It takes energy to separate hydrogen from water molecules, so it's not like you can just dump a bunch of water into a car and have it run on only the hydrogen. Also, a car that runs on hydrogen still burns the hydrogen to produce the power necessary to power the car, and water does not burn. Cars that run on "water" do not exist, it's science fiction. Cars that run on hydrogen require (that may have been stripped out of water molecules, which is not the same as running on water) must have the hydrogen isolated into fuel cells (most likely), which can then be utilized as a power source.

It wouldn't be Bitcoin's fault for being a bubble, it would be all the people mindlessly buying it without respect for usability. The fact that it's a bubble isn't Bitcoin's fault, the fact that it has no utility is. It is essentially a bubble because it has low utility. Also, there's a pretty good indication that if Bitcoin is a bubble, all crypto assets are also in a bubble state. Perhaps not as big as Bitcoin, but nonetheless. Bitcoin is still the big one that tends to raise or lower other coins like the tide raising or lowering all boats.

Don't expect either confirmation times or transaction fees to fall without significant changes to the Bitcoin ecosystem (either block size increases, reduction in the block times, or some alternative to on-chain transactions, like the Lightning Network). The confirmation time and transaction fees are related, and they're both currently prohibitive and there's no shortage of viable crypto alternatives. Without changes, people will eventually tire of the poor usability of the Bitcoin network and select cheaper and more nimble competitors.

Volatility makes it useless as a currency or store of value though, so if you want Bitcoin to actually have utility and widespread acceptance, the loss of volatility will be the best possible thing for Bitcoin. If you're looking for a gambling instrument to risk those high returns that are possible with extremely volatile assets, then Bitcoin is currently the right vehicle. Just be advised that when the attention and mania dies down and the volatility dries up, you might be stuck with a depreciating asset with no buyers willing to gamble any longer at these crazy prices.

I'd start by correcting the misconception that the American government prints the dollar. It doesn't. The Federal Reserve prints the dollar, and it's a quasi-governmental entity, yet outside of the control of the government for good reason. The Fed's mandate is stability, and necessarily attempts to remain apolitical. The government only has the revenue from taxes and debt auctions by the Treasury, it doesn't print dollars to pay old debts. It rolls over old debts constantly, literally on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis. Old debt expires continually and the Treasury holds new auctions to issue new debt instruments to fund the government. The value of the dollar comes from the (illogical) assumption that the US government cannot default on its debt. That's why US Treasury bills are (again illogically) considered "zero risk" investments. To this end, the government depends on buyers of the debt to function. The Fed acted as a buyer of last resort during the financial crisis, but if that action would have shot confidence in the value of the dollar, it may not have been a technical default but the outcome would have been the same.

I don't see a reason volatility will decrease when all the coins are mined. It's not the change in supply that's driving the volatility, it's speculation by buyers, and there's no reason to expect speculation to abate once all the coins are mined. The speculation is a type of mania, and the more volatile it is, the more volatile it is likely to become. It's a feedback loop. Have a stable supply and that doesn't do anything to the mania necessarily.

Not so much. Fiat is remarkably stable as a general rule compared to crypto. The value changes over very long periods of time and generally goes in one direction, that is it's generally inflationary, not deflationary. Crypto goes in both directions, by many orders of magnitudes more than fiat. The volatility makes it useless as a medium of exchange or store of value. It is correct that for Bitcoin to be more useful, it must be accepted by retailers. But in order to be accepted by retailers, it needs to be more stable.

I don't see a reason volatility will decrease when all the coins are mined. It's not the change in supply that's driving the volatility, it's speculation by buyers, and there's no reason to expect speculation to abate once all the coins are mined. Mania over trying to profit off the price rise is what amplifies the speculation, so in a sense the volatility drives the volatility. Have a stable supply and that doesn't do anything to the mania necessarily.

The first part of your statement is classic bubble mentality. As for why not btc for 1 world currency, the simple answer is because bitcoin doesn't have the capacity to handle the very small fraction of transactions it currently has, let alone being scaled up to handle transactions on a worldwide level. Transaction fees make bitcoin a terrible way to transmit value, and the volatility makes it a terrible store of value. These two things make it essentially worthless, but speculation and irrationality explains the price we have. That's not something I would feel confident about investing in, let alone long term.

People confusing "income" with price appreciation are showing they don't really understand investing.  Bitcoin does not produce income, and it has no inherent value. Stocks that pay a dividend, by comparison, produce income and have an inherent value because stocks represent a legal ownership of the business that produces the income. Bitcoin doesn't produce income, it's merely an asset that has value because many people think it does. Going up in value does not mean producing income.

Absolutely it is. There are a lot of ways to answer this question, but in almost every case it would be yes. Oil is pretty expensive to produce and transport compared to electricity generation. It's almost expensive in the toll it takes on the environment to produce oil, and burning it creates undesirable effects on the atmosphere and environment. Electricity as a power source is superior in almost every way. The only oil might come out ahead is energy storage. Oil can be stored pretty effectively and used as needed, where electricity can be stored in batteries that degrade over time and become less efficient in power delivery and capacity.

Then go ahead and explain how people buying Bitcoin as a speculative investment is any different from people who were buying houses in the early 2000s as a speculative investment, or .coms in the late 1990s as a speculative investment. In all cases, people who aren't sophisticated investors were rushing into markets they don't understand because they have the perception that everyone was making easy money with the speculative investments and the value could only go up. Naturally, you have to believe a crypto bubble is different than any other type of bubble, otherwise you're faced with the very uncomfortable reality that you're making a very foolish decision.

