If you want advancement in graphics cards to come more quickly, it’s not a bad trend.
Hopefully both can be achieved.
People will start taking mining hardware offline. This will result in a lot of idle capacity. There will be a number of people capable of pulling off a 51% attack. And if the hash rate falls very quickly, say 50% in a week, the difficulty adjustment will be unable to keep up. This would have all sorts of nasty effects.
If the price goes to $4000 it should go to zero. That's assuming that the "investors" will behave sensibly, which is never a safe bet.
Will you short bitcoin then?
Precedent isn’t here.
But, if you are willing to say what happened in the yesterday will happen tomorrow, I assume you’ve taken a HELOC put on your house and invested in bitcoin - rift?
- people trading 'stocks' in the same way Pokemon / WWF kids trade cards.
- thinking this is actually a long-term 'investment' strategy (well its idiots trading with each other ...)
- to top it off, siphoning off capital and giving a load of shitty excuses 'it could be like Detroit at the beginning of the 20th century.
Many people were left holding pets.com stocks, but others were left holding Amazon stocks.
Most of the things that you point out are truisms that the people that have been in the bitcoin space for a few years also see. I would suggest you make an effort, and try to see through all the bullshit projects or outright scams, and you will see that there is real value in what bitcoin and a handful of other projects are trying to build. If you want to avoid the current noise, read what cypherpunks were writing about in 1998: http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/msg00203.html
10 years into Bitcoin there's still no reason for someone to buy in other than speculation. It's not competitive as a currency and the current “store of value” pivot is undercut by the lack of fundamentals. One particular reason why that comparison doesn't work is that if you had, say, bought AMZN in 1997 even if the stock didn't do great you owned part of a profitable book seller which could carry on just fine even if it never saw rapid growth. Bitcoin doesn't have any value other than its current popularity so there's no floor on the losses if people switch to something else.
1. I actually sat in on some calls with Pets.com around the time one of our clients was thinking about buying them and it was quickly evident that they had no strategy beyond cashing out at the IPO.
Most people in the west have about the same use for gold[0] and bitcoin - speculation, gamble, "investment". However, people of Venezuela, Turkey, Libya, Iran and even Russia have a lot of use for gold (and bitcoin): A store of value they can take with them if they leave. And unlike gold, bitcoin can be made confiscation proof. The official currencies of these places have more volatility and less stability than BTC.
[0] Gold does have ornamental and industrial use, but that's NOT why people buy it, and not why it is valued the way it is. The "investment" claims on gold outnumbers the industrial/ornamental claims by some 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.
At this point in time, the same is certainly not true for the people of Iran or Venezuela, where there are capital controls, and the only way to get a different currency is on the black market. Effectively, compared to the west, everyone there is "on the wrong side of the government".
> There’s zero reason in principle that it is any harder or easier for an oppressive government to prevent capital outflows to bitcoin than to British bank accounts.
In principle that's true, but that just makes bitcoin's raison d'etre more evident. At this point in time it does not seem to be needed, but it may become needed with less than a day's notice. This has happened to the people of Cyprus (a "western" European country). Even the US confiscated gold in the 1930's.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes. Bitcoin is a hedge; it's far from perfect, it has a lot of drawbacks, but at this point in time , it is more useful than gold for people who might have to flee.
The dark hints about how any government may become oppressive is a red herring. The issue isn’t that bitcoin isn’t needed because my government isn’t currently oppressive, it’s that bitcoin’s utility in the face of an oppressive government is wildly exaggerated.
You are attributing magic powers to bitcoins that they do not have. Black markets are not invulnerable to government crackdowns because they are digital. On the contrary, digital networks are in many ways easier to control centrally than distributed underground physical networks.
This especially bad for Bitcoin since unlike cash they’d get your full history and quickly deanonymize everyone you know.
Is it still as easy? Probably not, I'm not up to date. Could people who have done that get in trouble for that in the future (thanks to bitcoins long memory)? possibly, if their opsec wasn't top notch and even if it was top-notch but they were unlucky enough to use a mixer that cooperates with the chinese government.
And Erdogan's turkey is also a great example; While the "coup" was happening, it was possible, even easy, to move money out of the country using bitcoin (not so fiat money). Quite a few people left the country afterwards, and many were arrested regardless of phone app. I don't know how many of them took their wealth with them in bitcoin, but they had much easier time doing that than any other way. at the time
But if you have managed to acquire bitcoin, e.g. before a government crackdown, or some other way through help from people in other countries, it still provides the "cross border value store" function that gold cannot by virtue of being hard to move.
