Of course no one knows, but plenty of people can look at demand vs new supply and new uses and see where the trend could easily go.  I saw an article earlier about RIAs and investors at many places not having access to the US ETFs so one could easily see that having that access will only increase demand and having it coincident with the upcoming halving will only steepen the fiat price curve.

It is a transition.  Right now it is more of an investment with other use cases included.  Once bitcoin reaches an equilibrium with fiat pricing then it will be much easier to use as digital cash.  That is another few orders of magnitude away and at that point (if not before) one hopes that you don't need to "get out" of bitcoin and can just remain in without needing gatekeepers to convert.

Chavez implemented the communist/socialist dream and got the logical results even with a huge amount of oil reserves.  You are right though, Chavez destroyed what was once the wealthiest country in Central and South America.  It can happen anywhere and the degree of the destruction is proportional to the degree to which anti-freedom policies are implemented.  As far as Bukele goes, I guess time will tell.

It is odd that they had to write an article about this and research to find the answer.  Anyone paying attention should know it. lol.

And you are right, do people really think that you can't cash out if you want to?  It would be nice if one didn't have to cash out of course.

It is sad because a lot of people had the opportunity and had the opportunity to be patient and yet failed to do so.  It is pretty funny though that we still hear the same nonsense though, "it is tulips", "it is a ponzi", "it will crash", "it doesn't have a use" etc.  I suspect that in another 10 years there will be still people saying similar things.  Likewise, 10-14 years ago, yes, there was a larger chance bitcoin could fail, a lot big chance that bitcoin would take the "worth very little" path as opposed to the "worth a lot" path.  Every year since then the chance that bitcoin would be worth very little in fiat terms has decreased whereas the opposite has increased.

I told a lot of people they should just put a few hundred or a few thousand dollars in bitcoin between 2010 and 2013 with similar arguments:  at worst you'd lose your initial money and at best you'd do really well.  It was a great example of an asymmetric risk / reward. 

After PayPal, Stripe etc cut off some Trump related entities from them back in Jan 2021, e.g. unbanked them he should be embracing it.  A censorship resistant form of money helps everyone avoid the fascist authoritarian tendencies of many of the left who want to cut people they disagree with off from the financial system.  

If those types of entities are willing to cut off the President of the United States and a billionaire at that, no one else is safe.

Excessive fees like some ETFs initially announced are unsustainable.  Thankfully competition is helping to get them down which helps people who are locked in to the old ETFs due to embedded capital gains.

And this is somewhat meaningless.  It is up now.  Look at the long term trend and if you are patient if the trend continues, you'll be rewarded.  Short term fluctuations are pretty much just grist for click-bait articles.

Trading is difficult unless you are trying to arbitrage or front run or something.  Holding is the safest way.  Sure some people will make money trading but many won't.

There are plenty of catalysts for the increase in fiat price: inflation, ETF approval, upcoming halving etc.  If this halving is like previous ones, there could be a drop in the short time after it, as people unload what they purchased in anticipation (buy the rumor, sell the news) followed by an increase upwards. 

This time could be different though because from what I've read many miners have sold a lot of "inventory" already due to the ETF approvals.  Plus with US ETFs (among many things) fueling demand there may be enough demand that with the decreased supply there isn't an opportunity to drop.

I think the answer is: no one knows, but we'll all guess lol

Yes, patience is key.  Pretty much anyone who has mined or bought bitcoin in the last 15+ years has made a profit - with the exception of a few weeks and those people are close to breakeven.  

It has been pretty easy to do well with bitcoin but patience and lack of panic has been the enemy of many.  Another enemy was those who believed the nonsense about it being a scam, tulips, "rat poison squared" etc.  I remember reading comments when I first read about it on slashdot saying things like, "well, I'll just copy the block chain and private keys and double my money."  Talk about a whoosh moment of incomprehension (that was July 2010).   Another enemy of many has been inertia and not doing anything. I told people about it at Thanksgiving 2010, and many times thereafter, including tech people and many people did nothing or procrastinated or "didn't have the money" to put $50 or $500 into it or the desire or "time" to set up a miner (back when CPU and GPU were options).  Pretty much everyone I told could've gotten $50 or $500 quite easily.

My advice has been the same all along:  buy or mine some. If you aren't going to use it, then move it to cold storage and leave it.

Is it guaranteed?  No, but the binary choice of it being worth a lot or very little increases the likelihood of the "a lot" every day and every new use.

Protection from inflation, and looters, plus censorship resistance.  Those things help everyone who wants protection.

