Each coin is affected by its own scarcity. You can have 50 coins with a limited supply of 21 million and each coins price can still be affected by its own scarcity. Its the synergy of factors that contribute to a coins appeal. They will move to mining more profitable coins. Again, its the combination of factors that makes a coin appealing and gives it value.
1. It's not better than gold. A 51% attack on bitcoin would destroy everything. 2. The scarcity is pretty subjective. There is 1.6 quadrillion satoshis(the smallest unit of bitcoin) out there right now. 3. Without 3rd party intervention? Really? You need 4 partys. 1 to buy it from, then you transfer to whoever and then that person has to find a party to sell it to and when trading for cash, nobody pays/sells at spot.(and even if they do, the fluctuation could cost you 10%. 4. Expected price appreciation? The bigger fool theory? really? 5. It's been 8 years. Bitcoin missed that window. 6. I'll give you this one, but gold and silver are also alternatives. 7. Secure? I've seen tons of people lose 1000s of bitcoins, and once they are gone, there is not tracking the person. At least if someone steals your gold, they have to leave fingerprints or evidence. Someone in China can steal your bitcoins. 8. Wrong. Takes days to get set up with coinbase and they charge 1% 9. Requires knowledge. People want to know how bitcoin works...nobody will buy it if they don't know what it is and how it works. 10. Wrong. Exchanges charge fees excessively higher than stock trading platforms. From 1/8th to 1/4th of 1% Trading $50k of bitcoin can cost $125. 11. Pretty much the same with any product...if you're trading something person to person, you don't need a 3rd person in the deal. 12. This statement is a little bit like saying coke has the biggest market cap of all the beverage makers....yeah, because they were first to market. This statement means nothing in terms of bitcoins actual value. 13. Can't argue this. 14. This means nothing. It's like saying a company is good because it employs a lot of people. Bear Sterns employed 15,000+ people. 15. Dell stopped accepting bitcoin. Fiverr stopped accepting bitcoin and newegg in canada stopped accepting bitcoin just this year. This is just to name a few of the people that are stopping using bitcoin so it's not growing. 16. Many people outside the bitcoin universe still associate it with criminal behavior. You failed to mention also that bitcoin is worthless without power/internet access. If a SHTF scenario really took place, like global nuclear war or all currencies collapsed overnight, I promise you, the survivors are not going to be trading stuff for bitcoin. They're going straight to gold/silver. It's pretty obvious that the only reason to own bitcoin is to sell it later at a higher price. Everyone that proselytizes for bitcoin are only doing it to get more money into it so they can sell at a higher price later. Bitcoin is the most advanced ponzi scheme ever created. Instead of people getting paid for everyone they recruit, they get paid in higher bitcoin price for everyone that actually gets recruited anywhere. It's a pretty ingenious socialist type ponzi and when it fails, people will not understand why so many smart people fell for it.
Wow... so nobody is even attempting to put a number on it... except me, kinda... Just because it's there doesn't give it value. Like @Pekelo said, usability gives it value. Trading it on an exchange doesn't really give it a purpose, except maybe for the exchanges. What's the purpose of Bitcoin? Store of value...? Really? Don't make me laugh... The purpose is exchange medium. The storage comes from holding back on spending it... same with normal money... you save it for future spending or you spend it now. All the rest is pushing it in speculation and therefore a bubble. True value of any exchange medium is related to goods... purchasing power. One dollar buys x. That's it.... and because of that, you can put a value on anything. Bitcoin isn't tangible either, maybe some find it a cool story to say "I own x Bitcoins"... but it's just ones and zeros. And like @peilthetraveler mentions, without the internet there's no bitcoin and it will have no value at all... unlike something tangible like livestock, land, goods. So store of value sounds like a pretty meager meaning to me, because it doesn't actually create anything. Same like gold/paper money... but they are at least tangible. Also, Bitcoin is a deflationary system. Because it has a limited output (I'm conveniently forgetting about the other coins now), it has limited reach. Are you really going to use it to buy a loaf of bread and 2 bananas? That will be 0.001 BTC please... and when it's used as the only currency, it will be something like 0.00000000001 BTC. And that will create problems. It will be massively deflationary, meaning if you have 1 BTC now, you could spend it but tomorrow it will be worth 10x in goods.. so you stop buying. You will even hold off buying essentials... Money needs to grow with GDP... fact... if it never does, in the end it will be collapse economies. So, does anyone know how much in real goods/services on a monthly basis is being bought with bitcoins? Then I'm happy to give it a number...
Apologies if i came across as very pro-Bitcoin, I'm not. I've just been making so much money from cryptos lately that I'm becoming a little bit biased.
Good on you.. but that means you only trade it? Have you used it at all? If not, or hardly... I would put you in the group who is playing the game of "who holds the hot potato".
I will counter that with Do you need to be able use it when you can quickly exchange it for fiat money? http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-28/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-list-companies-stores-shops Why does currency have to be centralized and controlled by governments? I'd be cautious comparing this to things you understand in history or with other asset classes. Cryptocurrencies are a totally new phenomena and difficult for many to understand so saying it has to have certain attributes otherwise its a bubble ready to burst, may be misguided. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempoo...value-unit-of-account-and-medium-of-exchange/
Then you're just in it for the gains right? You expect it to go up relative to your fiat money. That to me sounds like it's for speculative reasons... I get it that some people want to hold something other than money in a savings account. That used to be gold... maybe now it's also bitcoin. But both gold and bitcoin don't actually have returns except for capital gains. There's no value creation. You just expect it to go up and be higher when you need to swap it back for USD. Similar with people piling into investment properties at levels where any income generated by it (rent) is not sufficient to cover costs. Those people all hold property, usually massively leveraged with mortgages, because they 'know' it will go up. But not always... and when you need money the most, you tend to be forced to sell and possibly at major losses. That's getting close to bubble territory IMO. Everybody assumes it will just go up. Whether it's gold... houses... internet stocks or BTC. To create value, BTC needs to be adopted by the general public... if that's not happening, because there's no usability... it doesn't create value. And then, since it's not even a tangible item... you've got something that's somewhere in the cloud. Let me ask you this... if you didn't have any BTC... would you buy it now? What if the price was 8k... would you buy it? Why?
Like anything new, it takes time and as long as things continue to head in the right direction, the so-called bubble wont burst. That's my final post in this thread, its been fun as always.
Yawwwnnn. Ponzi, scam. Been saying all that since day 1. Doesn't matter. Timing is everything. Buggy whips were a ponzi too. Get it? I Knew that you wood.