BTC is hanging out under $110k, just under it's recent ATH, and right around the previous ATH's hit in December and January.


But so many things are happening for Bitcoin right now.

- Trump's tyrannical economic and political attack on the US is making the world very wary of the US, the US Dollar, and of continuing to buy US debt. This means people are looking to get away from USD and are looking for a strong store of value. Old fashioned people/institutions will and have been going to gold, but those who are up to date are moving into Bitcoin.

- Several nations are talking about adopting a Bitcoin reserve at some point once the political will is there (US being one of these), and Pakistan just announced it will be the next country to do so.

- US States are starting to adopt Bitcoin reserves, with NH being the first, and TX looking like it's about to become the second. Likely a few more on the way in the next year.

- BTC ETFs are again on an inflow surge, scooping up thousands of bitcoin basically every weekday.

- It has just recently become a weekly thing for one or two companies to announce they are starting up bitcoin treasuries, and add this to the usual weekly buys of Strategy and Metaplanet, basically every week corporations are buying up hundreds of millions to a couple billion dollars of bitcoin.

- Block just announced they are adding BTC payments next year to their payment PoS apps, and there are TONS of stores that use them for payments. While I doubt they'll actually be processing many bitcoin payments, and it'll take a bunch of years for that volume to really grow to anything significant, this at least is hugely symbolical in that it means merchant adoption of Bitcoin is beginning and gets a huge jump start next year.

- Various other bullish things of Bitcoin being added/adopted in the world that I keep seeing in the news.




With all this happening, it's actually pretty dang surprising Bitcoin only broke it's ATH by a couple thousand dollars and didn't blast off much higher. I think there's a lot of retail and traders selling for short term profits at the moment after Bitcoin went up by over $35k from the April bottom. Once this short term profit taking clears out, it's hard to imagine the price won't blast off at least up to the $120k's this summer.

Institutions are eating up tens of thousands of bitcoin every week for the long term. The dam is gonna break and we're gonna get the next leg up soon I think.

https://coinpedia.org/crypto-live-news/vaneck-predicts-ether-etfs-may-surpass-bitcoin-etfs-in-popularity/


VanEck, one of the Bitcoin ETF proviers, thinks Ether ETFs will make more sense to investors and be even more popular than Bitcoin ETFs.

What do you think?



Personally I can see that rationale simply from the fact that Ether has a payout from staking. So assuming the ETFs would stake the Ethereum and offer a perhaps quarterly payout, that would definitely help its popularity. Bitcoin's popularity of course it based on it becoming a global currency in the future and the world's alternative to fiat currencies. Makes more sense to actually own bitcoin itself, but for money stuck in TradFi circles BTC ETFs make for fantastic investments.

But Ether has much less of a visible use case than Bitcoin. Ethereum is the place where lots of fad crypto apps and random tokens and useless NFT pictures go. Even though the whole point of it being a smart contract platform is to use Ether MORE often than people use something that is simply a currency like Bitcoin, the fact that there isn't much reason to use anything built on Ethereum in the first place kinda makes it make more sense to hold Ether through an ETF simply to get the payout from staking. Of course that only works as long as people keep attempting to build stuff on Ethereum and the hype market for that continues. But if Ether ETFs get approved (which I think is realistically probably a few years away) TradFi getting access to a "bitcoin-like" thing that pays out ~3% annually income could actually be the most viable use case of Ethereum, far beyond any actual crypto-specific / smart contract use cases of Ethereum.

If there are enough people in TradFi who think Ethereum is close enough to Bitcoin that they should own it too, plus it comes with a payout like the dividends they are used to, that alone could keep Ethereum relevant even if the ETH ecosystem never really goes anywhere and just keeps being for fad-ish crypto experiments that pump and dump during Bitcoin-driven bull runs.

Anyway, interesting to think about. I personally own ETH at this point purely to make income from staking. I will just hold my ETH forever and use for passive income, never having to sell the capital base and pay taxes on that base. And that would be the use case of ETH ETFs, and may end up being the primary ETH use case in general. The question is, I suppose, is that enough, or are major applications gonna at some point have to be made on Ethereum for it to remain relevant and keep the price moving close to Bitcoin's trajectory.

So is making ~3% payout on a much less certain and more risky Ethereum enough to make it as big a hit or even a bigger hit with TradFi investors than Bitcoin is?

Bitcoin is currently undergoing a correction back to the $60,000s. Around $68k now, got down to $66k.


This is the time to buy before the bull run really gets going. This MIGHT be the lowest it gets. While a deeper fall during this correction, or another correction in the near future, is certainly possible, this might also be as low as it gets. After the near future, the only time it might get this low again is in like two years on the next bear market, and these prices may be the bottom of the bear market.


So anyone who has money sitting on the sidelines and who wants to buy Bitcoin, today is gonna likely be one of the lowest days we're gonna see for at least the next 18-24 months, and maybe forever! Buy!

About 20 seconds ago I just watched Bitcoin pass $69,000 on Coinbase.


