Unless the government wants a cashless monetary system because it's easier to control digital money than physical cash. That's what people are worried about. Digital money doesn't mean Bitcoin, it just means not physical fiat. As it is, the majority of the transactions in the US are already cashless digital transactions. People are just worried that what is now a convenience will someday be mandatory.

No one differentiates between "lost" coins and "idle" coins. All that matters to the Bitcoin price is the number of coins for sale and the number of coins being bought at any given time (supply and demand). Whether the coins are lost or idle, they are similarly not part of the coins that are for sale (not part of supply) and are similarly not having an effect on the price.

Please note that 21 million is not impossible to change. It is technically possible to scrap the cap, although at this time there is every indication to believe that would urreparably damage Bitcoin, so isn't likely. But that assessment can change over the next 100+ years that bitcoins will be created, assuming the network stays viable the whole time. (With the pace of technological change and innovation, I don't consider that a safe bet by any stretch of the imagination.)

But if everything stays the same, the one thing we could count on with the most certainty is that the transaction fees would have to rise dramatically to offset the decrease in block rewards, but this is also true log before we mint the last Bitcoin, as the block rewards will become insignificant long before the last fraction of a coin is mined, and the transaction fees will have to rise to keep the miners mining and the network functioning.

What's going to happen to the price, I don't think anyone can say. The last fraction of a Bitcoin won't be mined until around the year 2200 (last estimate I saw). Of course, by then, the cap of 21 million could be lifted or Bitcoin could be worthless.

Do you understand this is fundamentally wrong? Bitcoins will not be mined forever. They are capped at 21 million possible coins.

I think there actually would be a reason to do so, there just is no means to do so from a technical standpoint unless you can break the cypher protecting the whole Bitcoin system. And if you can do that, you have bigger problems than recovering lost coins.

The point is that smart people bought because of the halving a long time ago. The price is not going to magically double the day before the halving, but that's what simple people expect. So if you do get a rush of morons buying the day before the halving, it will create a bubble that will pop as soon as the upwards momentum runs out, so if you're buying now, you're basically gambling that you won't be one of the people holding the bag as the bubble deflates.

The time for Bitcoin to increase in price because of the halving has already passed from an economic standpoint because rational markets are forward-looking and liquid markets are efficient, which means the obvious economic reason for a price increase is already baked into the price. The next "halving" related increase will be based on mania, hype, and speculation. If you want to gamble like that, just go play a dice game, as you can get much more reasonable odds.

If block chain technology is used by a financial institution, it is likely to be a private chain, not a public chain like Bitcoin. People seem to think Eth will be used, but I don't see it happening. Eth is a bubble right now because of blind optimism.

Not so much. Any place it is used by merchants, it is not held by them after the transaction. They use a payment processor who immediately converts to fiat. Its use as a currency is greatly overstated, and its utility as a currency is very small because it is not a stable store of value.

Haha, ok. I wasn't paying attention to who was saying what, just read through the thread quickly. I actually thought your response was from the OP.

Are platinum uses industrial or tech, and what kind of substitutes are in development? Is it a synthetic replacement, or are they adopting the processes that currently use platinum to be able to use a different existing material?

Eth is going to prove to be a huge bubble, just like virtually every alt before it, except the Eth mania got out of control. Dash was trading at $15 a coin too once upon a time. Eth will come back down when people return to their senses and realize they bought into a pipe dream.

Someone mentioned artificial substitutes, so the utility factor could be fleeting or temporary. I wouldn't go too big on the speculation. Gold is more reliable, but even gold over very long arcs basically tracks inflation, so it's not really increasing wealth but maintaining. Speculating on any metal is just like gambling in the short term, and just maintaining wealth in the long term. The stock market is still the best place to actually increase wealth. (In my opinion, obviously, but there's plenty of data to support it.)

The story seems fishy. A guy who knew about bitcoin when it was trading around 7 cents, but doesn't know about mining or this forum?

A financial adviser who knows about bitcoin but advises you it will continue to go up in value, and not that it's a highly speculative asset and is extremely volatile?

Anyway, ignoring the blatant red flags... If you have 799 bitcoins like that screenshot purports, you've already hit the lottery. Trying to loan it out at this point is waaaaaay more risky than just holding it like your terrible "financial adviser" advised you to do. Under virtually no circumstance should you offer to loan it out to people on this forum.

Like I said, you've already won the lottery. If I was you, I would cash a significant portion of it out, probably 75-90%, and invest it in actual companies via the stock market. There is significant risk in holding bitcoin, especially if the engineers continue to refuse to address the capacity problems.

Good luck. I'd hate to see you take the huge win you've already had and lose it chasing an even bigger pipe dream.

Where does the value from platinum come from, it's rarity or its utility?

Or its already did risen because of the halving. It's nearly doubled since August. There's not a real good reason to expect it to rise further at this point because of the halving.

I think any lost coins at this point are going to be very negligible. We're going to be in a period of fairly high inflation for years and it will more than dwarf any accidentally lost coins.

It's not at all guaranteed to to $600 by the end of the year. If it were, it would already be there because otherwise people would be leaving money on the table. I think you mean to say you *hope* it gets to $600 by the end of the year, but I'm skeptical. I would guess it's likely we see a price fall after the halving from all the people expecting a huge price swing and then dumping quickly if it doesn't materialize.

Bitcoin will always be a compliment to the traditional banking system, never a replacement. The main reason is that People don't treat it like a currency but a speculative asset.

Not nearly the same. Bitcoin is a revolution because it proved the functionality of decentralized currency and has greatly reduced the cost of value transfer. Every alt coin that is a derivative without adding utility is just a pump seeking to capitalize off what bitcoin accomplished. That doesn't answer why some are bigger bubbles than others, but it seems to me that Eth is one of the largest bubbles in crypto. I've just been trying to find out if there was a legitimate revolution Eth has accomplished that people are then blowing out of proportion, or if it's just pure mania.