Crypto is starting to feel like really dirty money. From the environmental aspects of mining it, to it's primary use of buying/selling black market stuff. I can't buy into it without thinking I'm helping some human trafficker get filthy rich.
The economics of Bitcoin force miners to pursue the cheapest energy, ie stranded/waste energy & renewables. Bitcoin mining operations are portable... El Salvador just started mining it with Volcano energy. As the buyer of first & last resort, Bitcoin will drive renewable energy development and harvest wasted gas flaring/etc. It will help stabilize the grid since miners can turn off when demand peaks or supply dips, which will be increasingly important as the grid shifts towards renewables. It's far from "dirty".
The black market mostly operates in US Dollars, not crypto, and international banks launder 1000x more criminal money than crypto (you'd have to be a fool to put your money laundering transactions on an immutable public blockchain lol)
The true use cases are starting to be realized, like in El Salvador 1/4 of their GDP comes from remittances, which are now sent instantly over the Bitcoin Lightning Network bypassing the absurd Western Union fees.
But with Bitcoin in particular the transactions are so slow and so expensive that in order to use it as currency you actually do need a trusted third party application running on top of it. So that advantage goes away.
The Lightning Network sends Bitcoin instantly and nearly free, in a trustless way. A lot of people will probably end up using custodians, but you don't have to, and the fact that you don't have to will help keep the custodians honest (kind of like having FU money gives you a lot of leverage, even if you don't quit your job).
Over time, coins fall down drains and paper bills get destroyed. Bitcoins wallets are locked and the coins in them lost, no? Someone dies and doesn't share their credentials with family, and those Bitcoins are forever lost from circulation. So in either case, with no new 'money' being made, over time the available currency shrinks. Eventually, isn't that currency going to die? Who could accept USD if there are only a few million dollars worth left in existence?
Bitcoin is infinitely divisible. Right now the smallest unit is a satoshi, which is 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin, but it'd be trivial to add more zeroes after the decimal point with a soft fork to make it even more divisible. People losing Bitcoin just increases the value of other Bitcoins, it has no effect on utility for other participants.
Just b/c something has a huge market cap doesnt mean its not a house of cards - see enron. I just fundamentally see no value in this sector and mostly a bunch of talking heads trying to get rich quick.
There's about $17 trillion that's currently invested in negative-yielding bonds, talk about a house of cards.
Betting long on a transformative technology like Bitcoin seems almost safe by comparison.
As a monetary technology Bitcoin is superior to gold/fiat across multiple dimensions:
-portability - transactions are instant & nearly free over Lightning (much cheaper than Visa), and final settlement occurs every 10 minutes on the blockchain (vs several business days for banks)
-verifiability - counterfeiting is impossible
-divisibility - each coin can be divided into as many fractional subunits as necessary
-durability - bitcoins never expire or degrade
-permissionless - there are no gatekeepers
-censorship resistant - transactions can be made peer-to-peer globally with no counterparty involvement
-fixed monetary policy - nobody can debase the currency. The founding fathers instituted the DEATH PENALTY for debasing the currency. They understood its importance. How the mighty have fallen. There's nothing modern about Modern Monetary Theory... history is full of empires debasing their currency and then collapsing.
I'll be back to say I told you so I'm 10 years. Nothing but rampant speculation in this market. Admitted by those here.
This is you right now:
Paul Krugman 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”