bmks270 said:
I just feel like most purchasers of crypto purchase it not for utility, but with the hope of reselling it for more in the future. Just feels like a manifestation of the greater fool theory. Goes for a lot of commodities, but their demand is propped up by industrial uses. Stock demand is at least propped up by profit and revenue, with the product or service products having consumer demand due to utility.
That's a big red flag for me on crypto.
I agree with this take as it relates to most alts, but it's too late to have this opinion about Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly people invested in Bitcoin cuz "it go to moon". But they're decreasing in number as a % of all HODLers and will ultimately cash out at some arbitrary point. It's akin to someone buying AAPL stock back in 2008 and selling it in 2009 for a quick buck, not understanding what the iPhone would ultimately do to its valuation.
In your defense, Bitcoin's primary "branding" is its price. It's a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that Bitcoin gets free daily advertising on all major news outlets based on its price. The curse is that it leads those who aren't educated to think its utility is essentially that "it go to moon". There's alot more to the Bitcoin story than that but unfortunately its not readily available. Gotta dig in a bit but it's worth your (and everyone's) time.
The idea that Bitcoin has no utility is no longer a reasonable take. The majority of domestic/international payment transfers will soon run on Bitcoin rails. Major payment/remittance networks will be forced to tap into the Lightning network or go out of business.
Money transfer/remittance networks are grossly archaic. Can't transfer funds on nights or weekends. Crazy fees to cover billions of dollars of fixed costs that Lightning has rendered unnecessary. Bank intermediaries gouge you. All running on a monetary system that doubled in supply the last two years and runs at the whim of what Jerome Powell says.
Lightning is instant, essentially free, and runs on the most predictable monetary network the world has ever known. It's game over for Western Union, Visa, PayPal, etc unless they plug in. The Bitcoin network is not going anywhere. It's about to explode.
What does that make one Bitcoin worth? To say it nicely, who cares. Just get more of it. The idea that it has a price in dollars is a strange notion to begin with, though I understand why it had to start this way. We're slowly beginning the gradual transfer from thinking about Bitcoin as an investment in terms of its USD price to being the baseline standard for all currencies/economics (real or digital) to trade against. The "price" is more like a conversion rate to a different economic realm.
That doesn't mean the dollar is going anywhere. I think that's where people get confused. It will be used as the medium of exchange/transaction/tax mechanism here and many other places around the world for a while. Weaker currencies will continue to collapse into the dollar. If anything, the dollar will get stronger in the short/medium term. It will just be running on Bitcoin rails to a large extent.
The US needs Bitcoin and Bitcoin needs the US. Bitcoin haters will disagree with that first statement and maxis will disagree with the second. But I think both are true.
The US needs Bitcoin because the digital yuan is going to be a force in international trade. The US is too far behind do create its own and doing so would bring about enormous complexities that would be much easier resolved by allying itself with the Bitcoin network. That's not to say that there could be a US digital dollar stablecoin, but that stablecoin will run on Bitcoin rails. It's also possible that the US could just get behind USDT, USDC, etc. Gensler and his pals take alot of flack from the crypto community, but he gets this.
But Bitcoin also needs the USA. The path of least resistance (by far) to a Bitcoin prominent future is in alliance with the US (at least initially). At some point ~10, 20, 30 years down the road, Bitcoin will be fully integrated and the market will wonder why we even need USD, but that's a conversation for another day.
In the meantime, gradual Bitcoinization will continue to take shape. In the next couple years, the Bitcoin network will become an essential part of our financial/transfer/remittance infrastructure. That will lock in its legitimacy to the masses. Only the most dogmatic anti-Bitcoin religious will hold out.
Digital wallets around the world will hold a person's home currency (for daily transactional use) and Bitcoin (for international store of value...relative to that home currency). Those of us privileged in the western world will be late movers to this wallet structure, but billions of people around the world are flocking/will flock to it. And they should. We will too eventually.
USD derivative assets (ie common stocks, bonds, commodities, property, etc) will gradually lose their value relative to Bitcoin and its derivative assets. That will be a perfectly natural market reaction when one currency doubles in supply every couple years and is subject to the whims of academic bureaucratic bozos while the other runs like a perfect mathematical clock. The focus with Bitcoin will ultimately be on the tech and underlying fundamentals relative to the USD alternative. Not the price.