jump on to the bandwagon asap. Just invest a minor share of your savings that you can afford to lose and check the exchange rate in 1 year. It might give 50x profit or you can lose it all, but you can afford it)
I'm waiting for the next 20% drop, but there's a risk that it will never happen... it's probably not worth the wait though, if you plan on buying some...
Its like any other speculative investment.
Define how much you are willing to lose(risk). Once that condition is met, sell. If it goes up, take some profits.
It's all about risk management and the discipline to stick to your rules.
Think of it as a high-risk hedge against future hyperinflation - the Fed can expand the monetary supply arbitrarily to infinity; but Bitcoin's expansion is limited by design.
I think of money as simply a distribution mechanism for the world's resources - a unit of currency can be thought of like a share; a right to allocate a portion of resources represented by that share. With the dollar, you can be diluted to infinity, with bitcoin, you cannot. With any fiat, it only has value because everyone else says it does. ETH is interesting because it is more than just currency, but it remains to be seen how valuable the ability to run decentralized apps will become.
> Think of it as a high-risk hedge against future hyperinflation - the Fed can expand the monetary supply arbitrarily to infinity; but Bitcoin's expansion is limited by design.
That's true of bitcoin, but not bitcoin forks. You can just fork the chain and there's your dilution / inflation e.g. Ethereum classic, Bitcoin Cash, both of those are taking value away from the Bitcoin and deflating the currency futher.
This is a very interesting point. One distinction I'm getting hung up on is that this dilution is in the form of a different currency (Ethereum classic, Bitcoin Cash), not in Bitcoin itself. So the "dilution/inflation" effect comes in the form of competing currencies. In these events, do you have a sense of what mechanisms might affect whether the new currencies gain traction?
The entire crypto market is worth $160bn at the moment (Bitcoin: $100bn). That is less than the market cap of Visa, or equals about the market cap of Mastercard. Global gold is valued at around $8.2tn (or $8,200bn).
This is not investment advice, but _IF_ (and that's a big if) some of these coins (mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum) successfully achieve some of their goals, today's price will be extremely cheap. If not, it will probably be expensive. Do your own research and then decide whether you think they can.
I remember those times - does anyone know how many bitcoins one could make per computing time, every year since the beginning to see what opportunity is missed.
Wishing I had not transferred one Bitcoin to someone back in 2011 just to show them how it works. And then erased that old MacBook that was loaded with 10 BTC in its wallet.
This made me realize I think I just recycled the hard drive with my old bitcoin wallet on it. I had half a bitcoin that I mined in a few nights on my old Geforce 4 GPU. Fuck me!
I just learned last week. I found the word bitcoin next a last modified date of 2011 in my backups while looking for something else.
My heart kind of started racing as I looked through it. The backup was of a mining program I was using, and it had the address that I was mining to. Looked up the address, it has 13.3 BTC in it!
I started unpacking the whole archive to find the wallet, only to learn that I didn't backup the wallet.dat. I don't know why I didn't, probably some combination of it being worth like $30 at the time + not knowing exactly where the private key was stored.
But it brings the total amount of bitcoin i've lost over the years up to 23.3...
I love bitcoin, this rise comes just 3 days after it had its biggest one day drop in a month. At this point it must be a CTA's dream instrument, all it does is seem to trade on momentum:)
So if China shutting down exchanges, the CFTC coming out and claiming tokens used in ICO's fall under its jurisdiction, confusing regulations everywhere, and huge recent gains can't stop it, I'm not sure what will.
As a side note, if there are any Bloomberg engineers around, come on VCCY<GO> is really awful.
Put some time into it, its not like virtual currencies are going away any time soon.
Not a big deal most people don't understand that industry. The point I was going for is that CTA's, more than anyone else, love good momentum stories as they are the original trend followers.
I've asked it before but: how is this a desirable characteristic for a currency?
This level of deflation is as bad as too much inflation, though the problems it creates are different. Why would anyone actually use Bitcoin if simply sitting on it will yield a greater return than investing it in anything? So far it seems more deflationary than gold. If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble?
It's hard to determine but I'd love to see some data on Bitcoin use vs. its price in USD/EUR.