> There’s nothing to stop an oppressive government from preventing its people from buying bitcoin the same as they prevent them from buying pounds and wiring them to British banks.
There's also nothing to stop an oppressive government from killing its people (and some do). But oppressive is not binary, and people have used bitcoin to "smuggle" money out of (at least) Venezuela and China, despite capital controls and government crackdown, in ways that they weren't able to do with british pounds (and which would have been much harder and riskier with physical gold).
> You are attributing magic powers to bitcoins that they do not have. Black markets are not invulnerable to government crackdowns because they are digital. On the contrary, digital networks are in many ways easier to control centrally than distributed underground physical networks.
I am not attributing any magic powers. I am observing the reality as it happens now ; governments crack down on digital networks and black markets but it's much, much harder for them to shut down than bank transfers.
To stop bank transfers, all you need to do these days as a government is click the right button. To take down the Silk Road, the US government took many months and a lot of work; an oppressive regime might have done that more quickly and swiftly, but it would still have taken considerably more effort than shutting down wire transfers. The special feature cryptocurrencies have is ease of carrying across borders .
> The dark hints about how any government may become oppressive is a red herring. The issue isn’t that bitcoin isn’t needed because my government isn’t currently oppressive, it’s that bitcoins utility in the face of an oppressive government is wildly exaggerated.
Oppressive is not binary. Cypriots were (perhaps still are) subjected to very strict capital controls, with no attempt to crackdown on bitcoin.
I am not lamenting the downfall of Silk Road - I think it should have been shut down. I was pointing out that "an oppressive government can do everything" is a weak argument, because we have experience showing the limit and effort needed.
All I am saying that bitcoin has some of the same uses that gold has, albeit in an easier-to-carry-across-border and harder-to-confiscate way -- which was a response to G-G-..-G-P saying "bitcoin has found no use".
Now, "illegal" is a problematic word, because it is a technical definition that changes with time and location. It is now legal to own gold in the US, and it was legal in the 1920's but it was illegal to do so in the 1930s. Gold was confiscated, and (since USD was still denominated in gold at the time), it's value in USD was doubled overnight, or rather, the value of USD in gold was halved overnight.
It is still illegal for an unmarried couple to kiss, perhaps even hold hands in public, in the Saudi Arabia.
The technical legality of owning gold in this case is an interesting discussion, but I am interested in the properties and implications of an un-confiscatable store of value, which in some (limited) ways cryptocurrencies are. It keeps governments in check in a way that fiat currency cannot.
Unless you believe every single government anywhere in the world is, at all times, always "just" and "right" and "good" (for whatever definitions of those adjectives), then it is a good that some "illegal" acts in some places and some times have mitigations. And at this point in time, bitcoin provides these mitigations for the people of venezuela and iran, and has provided them earlier for the people of china.
Technically, how can they confiscate them? They cannot.
They can tax them 100% or 150%, true. And they can imprison or kill their taxpayers if they with. true.
But if I managed to cross the border from (hypothetically) malicious Sweden to (hypothetically) benevolent Liberia, with the private key in my head, what can they do about it?
They can, and money governments in the past have, deny me passage with anything of value but my clothes - it is often the case that anything of value gets taken at the border (hell, it is likely the US will take anything above $10,000 on your person unless you are very well equipped legally). But there is no technical way for them to do that with bitcoin, and for that matter to even know that you carry the private key of a $1B wallet in your head, unless they have researched it before hand -- which, at last for now, is hard to do for the entire population.
> To me it seems more like a digital crap honestly and I can’t wait for the day when it finally disappears.
Art pieces that go for >$1M feels like analog organic crap. But the value is determined by the market, not but our feeling.
> Sadly it will be in any case too late given the massive amount of energy and co2 thrown away..
I agree bitcoin is likely wasting significant energy and co2, but ...
Have your ever seen a rough estimate of the costs (in resources / energy / co2) that our existing monetary system imposes? It is certainly not free, and e.g. in a lot of places more than 1% of real-estate / energy is consumed by financial entities, many of which have usefulness to society arguably comparable to bitcoin.
I have looked for a study as such and has not found one.
(sidenote: some estimates are that 1% of global energy use goes towards clothes drying. probably provides even less value to society than bitcoin)
Afaik Bitcoin is handled the same as cash: they don't really check how much you have, but they will come down hard when you start spending more than you should be able to.
