments from insecure HODLers stumbling in off X, desperate to rub their gospel on anyone that didn't fall for it the first time around. The biggest loss I've incurred thus far was the life-hours I've spent entertaining this nonsense like it's a real-life MMO. The immaturity doesn't bother me - it's the deliberate myopia spread by defenders of cryptocurrency that assume the Bitcoin whitepapers still apply as-written in 2024. Today is a very different world and Bitcoin in particular is rather vulnerable in it.
And even zooming out, truth is crypto is dying. It's not one of those things that's even political if you just look at it objectively. Bitcoin itself is on life support and can't be used without a third-party iron lung like Lightning. Ethereum can barely reach consensus on anything and embarrasses itself in it's indecision and by letting Vitalik Buterin run his big fat mouth. The Cambrian explosion of shitcoins decided that memecoins are the most profitable (lmfao) and converged on a suicidal meta for the innovation of crypto. Today's cryptocurrency scene is more stagnant than it was in 2014 despite having more users, which is a horribly alarming sign for anyone holding crypto to sell while the demand still exists. If you've held crypto for more than 6 months, you know that the whole "dApp" promise is a literal scam invented to create demand when none existed. The solution hasn't found a relevant problem to solve. So investors speculate, and hope for the future of the chain is outsourced to morons.
Most miners mine to a pool. It is the pools that keep the ledger in memory as they have to host a full node. You're wrong about storage/compute being pushed to their limits. BTC chain is only 622GB.
I'm talking about utility in the sense of within the ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned wrapped BTC is the future. As long as it is on a PoS chain, it is free of the energy argument too.
I'm not writing anything off. He's president and you can't get around that. I didn't vote for him, but I'm certainly not going to sit around whining about it.
> I do short it - I sold my ETH, Chainlink and Bitcoin years ago.
That's not shorting it. Shorting it would be to borrow Bitcoin, sell for USD, hoping to buy it back for cheaper and then pocket the difference. If you had done that years ago, you would have lost.
Your long rambling personal story rant is nice and all but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, it just makes you sound angry at your previous decisions and losses. Fact is the price of BTC just hit a new ATH again, today at $103k. That doesn't imply death to me. You might consider taking a step back and realizing that your family members that you seem to hate so much, might be right.
i am unconvinced of the idea of PoS as a proof. Nothing will defeat proof of work in my mind.
I ran a 150k GPU ethereum mining operation. I was unconvinced they could pull it off. In that heart beat, they also decimated the entire GPU mining industry, not just for ETH. But, a whole ton of chains that aren't even under consideration in this bull run. All that power, estimated at 18-25m GPUs, given back to the grid. They "solved" a huge problem with crypto.
I also could have invested in the ICO, but I didn't believe some kid with questionable coding skills could build a chain to compete with bitcoin. I guess what I'm trying to say is that convincing yourself isn't always the thing that should be in your way. Is the risk convincing yourself or is it just diving in and accepting things the way they are, or working to make them better.
2. The ledger grows at a rate that's lower than the value decrease of storage. Effect increases over time..
3. Miners are incentivized to not collect around cheap sources of energy. As more collect, the energy becomes more expensive due to supply and demand and mining becomes unprofitable. So miners are geographically repelled from each other.
4. Bitcoins primary application is as a savings technology (not sure what crime and fraud you're talking about) and is not regulatable, nor does it need to be. The T&Cs are defined in code.
How on earth have you rationalised bitcoin going to 0 since 2013? And that it is failing? Sounds like a twisted cope mechanism to protect your ego - you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
What Satoshi envisioned for bitcoin and the way that might happen is simply that - a vision, an idea - and has no effect on how the free market uses bitcoin. He could have thought it would be used to keep track of ships in the sea - it makes no difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R87vco0jHvo
It is pretty clear he knows what he's doing and it is all out there. He's not hiding anything, which also helps it pass the pyramid scheme test as well.
Remember, this is happening in the most regulated market out there.