I’m sorry, I still don’t get it. I don’t dispute blockchain is valuable technology and here to stay, but I set my eyes on Bitcoin specifically as an unknown factor. Is it meant sit in vaults, like gold? Or is it meant to transact regularly, like a currency? I don’t think you can have both at the same time and it be a stable investment vehicle with better returns than real asset classes. Per the hardware question, the building and energy management systems are valuable, probably more so than the chips. Chips fail, hard drives fail, and like the Argo they are remade, the result of which has been a market created that supports developing these chips for miners, trains professionals in the maintenance of these data centers and chip fabrication, and identifies geographies amenable to cheap high volume data processing. Regardless, to speak of the specific chips, they can serve institutional backed crypto currencies performing similar operations. I just can’t shake the feeling Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme
It's meant to launder money. I say that in all seriousness. Piketty burned an entire chapter in Capital in the 21st Century determining the size of the black market and estimated it at 50% of the white market. If 10% of black market transactions are executed in bitcoin, Bitcoin's market cap would be 70 trillion dollars. There are 18b bitcoin in circulation with a market cap of $430b. There can never be more than 21b BTC. We're looking squarely at Drake's Equation here: we have a stack of bullshit factors that give us a scientific number but "ponzi scheme" or not there's a fair amount of runway even if you presume BTC will never be anything but thermonuclearly illegal. "Stable investment vehicle" is a relative term. No matter how you define it, though, it certainly doesn't apply to Bitcoin at the moment. "Real asset classes" is also a relative term. There was a time when ETFs weren't "real asset classes." The 401(k) is an accidentally-discovered tax loophole. Pets.com is a cautionary tale; Chewy.com has a $43b market cap doing the exact same fucking thing 20 years later. You're effectively saying "it must be bad since I don't understand it, and since it must be bad I don't have to understand it." mk can talk at length about crypto. So can I. Been there, done that. But you're never going to get more than a beatdown when your basic approach to the discussion is "this is stupid and illegal, and everyone involved in it is a stupid criminal." I've been called a stupid criminal by accountants, financial planners and immediate family members for owning crypto so if I want someone to berate me for making money I can get that job done by far more important opinions than yours.Is it meant sit in vaults, like gold? Or is it meant to transact regularly, like a currency?
I don’t think you can have both at the same time and it be a stable investment vehicle with better returns than real asset classes.