If you're comparing with the Internet, I'd say 10 years is still quite early into the Bitcoin and Blockchain space. You could say the Internet of 1999 was almost 15-20 years of development from the time TCP/IP was introduced on the ARPANET.
With the attention that Blockchain has received in the past year and the sheer number of smart people working in this field (yes there are plenty of scammers as well but you can't deny smart people are flocking to it right now), I'm pretty sure you'll be surprised of what it looks like in just another 3 years or so.
More interestingly, however, is that Internet was difficult to get and expensive throughout most of that period, not to mention the slow and expensive connection speeds of that era, all of which limited adoption substantially. Even with those barriers to adoption, however, there was plenty of demand because it was immediately useful to have email, Usenet (at least in technical fields), FTP, etc. even before the explosion of activity around the web. When the web boomed, millions of people paid (often by the minute) to surf it at 56K or less.
In contrast, Bitcoin has been available to almost anyone on the Internet for many years without anything like those barriers to adoption but most people haven't had a reason to care.
>10 years into Bitcoin there's still no reason for someone to buy in other than speculation
This is simply completely wrong, perhaps you should research the subject a little bit more.
I’m not saying it can’t be used but just that there aren’t many reasons other than speculation or an ideological stance. If I was, say, the corner coffee shop what would balance out the extra fees, delays, and lack of fraud protection?
It sounds like you are talking about credit cards and not bitcoin.
Compared to credit cards, bitcoin has extremely low fees and fast payments. The fraud protection for merchants is far superior compared to any credit card payment solution.
It seems pretty obvious that most people spreading this kind of bullshit have never actually tried to use bitcoin, and have instead built their knowledge based on forum posts by other uninformed people.
The other reason it matters is that if something is primarily used for illegal activities that'll really hold back the whole system: most businesses aren't going to offer a payment option which makes them look shady, people are going to hesitate to use have the software installed, running an exchange will be even riskier, etc.
For Bitcoin in particular, there's also the practical risk that doing something illegal in a public ledger with non-repudiation guarantees is not generally a good call.
Besides, if I lived in Venezuela or Russia, would I really want to record my black market activities in a public ledger which is hard to disavow?
Take a look at what is happening in Venezuela with bitcoin, and you will see why your statement is wrong. The fact bitcoin, an open source project, continues to flourish with some of the brightest minds in computer science ten years after its foundation speaks to its core strength: the removal of trust.
I sold an old phone through traditional fiat a few months ago, it took paypal 3 weeks to process my payment. With bitcoin, I could have been paid with in the hour.
Is anybody actually using Bitcoin as a currency in Venezuela? I can only find references to people mining excessively there because the electricity is so subsidized.
If you had said blockchain vs internet then it might have made for a marginally plausible line of reasoning. Blockchain at least has some proven real life applications that scale.
Amazon and Pets.com didn’t possess truly novel tech, to a trained eye
I don’t think truly novel tech matters much to most people.
I think ease of utilitarian life is good enough
We don’t need the energy sucking monstrosity that are the data centers we have if we looked at different models of commerce
This is just getting people to be tribal over something that appears magical but will fade out
Goodhart’s Law, Buffets Institutional imperative, and similar ideas, will win out. Human quest for novelty will end bitcoin and its tribal urges for nostalgia and fetishizing their LEGO train
Humanity doesn’t care to ogle dead men’s workshops showcasing their individual brilliance for long
You could just as easily point out that investing in beanie babies looked stupid, or any of a number of other totally failed ideas seemed stupid.
Most things fail. Your comparison adds no meaningful information and is attempting to mislead based on fallacious reasoning.
I wasn't trying to make any comparisons, since these are two very different situations.
Humans are hilarious. Anyone here old enough to remember the dot-com boom with absurd business models, that, when questioned, got the response that you obviously just don't 'get it'.
Proof of energy consuming work as currency is a sure path to environmental catastrophe.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/turnbull-directed-dta-to-stud...
“Lots of vendors were [also] coming to government and talking about blockchain.”
Not a good way to determine expenditure...
Lasing out against noise or heat I can understand, but unless electricity is being subsidized, I can't fathom the line of logic people take to justify lashing out against how someone chooses to use electricity they're pay for.
I suspect it's due to irrational hate rather than sound reasoning.
Furthermore, electricity prices do no include environmental externalities. So when you burn so much electricity for things that many people deem wasteful, those people do have reasons to get pissed and yell at you in the internet. Wellcome to modern society!