You’re thinking about this wrong; bitcoin is meant to be used more as a store of value rather than as a currency for transactions. You should think about it more as hold than dollars.
Also, new assets and specially new asset classes are predictably going to have high volatility at first, until the market knows what to make out of it and finds the right value for it. In relative terms, bitcoin is still a pretty new asset, specially since new people are coming into the market every month.
> If this keeps happening won't this actually crowd out the currency application and lead to Bitcoin becoming nothing more than a speculative bubble?
I think it'd be reasonable to say that this has largely already happened. Beyond the volatility, it's terribly impractical to use as an actual currency due to the transaction fees these days.
Definitely, the user experience is going to have to improve A LOT. It took a solid 20 years before email was used by grandmothers though, in another 11 years it’s likely to see grandmothers using cryptocurrencies!
Addresses have a checksum so unless the wallet ignores that, a fat finger causing funds loss in that scenario is unlikely. [0] With the newly designed address format there is also error detection. [1]
Great point, luckily unlike fiat currency, developers can fork the code and create a new currency if they don’t agree with the way things are being run. This happened when Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash (which has a blocksize that’s roughly 8x larger than Bitcoin, and has very very low transaction fees) and its likely going to happen again around mid-November when Bitcoin forks again. Unlikely that all these forks will survive, only time will tell what the market actually values!
Central banks have (without evidence) claimed that deflation is a universally “bad thing” in order to justify inflating the currency every single year (AKA stealing from savers, and transferring wealth to the people who are the earliest recipients of the inflated currency).
Gold would have become the standard around the world if governments had not used coercion to prevent it from becoming so, and instead replacing it with fiat currency (which they can control and benefit from).
If Bitcoin, or another cryptocurrency, replaces fiat, it’s value will be worth several orders of magnitude of what it’s worth today, which is why many people are holding it instead of spending it at the moment.
However, people will not simply “horde” Bitcoin forever in anticipation of its price going up any more than people currently spend every single fiat dollar/euro/yen they have for fear of it going down in value due to inflation.
You may ask, “but why WOULDN’T they hold it instead of spend it if they anticipate the value increasing each year?” The answer is because people HAVE to live in the here and now, they have to pay for things like food, rent, entertainment, cars, fuel, etc. So they can’t get around having to spend some amount of money to live.
But sound money (money with low to no inflation) does cause people to spend LESS money than fiat currency because there’s a much larger opportunity cost.
> Central banks have (without evidence) claimed that deflation is a universally “bad thing” in order to justify inflating the currency every single year (AKA stealing from savers, and transferring wealth to the people who are the earliest recipients of the inflated currency).
TIPS. JGBis. Linkers. Come on man, this makes you sound like a crank.
Gold was the standard. It didn't work out very well.
TIPS and JGBIs are nothing but derivatives of un-sound money (fiat currency controlled by a small group of people, enforced by coercion), not examples of sound money people can choose as an alternative to fiat currency.
The gold standard you’re talking about was far from a market gold standard, banks and governments colluded so banks could print more paper money than there was gold in storage.
What specifically do you think “didn’t work out very well”?
Inflation encourages spending and investing while deflation encourages saving and hoarding. It isn't a surprise that people who want to see the economic activity want inflation over deflation. It also isn't a surprise why the general population would prefer deflation over inflation. I can understand how someone can make an ethical or moral argument for deflation, but I don't know how you make a economic argument that deflation is better for the future of the country than inflation.
There are certain people who benefit from inflation (banks who loan money, governments who have their debt denominated in fiat currency) and there are people who lose from inflation (anyone who saves their money in fiat, the value of which goes down the more money that’s printed). There is no such thing as something that’s “good/bad” for a “country” — countries don’t exist, only people do.
Also, Bitcoin IS inflationary, there will continue to be more Bitcoin creates until sometime around year 2140 when the 21 Million supply cap is reached. It’s just not nearly as inflationary as fiat currencies, which have no cap and no one knows how much more will be created from year to year.
Let me simplify things. Deflation is good for the individual. Inflation is good for the whole. It is basically the tragedy of the commons. What is good for a single person is not sustainable when scaled up to the whole of society. With deflation spending and investing are discouraged. That is bad for economic growth.
