Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction and has been driven more by hype cycles and a small number of whales rather than any fundamentals.
> that Bitcoin is a stable source of value
no sane person could have ever held that notion - there is no underlying value.
Hindsight is 20/20. That bitcoin is a store of value has been talked about for a very long time when other blockchains overtook it in terms of functionality. People’s memories are short so I am sure it will be touted as such again in a couple years.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede?
But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate.
How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate
I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.
Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.
A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up.
Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in.
Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
> A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications.
I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)
Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.
Don't even need quantum to worry: Satoshi's wallet could be a massive rug pull by the CIA/FBA/NSA when the time comes.
Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.
Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
> You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts
If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.
This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.
Where is your gold? Buried in your garden? Or is it an accounting entry at some commodities trading firm?
Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.
But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".
Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...
Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.
Gold has been used as a store of value for bascially all of recorded human civilization.
Sheep get sick and die, and you have to feed them.
Civilization has had a habitable planet for the entirity of its run. When food and water are scarce, what good will metal do?
Yeah, when food and water are scarce, rearing sheep will be hard too.
> goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead
Wouldn't they just take your gold and pressgang you? Double win for them.
You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you.
The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.
A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.
It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
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My working hypothesis is that people are dumping Bitcoin for AI adjacent stocks because the hype around agents is growing.
There’s no way to prove this, but I’m seeing unexpected behaviors on the secondary markets for privately held AI companies.
At least AI produces something. Maybe not what everyone hopes for, but there is some output that people are worth paying for.
Cryptocurrency lived entirely in the hopes that people wanted to replace regular money, and it turns out not to be a big use case outside of criminals and refugees.
The AI bubble will one day collapse too. But the Bitcoin bubble could just plain vanish.
And it will continue.
Bitcoin treasury companies [0] have equity values lower then their Bitcoin holdings, so it is the financially correct move to sell BTC at market price and use the proceeds to buy back their stock at the market price.
This will lead to additional downward pressure on BTC.
I'm not a fan of Bitcoin but from a purely financial perspective it's natural for treasury companies to trade at a discount to the underlying assets. Obviously the executives are going to find some way to steal most of the value and leave the minority shareholders (suckers) holding the bag.
How long does it have to drop for it to never recover?
I think I read 11,000 is when Saylor is completely broken, again.
BTC failed to live up to it's own prophecy by not doubling from the last height of ca. 69420 to at least 140k in 2025. There was a last chance in October of last year, where it seemed to get close but ultimately it just didn't find enough buyers. Now with the narrative broken (bitcoin always goes up over the long term) one sell off will lead to the next as more and more people lose trust.
That isn’t something you can categorically say for sure though. If it hits 125k next month then Bitcoin does go up over the long term. Same if it hits 125k next year.
and it has proven to not be a great hedge against inflation (lately, short term)
the digital gold narrative falls apart when non-digital gold outperforms it and nobody wants it for its digital properties (payments, blockchain, etc.)
Possibly, but you don't know that and you are stating it as fact.
I still find it interesting that the pump and dump still works - it's the same cycle over and over again of building the market to dump crap onto people. I bet some folks have so much crap they've been dumping it gradually just so the market can absorb it.
Was this the final dump? I doubt it.
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Doesn't matter, there's no shortage of clowns interested in buying because the price will go up.
Nowadays even includes banks and custody companies.
Doesn't matter how much it falls.
Somewhere in Paris, a phone laying on a glass table started vibrating and was picked up by a mysterious person who answered, with a thick French accent: "Yes?".
In all seriousness to me this is still within the bounds of "a Tuesday" in the BTC space. Stranger things have happened many times already.
People dump BTC in order to buy gold.
People dump gold to buy Sandisk
People are dumping all sorts of things into gold.
I just did so with a few pounds of silver (when @ 49.5:1; now 56:1).
They aren't buying actual gold though
Paywall
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This is good for bitcoin /s
When silver is behaving like a shitcoin you know we're in for a fun ride. I think the fact that anyone with a phone can now download countless apps that allows them to """invest""" with leverage &co was a mistake. My bank app now advertises memecoins as a way to build "wealth"...
Trump associated currencies crashing.
Perfect time to buy
Not sure if that is the case. An insane amount of bitcoin has been dumped into the market by whales.
that's the perfect time to buy
Because the whales are dumbasses?
You’re right. Let’s wait for it to pump 20% before we buy. Lol what?
As far as I can tell, bitcoin, having no intrinsic value, is priced entirely by vibes. Right now the vibes are generally negative. The latest bubble of interest has faded. I would wait, the world could become interested again but it may be 2 or 3 years. The bottom will probably be around 70k.
The trouble with vibe-based pricing is it’s really hard to time the vibes. And hard to time the vibe dip.
What if all these AI companies, are going to mint coins with their idle GPUs, wouldn't that lower value of these coins massively ?
It's not as good as an ASIC, but we talk about millions of GPUs
Bitcoin mining on GPUs is generally unprofitable due to the price of electricity.
The rate of coin mining is the same, no matter how many miners there are