The fundamentals are at the current price of $17,000/btc bitcoin mining costs are about $14.5B annually(144 blocks of 12.5 btc/block plus ~3.8 btc/block in fees) in electricity expenses due to paying off miners which is about on par with the 8th largest company in the world Facebook. Bitcoin's revenue/year is however much money people feel like FOMOing in + however much tether money bitfinex feels like printing which right now is more than the mining costs. Once this figure changes, the price will decline. For reference, Facebook has ~$24B in revenue/year.

It isn't crazy to imagine crypto becoming adopted for actual transactions. Even if people are currently speculating, they're still downloading wallets they can spend from and loading it up with currency. For all these users there is now nearly zero obstacles to spending. This isn't even to say bitcoin is the transaction layer, but bitcoin still provides liquidity to any alt/2nd layer solution.

You don't need to physically control your own coins to speculate. I suspect many people are just keeping their stash on exchanges or online wallets.

The vast majority of novice speculators are using Coinbase. They at least attempt to maintain the appearance of compliance; but I suspect a large market run would wipe them out of USD fairly quickly.

The fact that “experienced” Bitcoin speculators are getting nervous is a sign the bubble is about to pop. Tether volumes are hockey-sticking up as a result. There has been enough technical analysis to show that USDT volume drives BTC price and not the other way around. USDT volume is hockey-sticking over the last few weeks. Feels like a Ponzi scheme and the whales are cashing out.

The price of one bitcoin is arbitrary. $1 is no more crazy than $1 million. It's all crazy. But the question is, what's the supply and what's the demand.

At some point there will be a correction. This velocity can't be maintained forever. But this is also a technology that heavily relies on going viral to become functional (payments/contracts) - and based on real world interactions I think crypto is heading towards an adoption curve that justifies its price.

Bitcoin can never achieve mainstream adoption since the transaction throughput is capped at 3 per second.

Maybe other technologies will, but Bitcoin cannot.

This is incorrect. Firstly, it's 10 per second. Secondly, it shouldn't be all that hard to imagine "side chains" or even "local-party networks" being built to handle transactions and use the underlying blockchain as a settlement mechanism. This is, as I understand it, how the lightning network works/will work, and I see no reason to think it wouldn't improve Bitcoin's adoption, which is already orders of magnitude better than other cryptos.

>Croman, Kyle; Eyal, Ittay (2016). "On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains" (PDF). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8. Retrieved December 10, 2017. The maximum throughput is the maximum rate at which the blockchain can confirm transactions. Today, Bitcoin’s maximum throughput is 3.3–7 transactions/sec [1].

1. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~prateeks/papers/Bitcoin-scaling....

I’d be interested in seeing evidence that USDT “drives” the USD-BTC exchange rate. I do think it’s a good indicator of sentiment about the exchange rate. Typically it’s within $0.02 of its supposed $1.00 value, but today it reached at least $1.08 and is still at $1.06. That means people are willing to pay a 6% premium just to be able to cash out of BTC today.

Maybe USDT is used in cross exchange arbitrage, where USD would be a lot slower and thus not worth as much.

There is a whole (and very good) book titled “this time is different”

https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Finan...

It's not obvious to me that "fundamentals" apply here. This is literally unprecedented and the Internet economy is uncharted territory.

-- said a million articles in 2000