This is terrifying. People are so desperate with their FOMO that they're taking on high interest rate loans to buy a highly speculative and inherently worthless asset. Taking on a high degree of risk to roll it into an even higher degree of risk is just the epitome of stupidity. Risk doesn't just add in this case, it compounds. I don't wish ill on these people, but I will not feel bad if their risky behavior burns them exceptionally hard. This is a potential problem that is entirely avoidable and foreseeable. First rule of investing is not to risk anything you can't afford to lose. If you're taking out high risk loans to invest, you've completely lost focus of what you're doing, or you never understood it in the first place. People resorting to credit card loans obviously shouldn't be investing in the first place, because there are more suitable ways to get an investment loan, so it seems to indicate these people don't have access to those channels because they're not well off enough or sophisticated enough as investors.

I like freebitco.in, the owner of the site has always been a standup guy. The only thing I don't understand, and the thing that makes me cautious about anyone offering to pay "interest" on btc holdings, is that in order to pay interest on btc holdings, the payer of the interest has to be making more than the interest he is paying with your btc holdings. Otherwise, paying someone interest costs that person money. Four percent is a pretty generous rate on a USD basis for interest, so that leads to the question: What is Wetsuit doing with the bitcoin holdings that is generating income that allows him to pay 4% interest to the website users. I don't know the answer to this, and that along keeps me from putting any outside funds on his site. I'm fine keeping whatever I had generated there on the site, it's not a significant amount and it was "free money" anyway.

But as a starting point with investing, always understand how the investment generates value, otherwise it's not safe for you to put money into it.

Affecting the decimal place shouldn't have an impact on the price. It limits the extent that a bitcoin can be divided into smaller pieces, but it doesn't change the supply. A 1000x increase in the number of coins should theoretically see a 1000x decrease in the price, but since people speculating don't take into consideration any mathematical or financial valuation when making purchase and share of BTC, I actually don't expect that it would logically follow. When Doge abandoned it's hard cap, the price went up over time, which doesn't make economic sense since the value of each coin is inflated away with the production of every new coin.

First, those prognosticators making those statements do so every year, and the more outlandish the claim of catastrophe, the more eyeballs and clicks they get because fear sells attention, and attention generates revenue. So doom and gloom should be taken with a grain of salt. It's much more noteworthy when economists issue warnings because it's supported by research and not designed to sell attention or generate revenue, but to inspire policy.

Second, Bitcoin has very little utility, so it's value comes from speculation, or the mass perception that someone in the future will value the coins more than you did when you purchased them and you will therefore be able to sell them at a profit. Because the value is made up primarily of speculators, the wealth poured into sustaining the price comes from people who feel financially secure and able to risk losing the investment. Essentially, the confidence created by the current robust economy creates the confidence for people to speculate. In an economic downturn, confidence will disappear and people will not tolerate such risky asset holdings any longer, so all assets supported by speculators and risk-takers will suffer greatly. The riskier the asset, the more it will decline in price. As the king of speculative assets, I expect in an economic downturn that crypto will suffer outsized losses to things with inherent value, like stock equities and assets that generate income like real estate or REITs.

In short, everything will go down in value, but crypto will fall harder.

Money is just a representation of all the value that is created in the world. When you create a good or perform a service, that has a value to someone who will consume it. Money is a medium of exchange to allow people to trade whatever it is they produce that creates value for the goods or services created by other people. The value that is created in the world is how much wealth there is, and money is just a representation of that, an easy way to quantify it. Because value comes from goods/services (not money), the amount of value divided by the amount of money in existence determines how much money is worth. When goods/services expand faster than the money supply, money is worth more. This is not typical though, generally the money supply grows faster than the value of goods/services created in an economy, which is called inflation and the reason money loses value over time.

Amazon's stock is not a medium of exchange, so it being volatile doesn't affect the company's business operations. When Bitcoin is volatile as a medium of exchange, it makes it impossible to conduct business in that medium because profitability it volatile. No business can survive the inability to predict what its assets are worth. If you transact at a bunch of business with 5% margins but the currency you just accepted could be up or down 20% in the next few days, you could be conducting your business at huge losses. Businesses can't function reliably in this environment. The most important aspect of a currency is stability, because the other important attributes (medium of exchange, store of value) arise from the stability. That's where the idea of volatility making Bitcoin an unsuitable currency comes from.

That's not a bubble bursting, that's just a correction of an overvalued asset. I'm not aware of a technical definition of a burst bubble, but I would argue that anything that hasn't lost at least 75% of its value in a short period of time is not a burst bubble. I would say that the bubble on Bitcoin hasn't burst until it's below $5,000, and it might even have to be lower than that considering it it started the 2017 year far lower than that (about $1000). So a "burst" of the bubble down to $5000 would still be a 5x increase on the price in the past year.

That's just how capital markets work. There's a high failure rate because ideas are rather cheap and easy and anyone can come up with one, but ideas the market values are another thing entirely. Once you have an idea the market values, you can still go bust because you as an operator are not efficient or particularly good at operating. The few percent of ideas that make it to market successfully are ideas that the market values and can operate efficiently. This is also where wealth concentration comes from, as it is only the few people who can clear these hurdles that become rich of their efforts.