Those who held onto a few of them like Amazon were able to retire years ago already in luxury. In any case, holders of Solana are in worse position than BTC. In one single stroke, they've lost the advantage of the Ethereum isn't Proof of Stake so we will kill it argument. As of the 15th of Sept. the consensus point has been nullified. There are only two advantages left for Sol, they are cheaper fees and faster transactions (this is arguable). The problem, is in order to get that, they had to sacrifice the security layer. Unfortunately, there is no way that a top-level world of DeFi apps and a financial banking system is going to build over an unsecured layer and dominate. And the recent downtime disasters of Sol have proven some of the fears of what will happen. Security in any financial system MUST be the top priority. Now, in addition to this, Ethereum's roll-ups keep getting faster, and cheaper, and the next two-years will have ever-increasing rollouts of data-sharing which will just close the gap even closer to Sol's only two advantages left that she can hold a candle to. Enjoy the shorts! Yet for some reason, I don't hear the bears shouting "Solana is going to zero!". Ironic, since there is a perfect case for this... The writing is already on the wall.
Well, truth be told, Amazon didn't really take off until 2015 when their web services (AWS) started making profits. So had you invested in AMZN since the 90s, that would have been an excruciatingly a long time. Plus your small fortune would have taken a severe hit during both 2000 and 2008 crashes. But I agree that, in the end, you would have been rewarded handsomely. I don't think anyone doubts the technology behind it all. Even the die-hard bears would acknowledge that the world currency will eventually converge on BTC and its derivatives. The technology is sound, but the sheer greed is unsustainable. That's what we're betting against.
1. Except it is losing it minoscule intrinsic value. Gold isn't. 2. 12 years is nothing. 3. Eventually it does. Memes can work just so long.
I thought price was important. PoW is not important if replaceable. Educate yourself otherwise it is just sad...
So now you have pivoted to years, memes and "minoscule value", a financial term I'm not familiar with. I'll just have to bow out and plead ignorance at this point.
$30! Imagine the asset you hate just went down by -80%, and you STILL are wrong by 666x that’s pekelo
Let's just back up a bit. There is so much about bitcoin and so many nuances that its stupid to try and convince anyone of anything in one post. But lets just consider the implications of proof of work vs. proof of stake. I like to work in analogies so will give a couple of example. The queen just passed away, and the next person to follow her is clearly only someone from within the family, which follows a natural order. Although much of the country isn't exactly run by the monarchy, and their role is perhaps more so symbolic, it perhaps still plays a big part for some people. Every person who gets to rule follows a proof of stake type of assignment. Those with the credentials get to choose who the next heir is (ie. credentials of birth). Contrast this with a democratic election where a candidate has to put in lots of time, effort, money, connections, etc. in order to win an election. It can be anybody, but in order to garner the most votes, you certainly have to put in lots of work (even if the work is perhaps shady via rigging an election). The point is that its not easy to do. How about the UFC or boxing. Lots of up and coming fighters like those Youtube guys are looking to score big fights without really putting in any work of earning that fight. If you want a shot at the title, why should some youtube star get to skip the pre-requite of having to fight 15, 20 or more other guys in order to show that he has what it takes to compete. How would it look if Dana White just handed a huge prize fight to some celebrity, against a guy with a record of 40 professional fights who had to work hard to get there? Maybe nobody likes my analogies, but the takeaway is that by using a system where the power to make decisions is handed to an entity simply because they have unequal distribution of votes just keeps us stuck in the current system, which is clearly benefiting less and less of society. These people cannot be trusted because the incentive structure is such that if you already have all the power, what stops you from acting unfairly? Imagine if you could log into your bank account and change your balance to whatever value you wanted? How would a system like this survive if it gets out that people are able to manipulate their balances at will? So the whole idea behind proof of work is simply that you are expending a shit ton of resources in order to earn a reward, and the work that you are doing is ensure that rules are followed. If you act according to the rules, you get the reward. Everyone works with the same set of rules and no one entity has the power to change the rules. If you don't have to put any work in earning the reward, and if the reward is earned simply by majority, then it gets far too easy for the majority to gang up together and do what they want, especially when the mechanism for changing the rules is already centralized in a small number of hands.
Slowly slowly, every single "technical ability" that Bitcon might have had is disappearing into nothing. That's why the price keep falling and it is only maintained by those professional gamblers that made a massive blunder on it. If we didn't have a huge concentration of capital on a few hands you would see the price falling to 0 in a day, exactly the same that it happened to many other shitcoins.