Honestly after reading this thread last few days, I think that Bitcoin being a collector’s item in the future is a more plausible scenario than being a universally recognized value unit.
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Ok, let’s say all the retail FOMO “investors” leave Bitcoin and long-term institutional “investors” adopt it. Let’s also say the current price is 1 BTC = USD 100’000.
Why would institutional “investor” x ever pay institutional “investor” y more than USD 100’000 for 1 BTC?
Currently people buy BTC, because they believe to find someone who is willing to pay more for it and with all the FOMO “investors”, they always found someone sooner or later. But why should the value ever go up otherwise? There’s no good being produced, no intrinsic value, just supply and demand.
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Well, looks like the "big bullrun of 2021"was fueled by the same money in loops of leverage from ponzi to ponzi. This is why we went parabolic and now are dropping like a stone.
The baseline i take away is:
- There is no way to generate yield on or with BTC
- BTC is not a productive Asset
- Always ask yourself what is the token utility - if there is none the value is the same
- Holding Sttablecoins is always a chance lo lose 100% and gain 0
- The highs are always higher than anyone expects, so are the lows
- There is no shame to offer products with crypto for any company if they make money off it (JP Morgan, ETF, any trade based product where there can be made money off fees)
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Like paleocurrency (tooth, shellfish, feather), gold or fiat, there is intrinsic value : trust, standardization, liquidity and scarcity (oops, sorry fiat)
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Have any of the proponents of BTC on this forum previously owned gold as an asset class? Or talked to someone that owns gold?
The situation feels like when IT at work spend millions to develop what they think is a cool technology but it never gets used because they didn’t bother to validate the idea with customers
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The amount of bad takes by people who don’t even understand the most basic use case/technology is… Staggering…
Why purchasing with btc:
No middleman, instant settlement. Why would a shop continues to pay visa/mastercard when they can get instant settlement for free even on a Sunday.
No intrinsic value:
What the value you put behind trust, mathematic and physic? Do you know what’s your government and central bank will do next quarter? I know what bitcoin will do for the rest of my life.
Not a store of value:
What’s your time horizon? If it is short term, you are mixing up emergency fund and store of value. And for the gold bugs, have you seen the news from Uganda this week 
?
No adoption:
… Are you even for real 
they talk about bitcoin in the news Every. Single. Day.
Last time I check El Salvador was at 20% adoption. Do you know how many companies would kill to get 20% market share in a year…and country/state/city adoption is happening, Lugano is a good one. Actually countries start to compete to attract capital from this industry, it is not going anywhere
“NFT is useless”:
NFT is not a jpeg, we are just scratching the surface, especially in the media industry. Don’t you want a piece from your favorite artist? And no you can’t do that we a centralized database, especially when you attach smart contracts to your nft. If you say this, it just means you don’t understand either.
Government will ban it:
Like in China, where ~20% of mining is still happening, so effective
All transactions are public:
Yes, and they are anonymous… A simple Google search will show you how to purchase and sell in a non-kyc way. Just don’t be that intellectually lazy
I am probably missing a few more bad takes.
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I am happy if you are happy.
Those points have been discussed over and over we don’t need a repeat here. You wont change your opinion and i wont change mine.
I own some btc, and some eth, but i’m highly skeptical of any future valuation. There is in my opinion no real “need” for btc (yet). If we go parabolic, nice…
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If their products were forced onto people by the government, then 20% would not really sound like a success.
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Merchants would love to get rid of the 3.5% merchant discount rate charged by visa/mastercard/amex, but they won’t.
Visa/Mastercard benefit from classical network effects.
As long as I, as a user, fear that I might need my Visa card to purchase something because I am not sure if other means of payment will be available (let’s say, renting a car abroad, or purchasing plane tickets), this will be my default means of payment. Sure, it might be wrapped into other applications like Google pay or Apple pay, but at the end it is all rooted towards Visa/Mastercard rails.
Merchants use Visa/Mastercard because they know that’s what buyers mainly use.
Buyers use Visa/Mastercard because they know that it works and will be accepted anytime, anywhere in the world.
It’s not enough to build a better mousetrap, you have to convince everybody at once to switch network. That’s a chicken and egg issue. Buyers won’t use BTC a lot because not a lot of merchants offer it. Merchants won’t offer BTC because they know that most of their clients use Visa/mastercard anyway.
Oh and btw, the Visa/Mastercard network supports instant settlement, even on sundays. it’s just that payment processors (who are plugged on the network) don’t offer all the feature…
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All these points have been discussed above. Just replying to your first point:
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have you talked to any real shopkeepers? The ones in El Salvador don’t want to transact in BTC because it is volatile, same for their customers
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if they want the instant settlement and to cut fees in the future they can get the same with CDBC - there is no added utility of BTC Vs CDBC
Funny… similar discussions were around btc price of 500 USD then 10k and so on. I suppose they will persist even at 1M price level.
