Okay. And you can read the article I posted.
An excerpt:
Storing value, hedging against inflation
If Bitcoin’s isn’t used for payments, what use does it have?
The major attraction – one endorsed by mainstream financial publications – is as a store of value, particularly in times of inflation, because Bitcoin has a hard cap on the number of coins that will ever be “mined”.
As Forbes writers argued a few weeks ago:
In terms of quantity, there are only 21 million Bitcoins released as specified by the ASCII computer file. Therefore, because of an increase in demand, the value will rise which might keep up with the market and prevent inflation in the long run.
The only problem with this argument is recent history. Over the course of 2022 the purchasing power of major currencies (US, the euro and the pound) dropped by about 7-10%. The purchasing power of a Bitcoin dropped by about 65%.
Speculation or gambling?
Bitcoin’s price has always been volatile, and always will be. If its price were to stabilise somehow, those holding it as a speculative punt would soon sell it, which would drive down the price.
But most people buying Bitcoin essentially as a speculative token, hoping its price will go up, are likely to be disappointed. A BIS study has found the majority of Bitcoin buyers globally between August 2015 and December 2022 have made losses.
The “market value” of all cryptocurrencies peaked at US$3 trillion in November 2021. It is now about US$1 trillion.
Bitcoins’s highest price in 2021 was about US$60,000; in 2022 US$40,000 and so far in 2023 only US$30,000. Google searches show that public interest in Bitcoin also peaked in 2021. In the US, the proportion of adults with internet access holding cryptocurrencies fell from 11% in 2021 to 8% in 2022.
