although, now that i think about it: my best trade was when I sold ETH for BTC when ETH was at >2k 
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Just to put some data, ethbtc was at a all-time high in 2018 at 0.11, it is now at 0.03. If somehow eth catches on btc and goes back to this ath, eth would be worth $5â800 (at current rate) . I donât see that happening with the current state of the market.
Iâm very intrigued by the state of mind of people buying altcoins. I wonder what the split is between people truly believing in the idea and the developer team behind a coin, thinking that it will overtake BTC and ETH, as opposed to the people that throw a few darts buying some altcoins to go along with their holding in the two major coins hoping for a moonshot.
For people in this thread with such positions, how carefully do you select the coins you buy, and how much do you truly believe in them? This is not in any case a judgment either way, just simple curiosity.
Do you know by any chance if people are working on tools that use a combination of behavioral psychology and blockchain analysis to try to determine the proportion of the two profiles described previously? I donât know if they are able to use buying timing, exchange velocity or any other metric to get a working hypothesis.
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⊠let the flame begin 
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Itâs not a topic that interests me much.
Iâm aware of the work required to have an opinion
Enough said. 
Iâll let the others change your mind, as I havenât done the crazy amount of work above. 
(but some very smart people, whose podcasts I have linked around BTC, would disagree with you)
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Perfect timing. I was just looking into NFTs with disbelief yesterday. Iâve also been thinking about the credit aspect. If there is a finite supply of coin, lending and borrowing cannot work as they currently do. Some might argue that the current system is broken but that answer is too simplistic.
Ironically, Iâm one of the greater fools who just bought their first BTC and ETH.
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Good luck, and I sincerely hope you find a greater fool yourself!
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It works, by mostly reinventing a few millenia of banking and finance. Youâll have a deposit account at your BTC bank at which point youâd hold BTCb and no longer BTC (thatâs my understanding that the vast majority of people donât hold in their own wallets).
Similarly people might get a loan in BTCb. As long as people keep faith in coinbase/etc. the system kinda works, itâs similar to how things worked with the gold standard. Major crisis or flow imbalance might trigger a devaluation of BTCb though (similar to how things were with the gold standard).
Edit: it would definitely suffer from all the downsides of the gold standard, the gold standard was short lived for a reason
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Thanks, the key is to not put too much money on it. I will have less than 5% of my liquid assets placed on the âglorified linked listâ (I laughed at that one).
First thought I had after the read : The boomer is strong with this oneâŠ
I canât decide if the tone of the article is humoristic or if you are geniunely mad at Bitcoin. Mad like a person who would have sold all of his stack in 2015 when the price was around 250$.
Donât get me wrong, you made some valid points! But some others are just plain wrong imho.
Yes, Bitcoin is not the P2P cash system that the white-paper promised, FOR NOW. Today BTC is more of a commodity. Why would you even try to pay your cup of coffee with your âe-gold barâ and pay 20$ in the process? It is a very slow system indeed. But itâs also why it is so secure. I think you also forgot to mention that people are working on layer-2 solutions like the Lightning Network that might enable us to also easily use it for micro-payments in the future. And what about paying a 20$ fees in order to have 100 millions $ worth of coin transfered in a trustless way and still in a matter of minutes ? Still quite a feat no?
I also donât get it when you talk about store of value. Itâs all fun and game typing this while living all comfy in a country like Switzerland. But even if you donât believe in the risk of hyperinflation in Western countries, would you have say that if you were living in Argentina? Or Turkey? Or in any other country with a strong and corrupt State like Bielorussia or China?
And why the rant on monetary policy? The impression I got from your article is that, for you, if Bitcoin cannot replace every other currencies in existence and totally eradicate our classical banking system then itâs totally trash. No in between possible in sight.
High concentration of mining power in China? Yes, it would be better to have it spread more. Will probably change in the future I guess. But what one could get with a 51% attack is still limited (you cannot rewrite the history and steal coins from the plebs). What they could do with this is mostly double spending. But miners in this position would still have zero incentive to destroy the confidence people have in Bitcoin since they would gain far less than what they would lose by doing it. For me the real threat would be if the government of China decide to seize enough mining farm at the same time and start to mine empty block to empty block in order to stop the proper functionning of the network. But 1) It would cost an unfathomable amount of money to run this scheme for more than a very short period of time and 2) Bitcoin is heavily scrutinize by third parties and this kind of attack would be detected quite rapidly. And extreme actions by the community would surely be taken.
And yes, I can still point a gun at you and steal the gold nuggets youâre hiding at home or in your pocket.
PS: Computers were also hard to use before people started to create nice user interface. We should let some time to crypto to improve in this matter.
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I think the argument against using BTC as a store of value is valid, even in contries with big financial issues.
After all a store of value is an asset which might have no expected return, but needs low volatility in its real value. BTC certainly doesnât qualify for this even in the worst countries, youâd better off holding USD.
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Agree about the volatility. But to me itâs a temporary thing IF the store of value case really turns to reality for Bitcoin (by that I mean a world where it becomes the norm to hold just a single digit % of BTC in a portfolio). Its marketcap would be multiple trillions by that time which would substansially decrease its volatility.
Would it be safer holding USD today if one lives in a shitty country (should the government in place still allow you to buy some from local banks) ? Sure.
Better? BTC chart disagree (for now).
So many words⊠I could not read everything, but at least you did not compare bitcoin to a tulip.
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Iâm sorry but the BTC chart completely supports the thesis that itâs not a better store of value than USD for example.
The only point of a store of value is that it doesnât decrease or it does so very slowly(regardless of the upside).
BTC has lost more than 20% twice since the beginning of the yearâŠit had a lot of upside runs as well, but thatâs a whole other point.
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what would be the purpose though? single digit % wonât really change anyoneâs financial situation.
Volatility is not enough to define whether it is a good store of value, it is just one element. Check this Investopedia post that compares gold, usd and btc.
Depending on the weight you put behind each elements, you can decide which asset is right for you as a store of value.
It is an asymmetric bet, just like investing in an early stage startup. If you lose 1% of your wealth, thatâs probably okay, but if it does x10, it was well worth the risk. Unlike startups, anyone can invest in bitcoin, it is not reserved to the wealthy.
The OP was talking about an hypothetical post-volatility time (where BTC is truly a store of value), not about early stage crypto investing.
Yet the very first point in the chapter âbitcoin challengesâ of that post (which tries to evaluate what makes a good currency) is:
âOne of the biggest issues is Bitcoinâs status as a store of valueâ⊠
Yeah, Iâm kind of surprised myself.
I donât usually have such strong positions, but on cryptos I do, and Iâm not happy about it.
And you know what pushes me toward such extreme positions?
People like you. Fanatics. I have an allergy for fanaticism and other "ism"s.
People whose first words when hearing someone not adoring this worthless crypto crap are âOk Boomerâ or âyou must be angry because you didnât make a lot of money like we all did!â
Wow, congrats!
You know how many kids with 500 Euro that â5x-ed their money!1!â into 2500 Euro Iâve met that are telling me that I must be tormented by the missed opportunity? Thousands.
Well, if that answers your deep question, I have a Net Worth thatâs approaching 1.5M and in March alone it went up (ok, still 3 trading days to go) by 57k. Do you think Iâm suffering for the missed opportunity of âinvestingâ in this thin air that impacted ZERO in terms of technology in our current lives so far, trying hard in practice since 2008 and in theory since 1982?
I reassure you, I donât give a fuck.
Well, I actually give a fuck. Stop destroying the planet to fuel your useless Chinese hash calculating machines, please.
This is the most absurd thing humans have done so far.
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