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Well markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
I also think we would have the same discussions at 0, this only proves my point that we don’t need to discuss it further since no one knows. We can just enjoy the show.
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Bitcoin is about as trusted as Email with GPG signatures:
Within a small bubble of adherents, they understand they understand the technology (to at least some degree. Or at least they think they do) and trust it.
Meanwhile the average person on the street has read about all the insecurity and scams going on through email and doesn’t trust it to be secure.
As a matter of fact, Bitcoin settlement is not free.
Neither are higher-level protocols (Lightning) that add additional complexity on top of it.
And with (virtually) no people in the world receiving their salaries in Bitcoin, exchange to Bitcoin is far from free either.
You don‘t. The existence of Bitcoin forks is enough evidence to the contrary.
So is the migration from Ethereum to Ethereum 2 - one of the more noteworthy changes of protocols. Even Bitcoin’s protocol has been changed in the past.
Yes, I do. I wish they‘d perform in my own home or backyard in 3D. Some of them even did, on 3D television/cinema. Yet 3D movies have, time and again, proved to be fads.
It remains to be seen whether some virtual entry in a database err… blockchain will prove to be desirable over the long term. I doubt it.
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Again, do you have any model, to which you would anchor your price predictions for BTC? Why should 1 BTC be worth $1’000’000? Just because it’s a trustless bookeeping system? You can create an infinite number of such systems, BTC clones. So the scarcity of BTC relies on its integration in the economy, and the reluctance to integrate any alternatives.
Just because something is scarce, doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I like the used car analogy. You get fewer and fewer of Ford Ka’s available on the market, yet the price at which you can buy it keeps going down. Why? Because you have more attractive alternatives.
If a superior financial product to BTC is launched, people might opt for it and the demand for BTC dwindles and BTC becomes worthless. So I suppose BTC relies very much on constant development and making the right improvements. In a way, it’s just like a regular company taking care of its product. Do you think iPhones will be sold into infinity? I think not, because either Apple makes a couple of wrong decisions, or new technology makes them obsolete.
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Nope. Just my gut feeling. I know it’s not a good basis for such discussions in here.
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Yeah, gut feeling is not a good basis for discussions, but it is great guide for investing decisions? 
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Surely it is common 
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Game theory, if it doesn’t go to zero, it will go to infinite. Fiât inflation only will help with that (for the worst)
I am referring to a smart contracts that allows peer to peer streaming of transactions, sounds pretty neat. Not possible as far as I know with the best databases. But that’s an advanced use case, it will develop in the coming years (my bet: watch tidal moving into this space soon)
You don’t need to follow a fork, you decide with your own node, fork doesn’t mean consensus. You can now to github and fork btc if you want. On the other hand, you don’t even know what your government will announce next week. Same for your central bank (which you did not even elect).
Virtually free, and very much cheaper than credit cards.
Bitcoin requires no trust, that’s the whole point, you can verify everything
There are enough videos of real shopkeepers to see how it works…
Cdbc is a tool to control people and monstrosity, nothing to do with btc
You are right, bitcoin replaces SEVERAL middlemen more efficiently and all their features, they will become obsolete (my bet: swift will disappear in the next 5 years)
Visa/mastercard will end up integrating with the lightning network, just a matter of time. You will have the possibility to use your own node to pay in a non-kyc way or use your Visa card as usual if you don’t want to take care of your node
It was not forced. A lot of governmental programs fail all the time, I won’t call 20% after a year a failure.
BTW, there is a first short bitcoin etf launching tomorrow in the US. Go for it if you have conviction 
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Yes you can fork. But you can’t know what other forkers will decide - and what the new consensus will be, or what the majority of users and nodes will follow.
And ignoring the majority and consensus and following your own (or any niche) fork with conviction is pointless from an investment perspective - since you will lack the ability to make real-world transactions for other currencies, goods or services.
Using money that no one but you uses is using money that’s not useful.
Given the history of central bank decision-making and fiscal decision making by governments, it has arguably been more predictable and less balkanising than most popular open-source software projects.
How much?
Transactions on the Blockchain, yes.
But that’s not everything you have to trust in making transactions.
Can you trust the identity behind a certain wallet address?
Can you trust the service provider holding your bitcoin in a hot wallet for you?
Has one single bank individual/organisation ever stolen 0.5% of the total supply of one of the world’s largest currencies - to one single bank account?
How much you wanna bet on that?
Shall we make it a Bitcoin?
I’ll even sweeten the bet for you:
- You lose, and you just pay me today’s equivalent of Bitcoin. In fiat currency (USD).
- I lose and I’ll pay you one strong, hard Bitcoin.
Should be a no-brainer, if you’re convinced it’s going to be adopted and gain in worth.
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