Also you are wrong about Bitcoin being inflationary. An expanding money supply is not enough to make a currency inflationary. The rate of the increase in the money supply needs to outpace growth in the economy. That isn't happening with Bitcoin. The obvious proof of this fact is the increase in the value of Bitcoin.
10,000 Bitcoin used to be enough to purchase a couple of pizzas. Now it has enough value to purchase an entire office building in San Francisco. Either the value of Bitcoin increased or the value of everything else on Earth decreased.
There are two phenomena we’re talking about here — an increase in the supply of money and the decrease in the purchasing power of money. The term inflation is broadly used to apply to both of these but they’re different which is where part of the hang up is.
In any case, the supply of Bitcoin will continue to increase until it hits 21m coins in approximately 2140, but if it becomes the world’s dominant currency, its purchasing power will continue to increase.
Why should spending and investing be encouraged, can you think of any downsides to encouraging this?
You are the one who described inflation as "stealing from savers, and transferring wealth to the people who are the earliest recipients of the inflated currency". That is talking about purchasing power and not money supply.
There are certainly some situations when you want to encourage saving over spending and investing. However I would argue it is not an ideal stable state. It is more difficult for an economy to grow when people don't circulate money through spending and don't increase future productivity through investing.
The benefit of a central bank that can control the money supply is that you can adjust these things on the fly depending on what is happening in the economy. Bitcoin cannot adjust the money supply in reaction to the economy.
Well, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory [0] has shown that the continuous, never ending increase in the money supply is actually responsible for greatly exacerbating the boom and bust cycle, so there are in fact many losers of this (people who invested money thinking it was safe when in reality it was a highly speculative market, eg real estate in 2007, internet stocks in 2001, etc).
Increasing the money supply ultimately leads to a decrease in purchasing power, which is stealing from savers.
If the market (individuals cooperating with one another voluntarily) valued a continuously inflated currency, then fiat currency will win and crypto will fail. I suspect the market values a fixed or slow-increase-in-the-money-supply version of money like gold as they demonstrated with their money preferences before governments used coercion to stop it, one of the biggest reasons crypto is so popular is because people can’t use gold as money, but governments can’t effectively stop people from using crypto.
> It also isn't a surprise why the general population would prefer deflation over inflation.
Nonesense. The general population is cash-poor, and is largely in debt. Inflation makes their debts easier to pay off.
Most of the wealth the general population owns is not in their bank account, but in their partially-owned house, their car, and their education. Deflation does not increase the relative value of any of them.
Part of the reason why people purchase or invest in these long term assets is because of expected future inflation. For example a 30 year mortgage with a fixed monthly cost would be a horrible investment in an economy with expected long term deflation. You would be much better off with paying the ever decreasing costs of renting rather than locking in a price that steadily costs more. This is why economist like small and steady inflation.
Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins and there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity. Basically since number of bitcoins will be limited - total value of all bitcoins must be a fraction to total human wealth. Tech leaders and SV have strongly stood behind bitcoin and blockchain with convincing arguments, and put their credibility behind it and each day by increasing valuation of Bitcoin they prove why tech matters on this planet.
Edit: /S
If a bubble forms and people's finances get hurt, that'll have very negative effect on the credibility of SV and tech sadly.
Arguably it has actually become less useful in the last few years, in that the transaction fees that you actually need to get a transaction through in realistic time have skyrocketed. And I gather it's beginning to be displaced on the tor drug markets.
It seems to be not very useful as a currency (transaction costs are surging, it's slow, can't scale, etc etc) and instead has proven much more useful as a vehicle for every sketchy investment scheme you can imagine.
I think blockchain as an idea is more valuable than Bitcoin as an idea. But that's me.
I know fees are higher now, but a big use case could potentially be people sending money to friends/family overseas. They're much lower fees comparing them to Western Union. Saw that in the Banking on Bitcoin documentary on Netflix, I recommend watching!
Possibly lower fees than existing solutions, but you have to factor in converting currencies, crossing the bid ask spread twice on different exchanges and the risk of volatility during the transaction. If you want a low cost transfer you're much better off using something like TransferWise.
