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I've held for several years now (~7 or so). My logic is this: 1. This is all 100% speculative at the moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a charlatan. You

I've held for several years now (~7 or so). My logic is this: 1. This is all 100% speculative at the moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a charlatan. You may make someone money if you're patient, but the point is acquiring a decent stake while it's still affordable on the off (IMO, not 0%) chance that Bitcoin or one of its derivatives become a secondary and then primary spending currency. Realistically, I see a boondoggled attempt by governments to create their own digital currencies with Bitcoin being used primarily as a store of value, a la gold. 2. Technologically, Bitcoin is an intelligent solution to the financial problems created by government mismanagement and greed. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn creative. With time, most of the major issues seem to be fixable. 3. Also technologically, Bitcoin is not ready for the prime time. The lightning network being implemented at a large scale would be the first warning shot that Bitcoin could see massive, stable use. Until you match transaction volume of Visa, Amex, etc., it's not going to take. 4. The likely timeline this plays out will be loosely correlated with the government's intervention negatively impacting the purchasing power of the dollar (speaking relative to the U.S.). The current situation is actually surprising; I didn't expect anything like this to happen for at least another 2-3 years. 5. Due to the way that humans tend to overestimate change in the short-term, the likely timeline for this to all play out is throughout the 2020's and early 30's, with the mid-to-late 2030's being the "even grandma pays with Bitcoin" moment. I'd say right now is the 97'-98' era for Bitcoin if we're using the internet as a parallel. 6. The current marketing and messaging of Bitcoin is, to be blunt, a freakshow. Painful as it may be, normal folks don't want to be associated with things that seem grimy, shifty, or subversive. The only way to overcome this is to demonstrate that using Bitcoin is easier than the current payment options, or, not having it would mean seeing all of your financial assets rapidly devalue downward toward 0 (which means the U.S. is collapsing and is a whole other bag of chips).

this_user 6y ago
The fact is that adoption times for new technologies have only become shorter over time. Modern smartphones came to the market at about the same time as BTC, and they have been ubiquitous for years now. Docker was first released 2013, and has been everywhere for a couple of years. If Bitcoin were actually useful, someone would have figured it out by now, and it would be widely adopted. But it's not, because it is fundamentally flawed in a way that cannot be fixed without starting over completely, if at all. It's a barely functioning CS experiment with little to no real world usefulness. And pretty much everything that came after has turned out to be either even more broken, or was an outright scam. > Technologically, Bitcoin is an intelligent solution to the financial problems created by government mismanagement and greed. That is complete nonsense. Bitcoin solves no actual problems, and instead tries to revert back to a previous monetary system that was abandoned because it was failing. The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. This is the equivalent of medicine going back to routinely performing lobotomies: it doesn't solve anything, but causes a huge amount of harm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  > barely functioning CS experiment Zero downtime since 2013. Visa has ten hour outages across entire continents. > Bitcoin solves no actual problems It's been moving billions of USD daily without fail for years. That's a non-trivial amount to anywhere on Earth. Try transferring money from say former Soviet bloc countries to Africa. > The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. Bitcoin is inflationary until 2140 and then stops inflating. It's not a deflationary currency. Perhaps you meant to word this differently?
  - qwytw 6y ago
    That would only be true if the demand for bitcoin was almost non existent. If it will ever be used as actual currency on a significant scale the demand for bitcoin would have to be magnitudes higher than can be produced by mining making it extremely deflationary.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  >If Bitcoin were actually useful, someone would have figured it out by now, and it would be widely adopted. Diffuse benefits, concentrated costs, and a set of governments which gain much of their power through monetary policy blows this assertion out of the water. >The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. There are a few fiat currencies that have negative interest rates. They are not going anywhere. Most notably the European central bank.
  - qwytw 6y ago
    But the euro is not deflationary. Negative interest rates actually have an opposite effect of what you're assuming, they should discourage hoarding and encourage borrowing which results in a higher money supply.
- wallacoloo 6y ago

this_user 6y ago

The fact is that adoption times for new technologies have only become shorter over time. Modern smartphones came to the market at about the same time as BTC, and they have been ubiquitous for years now. Docker was first released 2013, and has been everywhere for a couple of years. If Bitcoin were actually useful, someone would have figured it out by now, and it would be widely adopted. But it's not, because it is fundamentally flawed in a way that cannot be fixed without starting over completely, if at all. It's a barely functioning CS experiment with little to no real world usefulness. And pretty much everything that came after has turned out to be either even more broken, or was an outright scam. > Technologically, Bitcoin is an intelligent solution to the financial problems created by government mismanagement and greed. That is complete nonsense. Bitcoin solves no actual problems, and instead tries to revert back to a previous monetary system that was abandoned because it was failing. The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. This is the equivalent of medicine going back to routinely performing lobotomies: it doesn't solve anything, but causes a huge amount of harm.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DarthGhandi 6y ago
> barely functioning CS experiment Zero downtime since 2013. Visa has ten hour outages across entire continents. > Bitcoin solves no actual problems It's been moving billions of USD daily without fail for years. That's a non-trivial amount to anywhere on Earth. Try transferring money from say former Soviet bloc countries to Africa. > The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. Bitcoin is inflationary until 2140 and then stops inflating. It's not a deflationary currency. Perhaps you meant to word this differently?
- qwytw 6y ago
  That would only be true if the demand for bitcoin was almost non existent. If it will ever be used as actual currency on a significant scale the demand for bitcoin would have to be magnitudes higher than can be produced by mining making it extremely deflationary.
CameronNemo 6y ago
>If Bitcoin were actually useful, someone would have figured it out by now, and it would be widely adopted. Diffuse benefits, concentrated costs, and a set of governments which gain much of their power through monetary policy blows this assertion out of the water. >The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea. There are a few fiat currencies that have negative interest rates. They are not going anywhere. Most notably the European central bank.
- qwytw 6y ago
  But the euro is not deflationary. Negative interest rates actually have an opposite effect of what you're assuming, they should discourage hoarding and encourage borrowing which results in a higher money supply.
wallacoloo 6y ago