I recently received an email from someone wanting to sell me something, of course... which said, "Buy Electroneum while you still can". So... I looked into the Crypto market and offer these observations... 1. The BIG players are Bitcoin* and Etherium. They and a couple of others are the ones to play if you're going to. 2. There are nearly 1,200 versions of "crypto-coins" available in the marketplace... total of >2 TRILLION coins (that's TREEEEELION!)... ranging in price from BTC's ~$6,000 to <$.01. MOST are not "doing well"... only a few. 3. If you want "make a killing" like the one you missed from not buying BTC 5 years ago, you're probably out of luck. That ship has sailed, never to return. 4. Anyone who wants to buy into the crypto market has TONS AND TONS AND TONS of choices... which one will others want to buy to drive the price up of the coins you buy? Odds of picking a winner are slim. Even if you buy cryptocoin for <$.01, you may be paying waaaaaayyyyy too much. (Issuers/insiders probably got theirs for $.0000000001 each.) Buyer beware!! That said, I wish I'd have known about BTC when it was available for <$.01 and had the gumption to buy it.... "water under the bridge, now", you know. OK... all you cryptocoin-philes... lemme have it. (I know, crypto is the "greatest thing EVER", and "I don't know what I'm talking about". Yada-yada-yada.) *What they have going for them... being 1st and the fame that goes with + issue limited to 21 million coins... we'll see if that isn't somehow diluted later. But for now, "party on"!
I am still waiting to cash in on my Limited Edition Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo in Stormtrooper gear 12" figures. Guess I should have saved my $50 and waited for bitcoin as the value has decreased by 25% where I bought in 1997
Gotta feel sorry for the poor sap who allegedly paid for 2 pizzas with 10,000 BTC. That's got to be the most expensive pizza in history!
You know, I've been listening to people knock BTC since the very beginning of it. "It's a scam" or "It's never going to last." or "It's going to collapse soon." are all common phrases that I keep hearing over and over again. People are just so clueless about this stuff. Meanwhile, BTC just keeps going higher and higher, year after year. The main reason that BTC isn't going away anytime soon is the exact same reason why you see so many other crypto coins never achieving anywhere near the same level of success as Bitcoin. You see, Bitcoin has always had the one thing that these other coins don't have. And what's that? A unique purpose. All of these other coins are totally useless because they have no purpose whatsoever. You can't just create a currency out of nowhere and expect it to grow in value over the long term if there's no actual use for it. Ok, so think this through for a second on your own. Ask yourself "What unique purpose does BTC have?" If you're still drawing a blank then I will ask the same question in a more direct way: BTC has always been used primarily for the buying and selling of what? The answer is the same today and it was 6 years ago and here it is: - - - - - - - - - - Drugs. Since the beginning, BTC has been used as the digital currency of the online drug trade because it provides a level of anonymity and convenience never seen before. All these other coins are absolutely useless because they don't have even have a small purpose, much less a MASSIVE purpose like BTC has. Investors in all these other crypto coins are just dumb because they don't get this one point. They see what BTC has accomplished and they think this success should be replicable by another coin by simply improving on some aspect of the system like increasing block size, or improving the mining rules, or whatever. But none of that shit matters because those coins have no purpose whatsoever. They are just shiny new things to sell investors in hopes that those investors can dump those coins to other investors later on down the line for a profit. So at the end of the day, all of these new ICO's are just pure vaporware because they simply have no usefully grand purpose at all. So that brings us back to BTC. You'll see Bitcoin collapse under two primary scenarios: People stop wanting to buy and sell drugs. The drug industry embraces another payment method at mass scale. That's it. Now, you may the see the relative value of BTC rise and fall somewhat over time, but as a currency, it's not going away anytime soon.
Tom Lee does a great job on how to value bitcoin both short term and long term. It's the best explanation I've seen yet.
The drug trade is not driving this in my opinion. It's North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc. BTC allows one to store value in a country with hyperinflation. But that is the short term driver. Long term we have an issue here. What if people want to get paid in BTC vs dollars. Say I make 10 million a year and by having you pay me in BTC, I can save 5 million in taxes. I wouldn't care how volatile the coin is if I could save 50% of my income every year. This is going to get the governments involved, or it will lead to their destruction. Now "how" they are going to do this I don't know since BTC don't exist anywhere physical. This is very deeply concerning for forward debt issuance. If the US Gov't can't pay down deficits via forward taxation then interest rates could go parabolic. Which ironically could send BTC even higher.
Here's the thing. Not even sure if BTC is actually anonymous anyhow, but even if it is.... Governments everywhere, as usual , slow as shit, and behind the curve in regulating. Takes them a decade before they crack down on anything. How long did the penny stock manips last before the SEC locked them up? Same here, takes forever for the inevitable. As for drug trade driving the price, I think its more money laundering and pure manipulation by a few strong hands. But like porn and the internet , drugs was the first mover.
Although I'm just casually following this BTC craze, if what I'm reading in the past few weeks about how it is traceable is actually true, then it may very well be that the government is very happy to see its continued use as they build up evidence, especially if its being used mostly for drugs as @Baron suggests. In the past few months we have had a few hacking cases revealed, and in many of those cases, there was a fairly significant delay in this info reaching the public because the authorities enjoyed having the lead in terms of knowing about it, and being able to exploit/follow it, without everyone running away from it since it hadn't yet been exposed. I imagine that BTC might follow a similar path. For the moment, BTC doesn't pose a threat to the USD or the IRS being able to collect taxes. So for the time being, the authorities are more than happy to follow along, collect data, and when the time is right to bring it to an end, they will, and then go about doing something about all the bad guys that have been implicated.