It stuck pretty hard with me. The truth about bitcoin is like beaniebabies they have no value, and despite concensus other wise could at any time be ruined by the decisions of a dozen people or so. Anyone that still believes the “it’s decentralized!!” just because the database is - nonsense has a dose of reality coming.
Do I wish I would have gotten in at $5, yea, would I have sold at $20 not $20,000 almost certainly. But it’s over, it’s a fools game now.
If all you want to continue posting emotional comments on how much you hate bitcoin, then by all means I wont stop you. but to attempt to dismiss the currency as a toy strikes me as delusional and a bit sad. Approach this issue (and any other) with a level head. Don't let emotions take control you like this.
Add the power usage, the graphic card shortage and the illegal activities and I suspect you're two to three order of magnitude larger than legitimate uses. Sooner or later cryptocurrencies will get banned, or at least fully regulated.
If you want to continue shouting, be my guest. The rest of use will continue accepting and transacting with these currencies.
The opposite way to pose this is: Cryptocurrencies have been around for 9+ years, and there has been literally 0 use for it apart from conning rubes on the internet. The important thing to ask is whether it has a purpose and has it delivered on that purpose. There's really only one theoretical purpose that it's meant to serve - being free from tyrannical government. Well that kind of worked when capital fled into it from China - but there's also been crack downs. It also doesn't explain the US fascination.
I think there comes a point where 9 years in, you have to ask: What purpose does cryptocurrency serve beyond enriching people who are already invested.
Limited scope and obviously doesn't justify the money that is swirling in crypto right now.
However, if we want digital things to be non-fungible we're probably going to need something like a block chain. Cryptokitties(as beanie-baby-esque as they are) and the implementation of the ERC-271 token come to mind.
Again I realize cryptokittes are not really a great example other than proof of concept, but imagine with me for a second a fine art market where all the art is digital, this requires a decentralized non-fungible token, maybe digital house or car keys would be another thing where we want to limit the number of people with access to the thing, again if we don't want to trust someone like say equifax, with control over that we're going to want a decentralized non-fungible token.
I realize these aren't necessarily the best examples of non-fungible assets we might want one day. However it seems absurd to me that moving forward society won't at some point demand some digital asset that is non-fungible. If that assumption holds true then some form of cypto-currency is going to be necessary to provide such an asset.
Call it gambling if you will. What is the intrinsic value of a game of blackjack? None, yet an entire industry is propped up by it.
The externalities. This very thread is about how Bitcoin is messing up power grids and will soon be responsible for a non-negligible percentage of Earth's entire power usage (and the attendant pollution). It's not consequence-free fun.
That's weird, I've been using it to buy stuff off amazon and aliexpress. Am I a conned rube?
Does that mean Visa is conning rubes as well?
How? Neither company seems to accept Bitcoin directly.
You've got some strong arms on you my friend, moving those goal posts so far so fast.
I pay with bitcoin. Stuff arrives in the mail. I am using bitcoin.
>Cryptocurrencies have been around for 9+ years, and there has been literally 0 use for it apart from conning rubes on the internet.
So...
>Yes, you are using Bitcoin
Yes, I am. I don't understand why you two are so angrily and bitterly agreeing with me.
In other words, most things don't last very long, but things that do last for a long time tend to stick around a lot longer than you might normally expect them to. Like people predicting the death of Facebook. Sure, something will probably eventually take it down or become the next Facebook. But it's been around for so long now, a betting man shouldn't bet on it happening anytime soon.
Now one might argue that on the day Myspace died this effect would predict that it would be around for yet another 6+ years (or whatever it ended up being). And to that I'd say that this is a guide for predicting future behavior, not a crystal ball that can accurately predict everything forever. And some would argue that the writing was on the wall for Myspace long before it actually went kaput anyway.
So Bitcoin has been around in some form or another for 9+ years, and withstood a huge laundry list of setbacks, tests of its security, and evolution of the ecosystem in the meantime. So it's probably going to stick around for awhile.
Meanwhile, XYZCoin and it's hot new ICO has been around for about five days, so there's nothing to suggest that it's going to stick around for very long and you should be a lot more careful about putting your money into it.
More info on the Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Even so, how much wealth in this world is based in "actual, hard currency"? How many developers have unvested options? How much of Musk's wealth is in the bank as opposed to tied up in his businesses? I think you're trying to stand up a strawman.
Yes. Definitely.
Bitcoin has become the gold standard for crypto and many people invest on the basis that there'll be huge growth in the area of blockchain technology and tokenised digital assets in the years to come.
If Bitcoin remains the gold standard for crypto then it's value will rise accordingly.
