What would it take for your negative thesis to be wrong?
Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio Softens Stance on Bitcoin, Says It Has Place in Investors’ Portfolios
- Thread starter Daal
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I'll have to think on that for a bit.
But the short answer would be that I'd need to see some kind of utility/purpose for it that I can't currently get elsewhere.
Right now, I fail to see what that could be? How can it benefit me or society as a whole?
Is it not true that some services who supported BTC earlier removed it as an option because the fees were too high and the volatility too great?
Note: Just because I'm skeptical does not mean I predict a BTC crash. It may very well continue for a long time still and we may never see a crash either.
May I ask, where are you from? Given your nickname and english I suspect you are from the US or UK. I'm from Brazil, in the 80's and 90's Brazil had over 6 currencies. All of them went to zero, the government also had capital controls so it was hard to buy dollars to protect savings.
The only reason some people were able to keep some of their savings is because some of them bought real estate. Stocks dropped 95% in real terms so they were no haven. For people like me, its beyond obvious the utility, its limited in supply and government cannot prevent people from buying (just like they cant prevent people from downloading movies or series on Bittorent, a peer to peer network). BTC can also be sent to anywhere in the world if you have a computer, unless government shuts down the internet they cannot stop it. So it cannot be inflated, it cannot be capital controlled. Its the ultimate monetary fuck you to the government, and some people wonder why its so valuable? That's the utility, your savings no longer depend on governments doing the right thing. And it comes with a payment system on top of it.
Had you been born in Argentina you would have understood bitcoin much earlier, but if you grow up with 2% inflation every year, yeah, it doesnt seem to make sense. But the world is a big place and financial risks are higher than ever before, even in major developed economies....
Some food for thought
I'm from Norway. And I fully appreciate that not every country is equal in terms of economy, resources and government policies.
And as such - I can understand why someone would want to rely on some other currency or market than their domestic currency/market.
That said...
Didn't Bitcoin already crash and lose about 75% of it's 'value'?
Why won't that happen again?
And what's to prevent someone in Brazil or Argentina to park their money in foreign markets other than BTC? Is it illegal?
In Brazil you can, in Argentina they wont let you now. They are full of capital controls and just instituted a one time wealth tax of up to 5%. I can park my cash in US dollars which are depreciating or I can park in BTC, which appreciate every cycle. Sure it can crash but if you see the value of it, you start to think in terms of long-term value to the rest of the world as it gets more widely adopted. This is hard money, software based, but hard money. I look around and see every Gen Z and Millenial living with their phones 24/7, these people dont care about gold, they like in the mobile universe, in the software universe. They will be the ones running the world and they will inherhit the wealth from the old folks that dont get BTC and are going to be dying in the coming decade. I will take the chance of 75% drops (and so does lots of others) because I get paid multiples of my capital for doing so
Well, it's not like your only alternative is to either hold cash in USD or BTC. The problem for me is that I don't see the value in it. And that may be because I don't sufficiently understand it?
As for adoption - what about those that did adopt it, but then rejected it because of high volatility and fees? It does not seem to be any better than fiat currency for electronic transactions, i.e., buying and selling goods and services.
This does undoubtedly sound correct, but I hardly see it as an argument for BTC.
Well, if it drops 75 % - you're no longer getting paid multiples of your capital.
Either way - you're pretty much acknowledging that you buy and hold it because you think it will continue to appreciate in value. Not because you're going to actually use Bitcoins beyond probably exchanging them for USD or BRL sometime in the future and then buy things.
Or am I wrong about that?
As someone with only a very superficial understanding of this subject I may of course be missing something obvious, but this is at least how I see it at the time being.
That is a pretty weak argument. Why do you think the USD is the de-facto currency in Cambodia and why you can pay for many services even in Thailand in USD? Why do people in hyperinflation periods barter and not pay with a currency like stones? Because the stability and backing of the means of exchange is incredibly important. Does it not appear to be shortsighted to you for a person who is exposed to a inflationary home currency to invest or buy the exact same currency equivalent, bitcoin, that is equally highly volatile and not backed by a government that can actually deliver on its premise of full backing? Hundreds of millions of people at other places on earth simply exchange goods via a stable currency of their choosing, for example the USD, rather than replacing an unstable currency with an even more unstable currency. So, I don't follow your argument at all. During the hyperinflationary Weimar Republic people bartered physical goods at the worst of times not pick another currency that had no physical value or backing of any sort.
Exactly. Brazil to my knowledge does not prohibit anyone from using USD to pay a vendor who asks to be paid in USD. Venezuela perhaps but not Brazil.
Most of bitcoin volatility is upside vol not downside, so its a good thing
https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/some-bitcoin-volatility-statistics.353503/
Furthermore, why people use one of the elements in the periodic table as money/store of value (gold)? Because they decided they wanted to do that based on the atractiviness of the element. People (markets) are doing that right now with bitcoin. So BTC is getting backed by the trust of the market the same way that gold has. Gold outside the small industrial uses (which other metals can fulfill anyway) has no backing, its pretty much "worthless". Its only backing its the trust of the market, bitcoin is acquiring that, more and more
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