Which is odd because BTC has been confiscated, restricted, and a lot of people have lost all of their coins to various forms of digital "decay"...
And yet it can still be endlessly replicated and forked... Which of the various BTC forks are the TRUE bitcoin? Different people have different opinions. It's also not "anything", investing in a company producing actual physical goods might be "faith based" but it's not counting angels on the head of pin level of faith based.
Sigh, same old blah blah blah. It's still vulnerable to 51% attacks, has a terrible gini coefficient even moreso if you look at the miner distribution, good luck actually SETTLING a transaction in anything resembling a reasonable timeline lol "speed of the internet" more like "speed of the internet if we used IP over Pigeon". And the whole "no middlemen" thing is sus at best.. you're still dependent on the miners to actually record the transaction - and they 100% take their cut. What is that if not a middleman? (don't bother answering... it'll just be more dissembling)
There's a reason basically all of the crypto is held and even moreso traded without being it being actually done with the underlying blockchains. I'll say it again one more time for effect... IT DOES NOT SCALE! Mathematically it CANNOT SCALE.
Also since it's a limited resource, and is wholly dependent on new coin mining for transactions.. what happens when the blockchain runs out? Yeah yeah the middlemen could take a bigger cut (yaah?) but that would require rewriting the entire protocol (oh it's immutable you say and yet...)..
I think it's unknowable because I don't think anyone has any way to know the number of greater fools and gullible suckers who'll keep taking the bet.. Combine that with the blatant market manipulation and.. yeah it's impossible to put a timeline on it.
I think once the whales have largely cashed out on retail the house of cards will crumble 100%... but how long will that take? IDK.. Speaking off.. bets that Microstrategy dumps a bunch more crap stock to keep pimping that ponzi? They're kind of out of the last round of options (dumping $1.4 BILLION into an illiquid market like BTC in one week had a nice bump effect lol).
Looks like everyones favorite money laundering crypto Monero got a nice price bump from the $331 MILLION hack of some poor suckers BTC that was laundered through Monero... Criminals and scammers all the way down.
1) Bitcoin that the courts have seized was done so only through the cooperation of criminals through plea-deals.
2) Bitcoin that has been stolen was only through access of passwords and seed phrases.
3) Hard forks are normally done to fix deficiencies and add functionally. If some group makes a hard fork without the community consensus, then they have created an altogether different coin even if the coin has "Bitcoin" somewhere in the name. Here is a history of Bitcoin hard forks
https://dailycoin.com/history-of-bitcoin-forks-every-major-version-of-bitcoin-explained/
4) Because of the current hash rate the required computing power to try a 51% attack nowadays requires more computational power than all the data centers in the world combined and would cost Billions of dollars for control for one ten minute block. Andreas Antonopoulos explains in a now ten-year old video and also explains what a non-starter gaining control of one ten-minute Bitcoin block would do.
5) As I've previously discussed in this thread, with impending rise of quantum processing and AI, quantum resistant security protocols have already been developed and it is just a matter of implementing hard forks on crypto chains to implement them—in fact, a number of of developers are already discussing when and where to do so on their developmental road maps. As it is, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, was before Congress two weeks ago explaining that data-centers will need an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027 and that the "average" nuclear power plant produces only one gigawatt of power. This is to help explain the resources that currently would be needed to bring to bear to try a 51% attack.
6) Bitcoin doesn't scale. Bitcoin doesn't need to scale because starting next month Bitcoin users will not even know they are using the Cardano blockchain for transactions through the BOS Grail bridge.
This was announced last year and the demo is being shown in a few days this May.
7) We're still dependent on Bitcoin miners. Well, duh. Like the internet, the hash-rate (Bitcoin's total computational power) is distributed among the miners. This argument is like saying, you cannot have peer to peer interactions over the internet because it requires the internet! Even your own reflection about this argument show you know it is a
non sequitur.
8) The whales have already cashed out. Long-term holders (LTH) are entities that have kept their BTC dormant for at least 155 days and their numbers continue to increase while total Bitcoin sitting on exchanges continues to be drawn down. This means there is less supply in the face of steady demand and if we have a demand shock (which is expected as soon as more nation states officially begin accumulating Bitcoin reserves), Bitcoin's spot price is expected to rise.
9) Bitcoin and the Greater Fool Theory (GFT), market bubbles, et el. For those reading along The Greater Fool Theory suggests that the price of Bitcoin, like other speculative assets, is driven by the belief that someone else (a "greater fool") will pay a higher price for it in the future, rather than its intrinsic value. This theory highlights the risks of investing in Bitcoin, as its value can be highly volatile and dependent on market sentiment rather than fundamental worth.
It is increasingly hard to maintain the GTF theory in light that more and more people, institutions, companies, municipalities, states, and nations interest in accumulating Bitcoin has steadily increased over Bitcoin's now 16-year existence. Moreover, it is hard to maintain GTF in light that Bitcoin's continued adoption is a global phenomenon that includes all strata of class and cultures throughout the world. Furthermore, it is difficult to maintain GTF that more and more of those buyers of Bitcoin are becoming long term hodlers of Bitcoin, meaning they aren't just buying with a get rich quick mindset but have a long-term or eternal mindset of holding Bitcoin (the "Never sell your Bitcoin" mantra, cf. see the video below as to how Bitcoin is beginning to be used for generating more wealth with the introduction of Bitcoin-backed bonds).
As you have previously noted, for long term holders, volatility and chaos of Bitcoin pricing is a
feature that allows further accumulation at lower costs. Fluctuations in Bitcoin pricing (referred to as the "underlying") is a gift in the options market
trading the Greeks and one of the reason's companies like $MSTR have exploded in market cap because of their options market size and not just because of increased investor interest in the underlying equity and bonds.
But hey, perhaps in the years to come the world will one day realize that Bitcoin was a losing bet as our history is replete with institutions, cultures, and ideas that dried up on the vine and were cut off, but if such a time does come to pass, that time is not yet.