This is the problem that Buffett has with cryptocurrencies.
When you buy shares in a company you are buying claims to its future earnings at least in theory. Theory being that should the company not serve shareholder needs you can force the company to distribute the earnings/dissolve/merge etc etc. (Not going into the whole modern abomination to strip lesser shareholders of their rights to vote as Google, Facebook, Snap have done with their tiered stocks).
When you are buying Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency and yes that means ICOs too you are buying digital tokens with no claims to anything besides being a proof of having that token. It is solely 'castles in the air' which Keynes so long ago stated regarding stock market but in the stock market it is not the sole factor.
In some ways cryptocurrency is closer to regular currency but not backed by the government's mandate to receive taxes in said currency.
In other ways cryptocurrency is closer to tulips,gold,MagicTheGathering cards in that the value is based on something that some number of people agree on(ie the market).
Except cryptocurrency has no utility besides being a token, wherein tulips, gold and MagicTheGathering cards possess some utility outside being a token of exchange.
Two: I know you said >Not going into the whole modern abomination to strip lesser shareholders of their rights to vote as Google, Facebook, Snap have done with their tiered stocks
However if you want to argue you're problems with crypto (there are many) we need to make arguments using the way things are in the real world.
Given I'm a retail investor. In one universe I place a bet on Snap for 50k. In another I took that same 50k and put it into bitcoin. In both universes my bet goes bad, both asset's price per unit goes to 0. Snap goes through the process of being liquidated. Remember I'm a retail investor, I own common stock.
Now am I better off in one universe over another? I'd argue that I'm not. However if I were Warren Buffet, I'd have been much better off bought Snap as I would have preferred shares.
Buying shares is like investing 50k in your Uncle Eddies seashell harvesting venture. In return you receive 50% share in his venture that is you get half of all future seashells harvested by Eddie.
Buying cryptocurrencies is like giving 50k USD to your Uncle Eddie and getting some seashells back but that is it! There is an active market for these seashells and price goes up and down.
However you do not get to claim any more seashells produced by Uncle Eddie.
Buying common shares implies certain rights to some enterprise while buying cryptocurrencies implies nothing.
The fact that bitcoin has gone 10 years, with limited use, to me signals just how amazing the technology is. Ten years is nothing for a tech that can last 1000 (or more..).
Bitcoin’s success in Venezuela is because it is a inflation hedge. It has allowed Venezuelaeans to hold on to their savings and out of reach from the government’s ability to confisticate wealth via inflation.
It is working exactly as Satoshi intended it to.
Isn't that what Bitcoin is doing as well? Capturing people's attention as well as development resources (minds/energy) from some of the smartest people right now?
Crypto is meaningless, stock is actually owning part of a company.
That's been the 'investment thesis' for the past 5-8 years.
And people have been bidding these things up ever higher, because any day now someone's going to figure out something actually useful to do with them...
(And in the mean time if some coiners get to skim a little cream from the irrational exuberance, I'm sure they don't mind to do so.)
But where is any coherent trend line supporting claims of huge growth in the area of blockchain technology and tokenised digital assets in the years to come.?
Seems to be wishful thinking that is completely at odds with the reality of these systems.
Am I missing something?
There's a fundamental difference between buying shares of a publicly traded company on a regulated exchange and investing in bitcoin. This is quite literally comparing apples and oranges - your examples are not only different in kind, but in purpose. Also, there is a large, rather well funded government institution who aggressively works to make sure the stock market isn't subject to the sorts of abject manipulation, ponzi schemes, and other such unsavoriness that Bitcoin has been subject to. (Side note - watching the Bitcoin market is like watching the last 150 years of finance happen in 2-3 years. It's an interesting object lesson in market manipulation and why the SEC maybe isn't a bad thing).
As to Facebook/Snap being digital crap no one needs - yes. However, just because there's no physical good being created doesn't mean their value is entirely ephemeral/a financial illusion. Facebook/Snap create value by solving a problem people are willing to spend money to solve. Bitcoin creates value by...well it doesn't yet. People invest because they hope that "there'll be huge growth in the area of blockchain technology and tokenised digital assets in the years to come." That's a nice thought, but it's an assumption.
>If Bitcoin remains the gold standard for crypto then it's value will rise accordingly.
It's funny that you mention the gold standard, a standard that was dropped because of its votility, the fact that it was subject to manipulation, and the fact that it benefited some segments of the market FAR more than other.
>...many people invest on the basis that there'll be huge growth in the area of blockchain technology and tokenised digital assets in the years to come.