The value of bitcoin, as with other currencies, is the value people believe it holds. More concretely, this would be the value of goods or services you can exchange it for today, and/or the future value you believe the currency will hold.
Your argument reminds me of a classic eBay seller problem: you can price your rare collectables however you want, but if no one is buying, they are worthless
you are exactly right, but all the same criticisms apply to fiat.
the difference between fiat and bitcoin is that bitcoin cannot be arbitrarily manipulated by the state.
there is a fairly large, latent inflationary pressure on the dollar in the form of the national debt that has no credible prospect of reversing. the dollar has been a historical safe haven, but there is a reason that china is trying madly to diversify its foreign currency reserves.
> "Basically I don't see any target value for bitcoins except that there's no bubble since this is a once upon a life time opportunity"
Why? I can start my own blockchain tomorrow, and so can anyone else. If people perceive bitcoin distribution as being fundamentally unfair, they can just stop using it and switch to the some other crypto currency.
If it makes anyone feel better. When the Bitcoin whitepaper came out, I read it and thought it was neat. Then came the first mining program and I installed it on my computer and it ran the CPU up. I said, "This is dumb." and uninstalled it.
Unsure why you being downvoted; its actually quite good advise. If you disagree then let's get into time machine and I tell you 10 years ago that one bitcoin will be $6,000. As laughable back then as it is to think one bitcoin will be $25,000, which I believe will become once all coins are mined and there is limited quantity available in circulation.
I think once it becomes more user friendly more outsiders will adopt. My friends complain about there being so many different exchanges and the process of buying altcoins too complicated. They don't like signing up for more than 1 different site, etc.
My future self is chuckling about the crypto attack that decimated the value of bitcoin in 2019. Upon reading about the attack, cryptologists around the world sat back from their computer and uttered approximations of the phrase, "Well shit."
that's not how it works. having bought a lottery ticket was still not a good idea even if you won. meaning, bitcoin is still a risky asset, like back then, there is no reason little reason to reliably assert that it will still go up, and not down.
This analogy is comparable to an extent. The odds of making money off bitcoin compared to a lottery ticket are several orders of magnitude higher. When making investments if you want to make large gains some of your money has to be in riskier assets.
Obviously don't put your life savings in bitcoin, anyone who does is not making an intelligent choice. But if you have money to spare that your willing to lose, I wouldn't consider it a horrible investment.
Why is crypto a lottery ticket? I've never viewed it that way. Just because something is a risk to you doesn't mean it's a risk to me. I firmly believe that cryptos are just at the beginning of their value. Maybe you dont. There's many types of investing.
Similarly, I was living in dorms (free electricity) at the time bitcoin made its debut (well not really, but it was still very early). I started mining using my fairly beefy desktop. After months I decided it wasn't worth the small amount of 'money' I had made and just deleted everything. That PC is long gone, wonder how much money I would have now if I still had that wallet. Damn.
Lol, well I did the exact same thing, mined 100 BTC on my CPU, turned it off, and forgot about it. That computer had been formatted at least twice before 1 BTC even hit $1. I comfort myself with the fact that I would have sold when it hovered around $8.
I have no idea if it's a solvable problem but this is a ridiculous issue with bitcoin when you think of it as a serious currency: not only that its supply is artificially limited, a large number of early coins are either in possession of its owner (who we are not even sure will ever show up) or are lost in accidents like these.
true - however what has been happening in the last 20 years with paper fiat is not how fiat is "supposed" to work - though granted, it seems that EVERY paper fiat eventually leads to increased inflation/hyper-inflation. With Bitcoin, that is impossible. This allows the whole bitcoins, as well as the individual sitoshis to increase in value - much like the dollar of 1900 (it has since lost 99% of its purchasing power due to all the increased printing, loss of the gold standard, etc...
while I don't think it will ever fully replace fiat currencies, it will - and already is - acting as a secondary money/value exchange, so there is NO downside to getting in. None.
It's not an issue at all - Bitcoin is in theory infinitely divisible. In practice, it's divisible to 10^-8 parts, each of which (a "satoshi") is worth 3/500th of a cent at USD6000 per BTC.
