Another one who thinks everything revolves around what Americans (only) think and do. Note I am an American who has been outside the borders of this great country.
Actually, it's the fact that bitcoin is so convenient for illicit activity that gives it so much potential. I was recently surprised to find out that incidence of computer-related crime such as identity theft was at almost the same level as regular crime (DOJ data was from 2015). That means that as we are getting more computerized, shadow economy is too. If the shadow economy switches to bitcoin at least partially, we are probably talking about valuations of 40-50 thousand dollars per coin, as I have said before.
Not saying you're wrong.... but in what way? Thats kind of a vague statistic. Does one smash and grab at MoJo's liquor & grocery equal one identity theft? Does one stabbing equal one bottle of perc bought on the new silk road? Is it a dollar amount? That statistic needs to be quantified better albeit there's little doubt cyber-crime is the on a roll. But either way... at $50,000 per coin... (how many coins are out there again?).... that Costa Rica operation will look like a game of Cee-lo in section 8 housing to the Feds and Interpol. I wouldn't want to be the one buying BTC's @ 40K the day that headline (FBI crackdown) broke. And say they can't or don't shut it down... I'm with PEK... there's no barrier to entry here. I would never go long an investment instrument that can't be shorted. Shorting keeps the market honest. No ability to have a large short interest means the bottom can fall out in the matter of hours. I know that sounds counter-intuitive to the whole concept of shorting, but its true And I knowwwww... a few people here have posted places that enable shorting.... supposedly... but I'll be damned if some fly by night website with a banner that says "Short Bitcoins and Ether Here!" exactly fits my definition of a reliable vehicle to short an instrument with a current market cap in excess of 37 Billion. Thats 6 times bigger than Herbalife for christsake. www.bitcoinshortshappenintoday.net ain't gonna cut it in my book.
In terms of victimization rate, which is a standard metric when comparing various forms of crime. Obviously, it has it's drawbacks, but that's what DOJ uses and publishes. Notably, incarceration rates for cyber-crime are much lower then for regular property crime. Combining the two facts makes for some interesting dooms-day conjectures. Just like war on [drugs/human trafficking/tax evasion etc], attempting to shut it down would be a losing battle, especially given that resilience to this process is built into the bitcoin protocol. Obviously, if they decide to shut down the Internet, they will successfully take it down 40k "valuation" assumes that shadow economy is about 10% of published global GDP (the estimates vary from 10 to 15). This makes the total "GDP of crime" about 5 to 7 trillion, depending on if you measuring GDP in PPP or in nominal dollars. Let's assume conservatively that bitcoin will be adopted for 1 to 1.5 trillion of that and divide this by the total possible amount of bitcoin (21 million coins). So we are talking about 30 to 50k per coin. The barrier to entry is acceptance by a large user base. By the same token, anyone of us can write a new Facebook, maybe even one with hookers and blackjack, but gaining user acceptance is much much harder. In this case, it's especially so because rejecting the encumbent product has negative financial impact. Anyway, as I said, at this point it looks very interesting simply due to it's convex nature, similar to an angel stake investment (or more like 1st round of VC financing, probably). If you have cash that you are ready to lose otherwise, it's a worth-while punt - certainly beats a lottery ticket or buying penny stocks.
Pros and cons of shorting is, actually, a far more interesting conversation then "when bitcoin will go to X"
@vanzandt Vandy you know we love ya, but by the time you get an centralized exchange listed product to short BTC could be at $1 by then. Ya gotta take what the market gives ya.
no one is talking about ETH? traders have been rotating their coins in the last 3 weeks big capital flow $$$ :]
Seems to be the only coin that made it relatively unscathed. I stupidly got rid of more than half my coins.
More correctly, it had the best recovery to new ATH. But it did drop from 210 to 130, what was bigger than BTC's drop.