The main issue is whether Bitcoin will be considered cash or an asset during the next recession. If it's an asset it will be sold off. The main issue I see with it ever being adopted as a currency is because of the price volatility of Bitcoin. I doubt most people are comfortable with the idea that Bitcoin can easily lose over 10 percent of its value overnight. Also there's the fact that the blockchain can only do 7 transactions a second, which is a joke in comparison to Visa which can do over 2000. And the Bitcoin community has been hostile to attempts to increase that number (segwit2x controversy) What do you think?
Interesting article from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...bitcoin-dirty-secret-of-2017-s-hottest-market ''Using estimates of electricity prices and the rising speed with which calculations must occur, Butterfill estimates the marginal costs of each bitcoin will more than double from $6,611 in the fourth quarter to $14,175 in the second quarter of 2018. At the start of 2017, the cost was $2,856. With costs rising, there’s a greater risk for miners should prices tumble.'' Should prices tumble, miners stop mining new bitcoins. Should prices tumble further, will miners earn enough to confirm transactions?
The endgame has always been that once there are no new bitcoins to reward for finding blocks, the miners would only receive the fees of the transactions included in the new block. So there are two factors. With an average of say 2,000 transactions per block, the minimum fee per transaction would have to be about USD $2 just to cover the theoretical 2018 Q2 electricity costs Butterfil estimates. The other important component is that if miners do stop for whatever reason, reducing the total hashing power, the difficulty will decrease, meaning less hashing power is needed to find a new block. This would cause a decrease in the theoretical watts per block, and a lower breakeven for miners to participate.
People are just buying it in look for earnings, most people are just keeping them for as long as they can I doubt it will be used as a regular currency anytime soon, as this makes it both volatile and not really good to set prices in
I sincerely believe that people or most of them only buy it because they are cautious or very foolish ... It is not a well thought out and considered investment.
I don’t think price of Bitcoin would survive a flight to quality, no. I was responding to @betcashrun ’s post questioning if miners would earn enough to confirm transactions if BTC suffered a significant loss in hashing power. The difficulty of finding new blocks is designed to adapt to the available hashing power so they are found at a ~10 minute cadence. With fewer participants comes lower energy cost. The concept of BTC as a low friction way to send money (micro transactions or otherwise) has failed and years of effort to fix the apprent flaws has failed to reach consensus. IMO BTC is dumb as a stored value asset without the first part.