This also happens with fiat currency in the form of lost or destroyed cash. The final supply of bitcoins is limited but bitcoins can still be created using fractional reserve banking no different then our current banking system.
Your claim about fractional reserve banking creating more Bitcoins is wrong. The banking system doesn't create central bank money it creates a claim to it.
Fractional reserve banking oesn't create coins or notes, it creates credit (or bank money). These credit (IOUs) are liabilities of the bank that are denominated in central bank money (central bank liabilities). When a bank makes a loan this does not in any way affect the central banks balance sheet -there are no changes in the liability side of its balance sheet.
When the loan is withdrawn, this still won't cause a change in the liabilities of the central bank. Other than what bank owns what liability at the central bank. (But even this isn't necessary. It depends on what type of payment the customer made with the loan and what payment system it was cleared through: if it went through a gross settlement system or a multilateral net system,etc.).
The supply of central bank money is dependent on how central banks implement monetary policy. Everywhere in the world (and what has probably always been the case) central banks will supply as much of central bank money as is demanded from the banking system.
Fractional reserve banking will when the bank credit is denominated in Bitcoin doesn't create more Bitcoin, it just creates more claims in Bitcoin. The supply of Bitcoin is independent from this.
I wonder, is BTC liquid enough that you could actually get your $600k if you suddenly were able to recover them? I haven't dabbled in crypto coins, so I have no idea how the exchanges really operate in practice.
that would depend on your country's individual currency movement regulations as well as the different policies of the various exchanges.
for instance, coinbase only allows for a certain set amount of money in/out per week - and its actually quite low comparatively. $15-25k i think? maybe someone has seen more?
Absolutely. The 24hr trading volume on gdax.com (connected to Coinbase) is 15,524 BTC (~$93,144,000) and that's just the BTC/USD market on a single exchange.
I bought in at $3 USD / $4 CAD after trying to find someone to sell it to me while I watched it go from $1 to $4. I was broke at the time so I borrowed money off my credit card.
Sold almost all of it at $200 to $400. Felt like a complete baller. Who else has made 50x to 100x their money in a couple years? Who else takes a credit card cash advance and is right about it?
Sold some more at $6k CAD, overall I've cashed 250x my investment and still have some, but right now it's worth 2000x my original buy price and it's a bit batty to look at the current price. Could have bought a really, really nice house in Toronto if I'd just held on until today.
But you know, 2000x is, on a log graph, not that far from 250x. So unless bitcoin goes to $50k or $500k a coin I'm not going to be a touch sour.
Edit:
Also, this reminds me. I should go through my comment history and find people like tptacek that were very confident that bitcoin couldn't be securable:
It was a pain in the butt, but I secured bitcoin just fine. Bitcoin is one of those thing where you can go through what you said 10 years later and say "What did I say there? Yep that was right, nope that bit was a bit off, yep it wasn't banned by x, nope that person was wrong that it'd get shutdown within the year."
So much of what we arguable is unknowable, like generics in Go or whether mutable state is a good thing for certain programming applications. But the nice thing about investing is you get to find out how right you were.
And you're only really, truly right after the gains are realized.
I remind myself of this all the time. If I owned a decent amount of BTC early on, I absolutely would have sold it when it hit $1,000 or even before that. So no use in regretting not buying low and selling at $6000 per BTC
The incentives are completely backwards on why anyone would want to. All the value is trapped in the blockstream bitcoin core client - deviating from that sets the value of all those coins, all of which were already mined and are already owned by wallets that may never even come on the fork.
Thats 80% of all coins. Yeah, your fork can kind of start from scratch, act like the 16.6m coins that came before never happened, that most of them will be dead forever, and start mining from there and treating all the new coins mined (of the remaining 4.4m let) as the monetary base. But then you get any momentum and suddenly "dead" money is flooding the market from legacy wallets. Wallets that didn't contribute to the growth of the fork, that didn't harden the blockchains integrity on the fork, that simply installed a program and had a fortune ready to go with no effort and no commitment to that currency at all.
There is already the problem that vast amounts of bitcoins blockchain hasn't moved in years. Millions of coins that are being treated as dead that could come back to life at any time. But there is no way to know what wallets are actually gone - dat files lost, passwords forgotten, etc - and which ones are just waiting to cash out.
