Bitcoin is the most secure monetary and payment network (clearinghouse, value settlement) that has never been hacked or stopped since inception It is more valuable than Visa and Mastercard combined It has surpassed the yearly transaction value of PayPal years ago Its network effect is so powerful that the incumbents who used to shun it are now forced to adopt it into their systems, we're talking about Bank of New York, Square, PayPal, Venmo, Visa and Mastercard There are no paid employees other than the miners who earn their income in bitcoin It is open source and the software developers are not paid, neither are the over 100K operating nodes located worldwide It is still growing, and anyone in the world can purchase a piece of the stock share denominated in the 100 millionth of a bitcoin called satoshis https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bi...volume-surpasses-online-payment-giant-paypal/ https://ycharts.com/indicators/reports/bitcoin_statistics
Getting to be quite a few large investors that are believers. Probably a lot more that are invested but don't want to admit it .... yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/20/bit...at-start-of-going-mainstream-bill-miller.html
Imo, Bitcoin is trying to become a SoV, MoE, maybe a payment network. I don't think it's achieved any of those things today but then again it didn't even exist 13 years ago. Did anyone really think it would achieve those massive feats overnight? What it has done in terms of growth and adoption in its short 12 years is nothing short of historic. What people value today is the network and its attributes: a decentralized, permissionless, ultra-secure network and the token allows you to own a share of that.
I like how Michael Saylor calls bitcoin a monetary network Which other network outside of cryptos can you send $1M of value across the world, any time, any day, and have final settlement in approximately an hour (6 confirmation blocks, most counterparties accept 2 confirmation blocks) for the cost of a few US dollars? No one can hack this transaction, no one can stop/censor this transaction, no one can reverse this transaction Compare it to a bank transfer on many of those points
I actually like the fact that if I notice something on my credit card I didn't buy, I just call them up and they refund it right away. I earn points each time I use it, and I generally fly for free once a year, minus the taxes, with those points earned. Of course I pay my balance off every month, and all of this therefore doesn't cost me a thing. What happens once all the coins are mined, somewhere around 2027 I think I read? How do the miners earn a fee? Will the fee drastically increase as a result in order to maintain the network?
The question is asked every 4 years , bitcoin block reward is cut in half overnight which means the salary of all miners are cut in half, yet the hash rate does not drop by half Bitcoin mining is a self-healing game-theory incentives mechanism. The difficulty of the bitcoin mining adjusts every ~12 days So, in 2140, when there are no more bitcoins to be mined, the only reward for solving a block is from transaction fees. If a bitcoin is worth $10M and if there are thousands of transactions on the bitcoin network, the miner rewards should be enough incentive to mine Remember game theory I mentioned? Everyone that owns a bitcoin may also have 1 or 2 bitcoin miner in the garage, if I have millions of $ worth of bitcoin it's an incentive for me to do that Fidelity is mining now, probably Visa and PayPal, and Microstrategy and Tesla, and NYDig, and every company that has an incentive will be running some kind of a bitcoin mining operation And if there are less miners than now, the difficulty to solve a block will be much less In the beginning, the cost of a bitcoin was pennies, the reward was 50 bitcoins per block, you could have mined a block with a gaming computer See the relationship of the incentives mechanism? The higher the value, the more difficult to mine, but we won't be here in 2140 to see how much 1 bitcoin will be worth
Your gains are somebody's losses. When you do a chargeback ,the merchants take a loss, the prices of their goods and services go up for everyone The flyer miles are cross promotion marketing, the costs of those free flights are reflected in the price everyone's air fares