By the time you die Bitcoin will be worth god knows what. Historically speaking, Bitcoin is the greatest investment vehicle ever created though, nothing comes close. A $1,000 investment in bitcoin in 2010 say at $0.08 a coin would’ve netted you roughly $500,000,000 today and much more at its peak. Crazy stuff
It was an amazing asset to speculate a few years ago, but it'll only hold value for as long as people agree it has.
Unlike other crypto, it's completely useless as a day-day currency and its algorithm makes it very prone to manipulation -- at least more than any of the other big cryptos.
Tbh I don't see Bitcoin as a long-term investment and neither should you. It has an expiration date, it's just a matter of when not if.
At this point it’s simply an investment vehicle with the allure of stellar returns. Highly speculative like you mentioned, but that’s what traders love. They need volatile markets in order to profit off of the difference in price.
It’s tough to say whether or not Bitcoin will wither away into a worthless asset. Many large investment firms are starting to expose themselves to this risk in the hopes of higher returns for their investors. Will this influx of institutional money prop up the price for the next few years? It remains to be seen but it’s definitely something to consider.
By no means is investing everything in crypto assets a wise choice. No investment vehicle is as robust (in my opinion) as the S&P 500 etf (SPY).
By the time I die, Bitcoin will have faded into irrelevancy, having been outmatched several times by other get-rich-quick schemes, all of them providing ample investment opportunities, but none of them providing any use.
Despite being touted as a revolutionary currency, people overwhelmingly only trade Bitcoin to speculate on its value. Nobody cares what Bitcoin does; they only care about what Bitcoin is worth. To some extent this applies to all speculated investments, but even gold, stocks, fine art, and Beanie Babies have some utility, where as Bitcoin largely does away with pretending.
If you regularly use Bitcoin for buying groceries or something, then that puts you in the minority. But also, traditional currency would probably have been better suited to the job due to better ubiquity, stability, and regulation.
But even putting all this aside, it’s worth asking whether the high ecological and human cost of cryptocurrency justifies the novelty of making purchases with it. Traditional currency has a social cost too of course, but per-transaction it’s negligible in comparison to Bitcoin’s.
Tl;dr: it isn’t worth burning acres of rainforest for the novelty of buying pizza with Beanie Baby Bucks.
You talk about crypto currencies as if they were around for decades and bitcoin is the state of the art. Definitely differenciate between crypto currencies in general and bitcoin. In the early days neither transaction cost in fiat nor in power were close to what they are now. Bitcoin as pure currency is definitly not the answer for ever day to day transaction but if you were to move large amounts of money across the world for a few bucks it is worth it. Other cryptos do the day to day job way better because they were designed for it. There are cryptos that dont cost fees at all and use less power than an LED in a second.
Td;dr it is worth exploring the world of cryptocurrencies and setting aside prejudices.
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u/King-Of-Throwaways Aug 15 '21
Like they said, it’s Bitcoin all over again.