Fundamentally the problem is there are two groups of people here - futurists that want to overturn fiat, and investors that want to make (fiat) money. It is why we have not seen a cryptocurrency that can behave like real money yet - the closest we have gotten was dogecoin, which started as a joke and was completely abandoned by its original developers and left to rot.
To make a cash replacement, it would need enough minting of coins to cause inflation enough to keep people from stockpiling coins. But who wants to mine your cryptocurrency or hold it early on in its life if its depreciating in value from its own algorithms? The whole point of why people adopt early into cryptocurrencies is that if they blow up they just made millions from trivial amounts of effort by just being there first. Classic pyramid scheme.
But all crypto today has to be a pyramid scheme to get the adoption to start having momentum to operate as it is intended. Without the gamble of making a fortune how many people would have early on started bitcoin startups or invested in mining? If the promise was that a coin worth a dollar today would be worth a dollar ten years from now because the blockchain itself would generate enough coins to peg the exchange rate, the only first mover advantage you get is in how much less electricity it costs to mine early on assuming the coin takes off and becomes popular.
That can still be an incentive. It is still a gamble of course, but it is also an incentive. The problem is when you are one of those investor types with some large cash in a small neighborhood shopping for your next get rich quick scheme the humble coin trying to push the future is a lot less interesting than the pyramid scheme promising ludicrous returns if it can get enough fools to buy into it.
I do not mind having Bitcoin keep going up. But as a business owner that relies heavily on cryptocurrencies, I would really love it if things were more stable. We are building a business on privacy, anonymity, and cryptocurrency as a backbone. We're extrajurisdictional, so banking to USD or other fiat is very tricky. Tether is a great idea, but the current company looks very unstable. If there's a crash, they seem unlikely to be solvent.
Our company would pay a premium to get into a solid, pegged-to-USD coin. At least 5% if not more. Or even a coin that's pegged to an ETF. Of course we cannot satisfy KYC laws so it'd need to be a freely traded token, really.
I really hate the "hodlrs" and the complete lack of focus on how this is supposed to work for real businesses that use it as a means to an end, and not an end by itself.
I see this a lot talking about the 2x chain. People sometimes discuss it in terms of what's better for the BTC price. Why is that a goal at all? Other than the obvious reason of making current users richer?
If you want to transact in USD shouldn’t you use USD rather than a different currency (BTC)? And if you want to use a block chain to transact in USD shouldn’t you use something designed for that like Ripple?
That'd be swell. As an EJC, transacting in USD is more difficult, hence we must use cryptocurrencies.
Is Ripple pegged to USD? I do not want anything complicated, just a coin or token that has a 1:1 ratio with USD. Charge me 5% or 10% to buy them or 5% on cash out.
I believe this is because we are still very low on the adoption curve. Once it gains mass adoption and it is used more as a form of payment, the price will stabilize.
2x was made by businesses for businesses. It is supposed to solve the high fees and long confirmation times (at least on the short term) which are crippling businesses.
I do not really care about Bitcoin politics, but I will say as a user and business, the fees and confirm times are ridiculous and need a fix now, not in "18 months" when LN comes out (and then who knows how long until high adoption of LN).
Except they are shady as hell and have not published anything to establish that they are solvent. It is fine to use right now to hedge against small changes. If something crashes hard then people try to get out of Tether, it will fall apart.
No one has shown proof of being able to withdraw from Tether.
That's why a Tether that is done properly would be very valuable indeed.
What's the volume / liquidity of Bitcoin these days?
Say you're Tim Draper and you're sitting on 30K (bought at $600 from the US Gov in 2014 [1]). Would it be possible to offload them for $180M or is the order book too thin?
Say what you will, but this irrational exuberance is precisely that; irrational. I knew about Bitcoin 6+ years ago, when I read a blog about someone buying a sandwich with this newfangled currency. But I didn't rush to mine it. I didn't rush to buy it either. I was simply indifferent to the prospect of it, and I don't regret it.