Goodbye 2021 ATH, and welcome to the 2024/25 bull run!


Update: about a minute later its down under $68k haha

Fun question: how much bitcoin do you think the ETFs will accumulate by the bull run peak in 2025, and what price impact do you think that'll have on the market?

Only count the 10 ETFs excluding Grayscale since Grayscale already had a ton and then dumped a bunch and it just makes things messy.


As of end of last week (two and a half weeks of the ETF operating) the non-grayscale ETFs have accumulated just over 130,000 bitcoin.




I'd expect the amount of money coming into ETFs to naturally slow after the excitement of the launch is over, and as the price rises the same amount of money will buy fewer bitcoin. So I think ETFs could accumulate another 300k to 350k bitcoin by end of the market cycle, presumably sometime late next year, putting their total at about 500k bitcoin by that point. I think roughly another 100k first half of this year, roughly 100k second half of this year, and then another roughly 100k next year until market top since price will be much higher so it'll take a lot more money to get bitcoin.

Without ETFs I had been expecting this cycle's peak price to be $120k to $140k, but with now with ETFs I could see it potentially being more like $140k to $160k.


What do you all think? Your estimates cycle top price and for amount of btc held in ETFs by that point.

Supposedly we've only got a week until many people think the SEC will accept the first Bitcoin ETFs.

Do you think it'll actually happen? Or do you think it's just been a bunch of 'hopium' and the SEC is just gonna reject all the ETFs same as they've been doing for the past 5 years?



It seems like the SEC has actually been engaging in talks about ETFs with various interested parties so it at least does seem like for the first time the SEC is actually considering the possibility of accepting ETFs. But at the same time the head of the SEC, Gensler, is well known as a Bitcoin hater and he wants to see the entire industry destroyed in America. But the one thing Bitcoin ETFs have going for them despite Gensler opposition to Bitcoin is that Gensler and the SEC has come under increasing pressure from Congress and the courts to stop denying ETFs and stop standing in the way of the industry.

To me, it could go either way. Maybe Gensler stands firm in his opposition to Bitcoin and the crypto industry (though if he does he has gotta know the political and legal pressure on him is going to get a lot worse), or maybe he has been feeling enough pressure last year to just say the hell with it and allow an ETF despite his personal vendetta against Bitcoin.

What do you think? Are we just days away from Bitcoin ETFs getting accepted or is the whole market about to be in for a huge disappointment?

At the bookstore today I saw some book about the rise and fall of crypto. On the front cover it was saying crypto went mainstream in 2021 and then collapsed in 2022 culminating in the FTX collapse. The book was definitely partially about the FTX collapse, but it also referred to the entire market as having collapsed, hence the "Fall" part of rise and fall. The final sentence on the front cover mentioned something about the collective delusion that led to this rise and fall of the $3 trillion market.


It hit me that the author, who presumably did a lot of research into the industry in order to write the book, is basing his book on the idea that crypto has collapsed permanently after having a short moment in the mainstream in 2021 (though you coulda said the exact same thing about 2017).

I almost laughed out loud cuz here is an author that did enough research to write an entire book, far more research into the space than the average person does, and even the author doesn't understand what anyone who actually participates in the market easily understands - that the market is cyclical and the 2022 crash was not an end event for the industry but simply the end of a market cycle leading into the next larger market cycle.

Knowing that the market goes through four year cycles and each one is bigger and each big crash and bear market is just a temporary downturn before the market grows vastly larger than it previously was...this is extremely basic knowledge for everyone in the industry. But someone who wrote a whole book on the topic doesn't even understand that! It just really blew my mind. The author thought he was writing about the collapse of the market, yet he would be laughed out of the room by anyone with even a little understand of the market. What is it going to take to educate people on bitcoin and the crypto market?? Every four years its like the general public has a complete reset and thinks bitcoin is going through a bubble for the first time and then dies for good. And they completely forget that it did the same thing a few years earlier likely when they first heard about Bitcoin in 2017 (they probably don't know it had done it a few times before that too).

But just like how do we get the average person out of the repeating delusion that every bull run must be the last and every new bear market is bitcoin and crypto finally collapsing for good? Cuz I mean the average person legit thinks that bitcoin is over during each bear market, they literally think "oh I missed out on that bubble". A friend of mine even said that to me like a month ago, she asked what I had my money in and I told her Bitcoin and her response was oh I missed out on that. She just assumed that it was a one time bubble that was over.

How do we educate people that Bitcoin is a continuously growing global currency that is still in its early staged and each big boom and crash is just its early growing pains? Its just crazy to me that people see Bitcoin becoming more and more valuable and its much much more valuable than the few thousand dollars it was worth when they likely first heard about it in 2017 and yeah they all think it was just a bubble that has passed and they missed out and there's no reason in paying attention to it or owning it now. And then of course they'll be surprised in 2024/2025 when they start hearing about Bitcoin again but then by 2026 when the next bear market hits they'll forget all about the past market cycles and go back to thinking oh it was a bubble and is now dead.