I think this is undeniably true. However, I think the assumption that bitcoin will be the vehicle for this growth is incorrect, or more charitably, overly optimistic. Bitcoin has accrued a lot of non-technical overhead that I think will prevent it from being used to drive these solutions - things like its association with speculation, the fact that the majority of miners are on the Chinese mainland, etc. I think the growth in blockchain technology will come from companies and individuals taking the concepts of the blockchain and using them to build products with real value (as in, they solve a problem that someone is willing to pay money to have solved). Bitcoin's value (sadly) doesn't come from the technology, which is fascinating and interesting - it comes from the fact that it's created an unregulated market with no barriers to access, which has allowed rampant speculation, incessant hype about 'the technology of the future', and a continual influx of new money to create 'value' that ultimately, has no real value.
I don't want to say to my kids, "in my day you could still buy a bitcoin for only $7k."
Significantly less than $7k worth.
I paid £30 for a framed print and that sits on the wall doing nothing (it's resale value is probably a fiver on ebay), I have even bought a particularly pleasant rock on more than one occasion, pet or not. I have no use for them. Some are sat on the side because I like to look at the impressions of the creatures who died in it. Some are embedded in my wife's engagement ring (a pointless piece of bent metal), I'm not sure I get any value for them any more since we are married.
Why do we ascribe value to anything? I have a piece of paper in my wallet with a picture of the queen on. It's just a piece of paper, yet if I take it to the shop they will swap it for food! If I take it to the bank they will swap it for a number in a database (woop). Yet if I have a big number in that database or a lot of those special pictures I become a Big Man in society.
Yet, through no fault of my own, if I wanted to swap those pieces of paper for pieces with dead US presidents on, I would get 20% less than I would have 2 years ago! It would be worse but the value of dead-president-paper is not as high as it was. Holding Queen-paper or Dead-president-paper sounds like a huge risk.
> I don't know where to begin with this Bitcoin crap
Begin by addressing the actual strengths of blockchain tech (I think the weaknesses are fairly stated in this thread).
So far, in its short life, it has provided:
1) A store of value that can be easily held on the person and that lives outside the state-corporate banking infrastructure
2) A way to buy psychoactive compounds and other medicines which have been wrongly (and violently) prohibited.
Although I have no problem with Pokemon, nor do I judge people's proclivity to collect them, I do think that cryptocurrency has already achieved something that Pokemon haven't.
edit: Ouch - quite a lot of downvotes with no rebuttal. I guess we're in an anti-blockchain mood this morning.
And that idea is pretty powerful (even if the manifestations thus far still seem to be pretty much the above as well).
If your computer could do your work for you, leaving you to do whatever you want in life, why would you NOT want that? The stupidity is that we are not all doing this, that we are not tearing down the halls of congress for cheaper power collection methods. What is crazy is that we never demand accountability from our traditional finance system, leaving us to trust a few tremendously wealthy individuals who have no obligation to the rest of society. With bitcoin, there is no trust, in fact this is even a key feature: remove the trust. I think this is an idea that is very powerful, and is something that people like.
If you are looking at bitcoin as an investment, then you are already looking at it all wrong. This isn't about investing, its about financial independence.
I would suggest you look into the fundamentals again.
So this leaves me to do what I want. I can get another job, or not. Who wouldn't want this? Its a simple idea, trade computation for social mobility. There are people doing this all over Venezuela right now.
George Soros said it best, " All of financial history is one lie and deceit after another, your job as a speculator is to get on the lie while it is being propagated and get off before everyone finds out".
I feel like a lot of folks are going to get burned but what do I know? I could be full of shit....
Bill Gates May 2018: "I would short bitcoin if I could." <-- He can. He didn't bother to look into it though.
Elon Musk also said on stage that Bitcoin is mainly for illegal use. Based on what? https://youtu.be/7WMJs1v63C0?t=2m50s
He barely knows anything about crypto, and neither do these other guys, and they talk like they do. They DO have a horse in this race, and it's clearly in fiat USD. They're not omniscient and neither are we, so let's keep our eyes and ears open.
- people trading 'coins' in the same way Pokemon / WWF kids trade cards.
- thinking this is actually a long-term 'investment' strategy (well its idiots trading with each other ...)
- to top it off, siphoning off electricity and giving a load of shitty excuses 'it could be like Seattle's.
I don't know where to begin with this Bitcoin crap; it's gotten crazy that so many naive people are into this plopping their hard-earned money into a well-functioning sinkhole.