Bitcoin is 21 century tulip bubble. Stay away as far as possible.
You're welcome to do that, though it's certainly not behaved as a weird "one and done" bubble. One might point to the various tech and housing bubbles as well, but... bubbles are mostly obvious in retrospect. Or, around the time the mainstream media starts going on about how they can't possibly fail, new normal, etc. That's typically a good time to diversify out some.
It can't be used as store of value. Its value is not stable.
It's certainly more volatile than metals, but it really depends on what one is looking for in a store of value. Bitcoin remains nominally dependent on a working internet, though one could certainly keep it working on alternate comms systems. But it's certainly an interestingly diversified value store for the short term, at least. It just has... quite a bit of volatility.
It's not a currency. It's a virtual commodity which is powered by wasting more and more electricity doing unproductive work. We better use that electricity to power our transportation.
"Wasting" is a value judgement. Obviously you don't think Bitcoin is of any value, so energy spent on it is a waste. Those who value a decentralized ledger without any central controls might not consider it nearly so wasteful. Certainly it's more interesting than selling ads on repackaged content...
If bitcoin becomes too powerful, world governments will take it down, just as e-gold was taken down. They can do so by cracking down miners and exchange services.
World governments can't even keep The Pirate Bay offline, and that's run by a couple of drunken fucknuts (by their own admission). You can certainly cause problems by putting screws into the exchanges, but even then, individual exchange remains, and flat out banning things rarely works as hoped for. Treating it as any other commodity in terms of exchange makes reasonable sense.
We are not going to take bitcoin in every day business transactions when it can drop 30% next week.
Yet, presumably, you do take dollars, which decrease in value on a pretty regular schedule? Not quite as volatile, but they also very rarely go up in value. A few trillion printed here, a few trillion handed out there, I mean... at some point, that starts to look like an awful lot of money.
All the stories I see about cryptocurrency fraud end with the fraud victims not having any way to be made whole.
It's a different class of assets, with different risks. If you've got a $100 in your wallet that gets stolen, it's pretty hard to get that back as well. On the flip side, it's reasonably unlikely that carrying a chunk of value in bitcoin across the country is going to be taken by police during a speeding ticket, either. Understand the asset class and act accordingly. If you value having all your assets in a centralized institution that has insurance, go for it. If you'd rather trend in the riskier waters of cryptocurrencies, go for it. Someone putting $10k in back at $200/coin in 2015 could very well be comfortably retired on that, 5 years later. Not guaranteed, but depending on where you are, the loss of $10k isn't terribly meaningful either.
In any case, I'm out of this thread. Clearly minds are made up, and there's no particular point in an actual discussion when both sides are firmly entrenched.
Or, in the spirit of meaningless assertions that this thread seems to be, "Two Bitcoins Good, Four Bitcoins Better!"