Here's why. Bitcoin's thesis is that it possesses inherent value because it will become a medium of exchange i.e. people will trade in bitcoin, thereby using it as a store of value, and making it valuable. And yet, that hasn't happened yet. While it's hard to estimate the velocity of money for something like Bitcoin, and the "Bitcoin days destroyed" metric isn't accurate either, it is quite clear that as Bitcoin as a store of wealth rises rapidly in value, its utility as a currency correspondingly drops in value; thereby invalidating the central thesis on which the question of its value rests.
Here are rough estimations for the velocity of money for BTC;
Even if these are filled with inaccuracies, the general trend seems to be quite clear. People use BTC as an asset not a currency. And as such, the idea that it's a savvy investment belies the fact that it's value as an asset is entirely psychological in nature and completely ungrounded from actual metrics like fiat currency (though again fiat currency does run on trust, but the difference is that it's a marker of exchange thereby measuring the economy and its productivity gives an estimate of its value).
Further, even if it was a valid currency, then what we're witnessing over here is hyperdeflation in action, and it is fundamentally irrational to expect it to continue.
The reasoning for the above points is quite straightforward and simple. The magic of money and capitalism isn't that you can hoard gold and get rich. No, it's that you can make money. It's the idea that value can be created and destroyed through the economic actions of human beings, and that money as a concept serves as a measure of wealth as opposed to wealth. It's why we moved away from the gold standard - it was fundamentally irrational and in the long run, would have caused the exact phenomena we're seeing with BTC.
If you really think that somehow as a store of value BTC is going to become some significant fraction of human wealth, then go ahead buy this. But if you give it any rational thought whatsoever, then you'll see clearly that this is the tulip mania in action and that timing your actions to beat the market is even more irrational.
So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be.
Right now, the most rational thing to do is to bet for it to fail. And then figure out how to time that bet. Because the farther it rises, the harder it will fall.
> So no I don't regret passing up on buying BTC, precisely because it was and is a lottery ticket and I'm not in the business of buying lottery tickets no matter how well conceived they may be.
Dude, this is nonsense. Everyone regrets passing up on buying BTC because it's currently worth $6k because you can sell it right now for that money. Anything else is complex rationalization to make yourself feel better.
Look life is filled with lottery tickets with unknowable odds, playing every lottery out there just in case you win is foolish and a misallocation of resources. I'd much rather invest it into myself and build a game where I know the odds.
I made what I believed was a rational risk assessment at the time (back when MtGox was spinning up... Not exactly the most credible days for BTC) and decided to avoid the hype.
Could I use the money now? Sure. It's money.
But I don't regret the decision now because I was acting on the information I had.
Heck, even now, it's possible for someone to buy BTC and for it to crash. Should those people regret their decision even if, in their estimation, it's rational now?
To be blunt: if you spend any time regretting these types of things you're a gambler, not an investor, and will find yourself tricked into trying to time markets. And that will eventually bite you in the ass.
As for me, the same reasoning that kept me out of the market then keeps me out now: I don't believe in the fundamentals and I'm not a gambler. Full stop.
For those who do, the should buy and hold for the long term to realize the most gains.
But "it's worth a lot more now than it was 10 years ago" is not fundamentals. It's just the irrational assumption that past performance predicts future behaviour.
But that's the whole point. It's completely irrational to regret not buying a winning lottery ticket, because it might as well not win. The only question is, what were the odds?
Your chart shows that velocity of BTC is the same as velocity of USD M2. Is USD not a medium of exchange by this logic?
Bitcoin is a replacement precisely for M2 (base money + deposits), because with a fractional reserve deposits are as much usable as a medium of exchange, as the base.
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bitcoin. Time will tell if I am right or wrong. If we think of it as simply a currency, or a store of value we can place limits on its value based on what we know about gold, fiat currency, etc. We can extrapolate and come up with a valuation that we think is appropriate. However, its not just any of those things. It's a paradigm shift in digital ownership of value, and could potentially be a record of and a secure digital token for a huge variety of physical goods, virtual services, etc. Whether this happens is largely dependent on scale, but we will leave that argument for another thread since the troll army will show up. Bitcoin is something entirely new in the history of value transfer and ownership, stop trying to compare it directly with the systems that will be eclipsed by it.
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