Excellent explanation! And to examine the other side, bear market cycles that start a crash of over 75% on btc is a change in the demand dynamics, i.e. Nov 2021 - Dec 2022, Fed tightening of liquidity, and a global central bank follow-the-leader timeline Money is medium of exchange and store of value (also a unit of account) I'm from the US and (whole family, wife and kids) have moved to Asia for over a year Let's break it down, in the US, what do you use for paying goods and services (i.e. coffee, Chipotle, air fare, hotel, groceries, rent/mortgage, a sports bet amongst friends, a haircut)? 90% of the time, when I was living in the US, I used a credit card and I'm going to assume that most of you were the same. I carried cash but not much when I was in the US, unless going to a casino Except for rent which was bank ach, and Zelle/Venmo/PayPal for peer to peer transactions So to break it down, 90% of fiat transactions were on fiat-credit form, Visa/MC/Amex/Discover, (paid off online before statement) I switched to Aqua wallet for Layer 2 wallet for bitcoin (Lightning and Liquid), it's a custodial wallet, but non-kyc, I don't put much in there, but it's important to notice the 100 usdt This wallet can instantly convert between btc, LN btc, Liquid btc and usdt, so an exchange built into the wallet, very nice! Within a short distance of where I live, I've seen the logo/banner - Bitcoin accepted in some stores/coffee shop, but I've been in Asia over a year and have never used bitcoin as payment 90% of the goods and services I listed are settled with local fiat currencies using digital fiat wallets, QR payments is big in Asia, also good for p2p transactions No credit card payments, except once I accidentally used Amex linked to Google Pay when I did NFC payment at a restaurant thinking it would prompt me to use one of my local digital wallets [I have 3 credit cards that have been closed already for no activity, 0 balance, just received an email from a Visa CC that they will charge me $99 annual fee unless I use the card before so and so date, and another MC credit card that will be closed in a month or so unless I use it, I basically just ignore them, the annual fee, is ok, account closure is ok, too] ---------- So, let's break it down, btc I never used for payments in the US or in Asia (except tradingview subscription, lol, and lifetime netflix/hulu/hbo max/cnbc pro subscription, lol) In US, CC debt-based fiat is the norm In Asia, digital cash fiat is the norm (or even physical cash, but I do not like physical cash, I carry around usually $100 worth of local fiat currencies, but mostly I use for tipping) How is this related to crypto and Tether usdt? The screenshot above shows crypto assets that I can convert to local fiat in less than 5 minutes, so by extension, they are digital cash (local) fiat Any crypto asset that is not a stable coin, i.e. usdc or usdt, are a form of money that is a store of value When people are posting that a failure of Tether means a crash of bitcoin and all cryptos, I would disagree, but I do not wish for Tether to fail so it can be proven I'm actually short Tether usdt at the moment, the screenshot shows over 26k usdt I borrowed against my crypto collateral, if Usdt goes to $0 or close to it, I'll benefit If Tether fails, can switch to Usdc (owned by the banksters Goldman Sachs/Circle/Coinbase), if Usdc and all stable coins are shut down, we'll switch to pure crypto assets for store of value that can be converted at exchanges to local fiat currencies No, we don't give our funds to Tether or Circle, we just use dexes we can swap between other crypto assets to stablecoins and back, but if no stablecoins, we just use other crypto native assets, Sol, Eth, Wif, Btc, and 10's of thousands of other crypto assets If the nocoiners want to educate themselves, actually use cryptos in native form, transact with dexes/smart contracts It's the greatest revolution in our lifetime, but you would not accept this until 5-10 years from now when bitcoin is way over $1,000,000/btc Your children and grandchildren will wonder how you missed all of these
On that note, here's a snippet from (Bloomberg) yesterday, last paragraph:- "Separately on the new Odd Lots podcast today, Tracy Alloway and I spoke to Hiten Samtani, the founder of ten31 Media about the world ultra-high end real estate in places like Miami, NYC, Aspen, Dubai and elsewhere. At the points that billionaires are paying for premium homes, these price points bear no real relationship to the actual cities where they exist, and instead are more like pieces in a global game of billionaire oneupmanship. In fact, you could argue that the high price points -- units that can go for over $100 million -- actually serve distinct economic purposes. One is simply ego, which is kind of obvious. If it's a big deal to you to splash out more than your rival, then you want a higher price tag. But also expensive real estate serves as a nice wealth sink. If you want to spread $1 billion worth of housing purchases around world (so that you have $1 billion globally distributed across various legal environments) then it's easier to do that with 10 $100 million homes than 1000 $1 million homes). To some extent, I think of crypto the same way, where the higher the price point in some ways makes the asset less expensive. If Bitcoin is trading at $62,000, it's probably not that hard to park $1 million in Bitcoin. On the other hand, were Bitcoin still trading at $6, then it would have been extremely difficult to park $1 million in it without dramatically moving the price, getting all kinds of slippage etc. Thus, ironically, the more expensive the coin, the cheaper -- at least in some sense it is -- to use it as a wealth preservation vehicle (which is supposedly how it gets used)."
Bitcoin is a Veblen good, the more expensive it is, the more desirable it becomes Which is why the most difficult time to buy bitcoin is during the bear market The toxic naysayers were posting celebratory schadenfreude when they should have been loading up when btc was below $20k for many months Hodlers are not perfect, we suffer the pain of bear markets, but choose to focus on other things
Reminds me of the joke about two Russian oligarchs who meet on the street. The first guy says, "Hey, nice tie. How much?" The second guy says, "Thanks. $5,000." The first guy replies, "You're a fool. You could have bought the same tie for $10,000 across the street."