>Certainly it's not actual use of BTC

You have to drop the idea that scarce/finite assets can, should or need to be used as "currency".

Currencies are necessarily able to be increased in supply easily.

Even though there are debates about the actual description of central banks expanding their balance sheets as literal "money printing", this is mostly a debate about where this liquidity flows. For the wealthy and corporations who can borrow at extremely low rates, of course this means they have access to this "printing" and will then inject this liquidity into assets.

>The gains can be explained by nothing else than mania and speculation.

Sure, sort of.

But finite assets are doing their job if they rise in price (in reference to fiat currency units of account) as fiat quantities increase, and the people who have access to this fiat look for a place to put it.

This is literally the use case of Bitcoin, and so it is absolutely "being used".

But since the expansion of BTC has no flexibility (strict supply schedule regardless of economic conditions or price), unlike gold mining or central bank open market operations, it makes BTC very volatile both on the way up and on the way down.

But long term (so far) it is doing its job (of absorbing expanding fiat liquidity and supply).

> You have to drop the idea that scarce/finite assets can, should or need to be used as "currency".

Sure, but the whole premise that Bitcoin is an asset is that it has theoretical use as currency. There are plenty of other things which are limited in quantity and fungible which nobody is paying $30k for because nobody believes that they are future of money.

From a podcast I listened to, Michael Saylor does not have "future of money" in his investment thesis at all. He doesn't see this as currency. Instead, he sees bitcoin as something more like gold, but much easier to move around (and across borders), easier to audit, easier to liquidate, etc.

That this is not what was in the original bitcoin whitepaper doesn't seem to have stopped him.

No. BTC is a store of value.

Why does the supply need to increase? Bitcoin can be subdivided to 100,000,000 times. If the value of one satoshi gets too high to be a practicable then a change can be introduced to make smaller units possible. This is like a stock split.

BTC has no intrinsic use as a commodity; its value is as much on faith as any fiat. Perhaps more so, since it lacks the force of a state to support it and defend its use as a currency.

Sure, some folks purchase narcotics and other folks send money to Venezuela with it, but the vast majority of BTC holdings are playing their part in a multi-level marketing scheme for tech nerds. Every schmo who pumps the price with their fractional purchases pads the value of the whales' holdings.

>The gains can be explained by nothing else than mania and speculation

And almost 22 billion fake tether dollars injected into the space.

Could you expand on this? I've heard many times that tether is what underlies a lot of the infrastructure of bitcoin trading on exchanges and that the company responsible for backing them is particularly unclear about what's going on and likely engaging in fraud.

As someone who is an amateur looking in, could you help fill in the holes in this picture? Why do we need tether? Why does it matter if tether is not backed 1:1 by USD? If the fraud really is so obvious and impactful, why 1) isn't BTC tanking and 2) why aren't there charges filed against the company?

>why aren't there charges filed against the company?

There are, it's currently under investigation, lookup tether/bitfinex new york court case.

Tether is needed as many exchanges cannot trade in USD so need a crypto-substitute in a form of a 1:1 dollar equivalent stable coin.

Not being backed matters because it means a single company can essentially print infinite money and buy up crypto, leading to fast price increases, just like the one we are seeing right now. When you see $30000 price tag on a bitcoin you don't know what percentage of it is actually fake USDT dollars. Right now it doesn't mater as you can exchange usdt for usd 1:1, but one day the music will stop and a "bank run" will happen, which will expose a giant hole and a real price of btc, collapsing the whole scheme.

>why 1) isn't BTC tanking

My current theory is that they co-opted a lot of exchanges, if you read their website https://tether.to/ they admit that they are not backed by USD and mention "loans made by Tether to third parties" which sounds like they give exchanges billions of dollars for IOUs. So exchanges get free billion dollar loans and in turn tether can print more billions and trade it for real money on bitfinex which they own.

The Gist is that Tether is a cryptocurrency that is supposed to trade at 1:1 USDT:USD. Every tether (their currency denomination) issued is theoretically backed by 1 USD. In 2017, Bitcoin prices soared in large part to the fact that so many people were trading tether for Bitcoin. It turns out that Tether may have arbitrarily issued more USDT than USD they have on hand. Therefore, the buys of bitcoin were essentially fake - trading $0.75 USD worth of tether for $1 of Bitcoin (a Tether lawyer said that Tether only had 75% of the cash necessary to back their supply of USDT).