I didn't think it was a scary time, personally.  There have been quite a few forks over the years since I read about it during the summer of 2010.  Things that were potentially scary were the overflow bug in August 2010, but it was resolved quickly.  Ditto the March 2013 fork which also was resolved quickly.  😀. Everything else was pretty much ignored by bitcoin.

Let's hope there are more leaders like him and fewer politicians who are only out for their own power and who are more than willing to trade other people's freedom to enrich themselves and their families.  Anyone who thinks fiat is doing anything but hurting the vast majority of people with the extremely regressive hidden inflation tax and the resulting continual recessions is naive. Not to mention it allows the so-called elites to spend money they don't have putting future generations in debt and destroying a country by destroying the currency. 

Finally.  The whole bitcoin.org nonsense was a default judgement was meaningless.  CW needs to put up or shut up.  Given he could easily prove it if he were SN, I think it is pretty obvious that he is not.

This article talks a bit about why there will be more inflation.  Although it doesn't specifically mention using bitcoin as a hedge, the clear implication is that you want gold, or digital gold.  Protection from inflation is one use for bitcoin (and gold/other PMs), thankfully there are others, but it is smart to protect oneself now.  Having an ETF as an option is a good thing for people who want some protection but want it in a brokerage account.  Sure, they could do it at coinbase etc, but just because you can code in binary or machine language doesn't mean you shouldn't make it easier and use a high level language.


https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-living-borrowed-time

The plan would be to inflate their way out of the mess by just printing money.  Like the dollar has lost around 99% of its value since the democrat US President FDR devalued the dollar and then took us off the gold standard and prohibited private gold ownership.  Then when Bretton Woods as abandoned completely even more value was lost.  This will only continue as long as statists believe (like MMT people claim to) that printing money has no impact on the real world.  If MMT had no impact, why not just print $20,000,000 and give it to everyone around the world.  Then everyone will be rich.

Of course it is nonsense, but people don't notice the short term 2-3% loss of purchasing power every year.  It is only when it is higher or the timeframe is 10, 20, 30, 40 years that people notice.  This hidden tax is the statists way of having an extremely regressive tax on the poor and middle class while claiming to champion their cause when in fact their goal is to do the opposite: control people and restrict their freedom.

So how would bitcoin behave?  If enough people realize what is coming, they will be smart and protect themselves with bitcoin and PMs.  Bitcoin will rise as soon as people realize that fiat or bonds (or equities) aren't safe havens.   Everyone else will lose out.  Over time people who are paying attention will plan and the fiat price of bitcoin will rise as they do so. Given the debt and deficits in the US now, they should be planning now since the interest payments are getting close to crowding out much of the other spending. 

Innumerable countries have gone through this once they have politicians control of the money.  Eventually the fiat check bounces and says "account overdrawn" and things get really bad.  When evil takes control of the value of money and it is set by whim with no objective value behind it, people won't want to get out of bitcoin into fiat.  They'll just deal in bitcoin, by voluntary consent and trade without the statists in the middle taking a cut.

I hope that the US (and the world) gets their act together and stops the insanity but history has shown that it rarely happens without a huge crisis when much is destroyed and lost.

When he has been proven so abjectly wrong for so long he would do well to stop talking.  Between him, Munger and Buffett, they really just need to stop talking about something about which they clearly have no understanding.  I will say that Munger and Buffett calling bitcoin rat poison and "rat poison squared" is nice in that rats hate rat poison and so it outed them as authoritarian statists rats.

So out of a random group of people with no knowledge of the matter, 1/3 think that bitcoin will fall below $20,000.   Of what use is this? 

Meanwhile, 2000 out of 2000 people who have followed Deutsche Bank will say that they are incompetent.  Between their money laundering scandal in Russia to their insanity, with regard to the GFC, their interest rate manipulation, violations of the US-Iran embargo,  relationships with Epstein etc., their abject reputation among banks is well earned and well deserved. 

A survey such as this does nothing to burnish their reputation. 

I have to agree with that!   Neither are morons.  In Cramer's case, he makes snap judgments which are bound to be wrong sometimes.  In Schiff's case, I think you are exactly right about his love of commodities.

And I agree with Schiff, it is smart to have a small percentage of your assets in gold or something as the ultimate hedge.  I don't want to pay for homeowners insurance but I pay a small percentage every year to do it.  Gold, silver etc should be similar except you don't have to rebuy it every year.  The same goes for bitcoin except perhaps the percentage should be higher from a portfolio point of view.  From a currency point of view, it should be even a bit higher.