I'm not sure how it's supposed to affect current prices, however. Tethers are still around, and as far as I know, they have not submitted to an audit, but 1 USDT is still trading for 1 USD.

> Tethers are still around, and as far as I know, they have not submitted to an audit

They promised to produce documentation that should shed significant light on the situation by January 15 of this year [0]. In recent days, they have issued up to $800M tokens a day [1].

Which either means that everything is going just swimmingly, or that somebody is stuffing a few more suitcases with cash while heading for the airport. We may soon find out.

[0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/ny-attorney-general-expects-d... [1] https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter/status/134612804290579251...

> Why do we need tether?

You only get taxed on gains when you transfer coins to "real" currencies like USD... so you can use Tethers instead and buy Bitcoins back after a drop

Not true. Converting from BTC to ETH is a taxable event, for example.

So if I trade fifty $100 cars for a $5,000 car, my income need to be taxed also? How does that work?

What if I transfer from a Bitcoin wallet to another Bitcoin wallet?

For the first question, it depends if you bought the fifty cars for $100 each, or if your basis is less than that. Cost basis is key here. And no to the second question.

The IRS has designed crypto as a property, so you are subject to paying capital gains (or claiming capital losses) whenever you sell, convert, pay or earn. Converting one crypto to another (or to USD) is a taxable event, while transferring BTC in one wallet to another wallet is not (since you keep the same property). Further details at https://www.coinbase.com/bitcoin-taxes#paytaxes.

If you sell a car for more than you bought it for, you do owe taxes on that. https://www.carvana.com/research/2020/03/what-to-know-about-....

> while transferring BTC in one wallet to another wallet is not (since you keep the same property).

It is not since it is a different private key...

It's considered the same as an in-kind transfer for stocks from one broker to another.

Again, the understanding of "property" is evolving in this environment, and there are areas of regulatory uncertainty (such as synthetic assets from staking collateral in money markets). However, transferring from one wallet to another is pretty safe territory.

That's an implementation detail in service to controlling value on the ledger. Moving it around does not change that it represents ownership of a quantifiable amount of BTC, unless you sell it or trade it.

Tether will be replaced by other stablecoins, so this isn't nearly as big a deal as many people will claim.

Supply shock. Take a minute and read about S2F:

https://link.medium.com/IeD1uR5y5ab

>The gains can be explained by nothing else than mania and speculation.

This was always the case for Bitcoin. Why would ever use it as a currency when its value can swing +/- 20% in a single day, that would be ridiculous.

The hypothesis is that its value will stabilize eventually. Many are using it as a store of value to resist government induced inflation.

Whose?

Bulls trot out the "Bitcoin to $1M" trope all the time, that hardly seems stabilized to me.

My guess is you have no idea of the underlying dynamics because you haven't done your research before deciding for yourself and stating confidently "can be explained by nothing else than..."

Here are a couple of threads describing the dynamics in play. Feel free to agree or disagree after reading but, contrary to your statement above, these can explain the price increase:

https://twitter.com/Croesus_BTC/status/1319734166557081600 https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1143070383261638656

Here's Lyn Alden, regarded by many to be one of the best macroeconomic thinkers working today (who is now very bullish on BTC), playfully echoing the same idea from above:

https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/13458545139457065...

And, just in case the tone of Lyn Alden's tweet confuses you about the caliber of thinker you're encountering here, this is a recent article of hers with relevance to BTC macroeconomically:

https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

And another covering several BTC misconceptions:

https://www.lynalden.com/misconceptions-about-bitcoin/

As I started: I believe you have not done your research to understand what you're looking at. This would be an excusable situation 5 years ago, but the BTC space is now teeming with high quality, pre-digested material that you can use to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding.

I believe you'll regret your hubris...sooner rather than later.

> regarded by many to be one of the best macroeconomic thinkers

By whom? She doesn't seem to have a wikipedia page.

I follow a lot of macroeconomic and investment personas on Twitter and in the past 2 years Lyn Alden has been a rising star. But she is still young and fairly new so it will take a while before you see her more often on CNBC.

Holding BTC is a use case.