I know the idea of Web5 is still brand new (I think maybe the first one or two Web5 apps came out recently or are about to come out), but being based on Bitcoin and other decentralized technology I think it seems like a much more firm basis to build a "web 3.0" crypto economy than the token/gambling focus of Web3.


Anybody on here looked into the Web5 concept a bunch? What are your thoughts?

I think Web3 is looking more and more like a failure. As it has ended up just focusing on silly useless NFT pictures and an endless creation of token gambling projects. The idea of Web5 seems to be more about actually building a decentralized app economy with Bitcoin as its currency, rather than the hodgepodge of endless fads and investment schemes that make up Web3. The idea of tokens I think is what will end up killing off the smart contract chains and Web3 - because instead of building useful things it just draws everyone (creators and consumers) into get-rich-quick money making schemes which ultimately fall apart because there is no substance to them. That's not how you build a sustainable economy. Crypto tokens makes the focus on money making schemes, rather than actual businesses. I'm not totally informed on Web5 but it seems to be the idea of making actual decentralized apps with decentralized identity and data storage with decentralized payments with Bitcoin.

The state house of North Carolina just passed a bill to study the idea of the state holding Bitcoin (as well as Gold).

https://cointelegraph.com/news/north-carolina-house-passes-bill-to-study-bitcoin-hodling


If this bill gets passed, and North Carolina does indeed start holding Bitcoin, that will be the start of what I see as inevitable - states/nations eventually holding bitcoin in reserve just as nations hold large amounts of gold in reserve. Hopefully they become the first state in the US to do this and others follow their lead. El Salvador of course has led the way for the world, but its good to see a US state starting to think about holding Bitcoin. States and nations will eventually join the race to accumulate bitcoin along with 'retail investors', the wealthy, financial firms, banks, and corporations.

Just a couple cool shares from this past week.
I was on vacation in Maui the past week and I saw this cool Bitcoin Bull in the window of a fine art metal shop.




Also went on a snorkeling boat tour and after it was over the guys running it asked for tips and named several ways they take tips including Bitcoin! First time I've ever personally experienced someone saying they take Bitcoin for payment (it was just for the tip, but still cool).

Just for fun, since this is the Speculation forum, when do you think Bitcoin will hit $1 million USD for the first time?


Presumably this will happen during a bull run and then it'll fall back below $1 million for a couple years, but what year do you think will be the first time we see $1 million bitcoin?

Personally I think it'll be during the 2036/2037 bull run, assuming the four year market cycles are still going on at that point. Though the 4 year cycle may have largely faded away by then, but somewhere around those years feels about right.

Do you all consider Bitcoin the best asset in the world or do you think there are other assets with as much potential for safe long term appreciation?

By best asset I mean potential for long term return on investment versus potential for risk. Return vs risk.

Just curious to see what people think.


Personally I think Bitcoin is easily the best asset in the world. Ethereum is probably the second best asset in the world but it is far riskier due to centralization and lack of clear purpose or utility and lots of possible future competition form other L1s and I think its days of growing significantly faster in price appreciation than Bitcoin are mostly over so the growth possibilities compared to the much greater risk I think leaves it far below Bitcoin when considering which is a better financial asset. I guess the one benefit it now has is income through staking but that isn't nearly enough to make up for the other disadvantages.

And beyond that I can't think of anything else that would even be in the conversation for best asset outside of like owning a really good rental property in a booming city but that is very specific and requires good financing and a fair bit of luck and work to accomplish.

Think of it this way, if you had to put all your money in a single asset, would you put it in anything but Bitcoin? I already made that decision years ago by putting just about all my money in Bitcoin. But how about you all? Where do you land on this question?

Bitcoin was easy to earn originally, you just had to have your PC run the mining software.

It is no longer easy because you have to spend thousands of dollars to buy a single ASIC miner to mine Bitcoin. That was the inevitable outcome of the economic competition that PoW creates.



How would you design a blockchain system that would prioritize ease of earning newly minted coins love the long term, rather than prioritizing the economic competition that Bitcoin's PoW does?




So the goal is that even after your theoretical cryptocurrency is very popular some years after it is introduced and lots of people are interested in earning coins through whatever system you set up, you need that system to allow them to do it easily/cheaply. Your average Joe should be able to reasonably participate in earning newly issued coins without large time or capital expenditure, including capital expenditure on investing which makes PoS not satisfy the requirement. Okay, go!

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5445086.0) about needing fiat to on-ramp into the Bitcoin ecosystem got me thinking.


What's the best way to remove the necessity of needing that fiat in-ramp (banks) to get into Bitcoin?

There's like in person p2p transactions but that is a hassle and can be dangerous. Since everyone's money is fiat generally we need fiat onramps to get into Bitcoin. But that is looking like it could be a potential weakness with govts trying to debank the crypto world a bit.

Specifically I was thinking about how a crypto altcoin could be designed that would allow people to own it without buying it. Basically an altcoin that is easy to earn, and is perhaps tied to identities or mobile devices, in which the whole point would just be to easily on-ramp people into crypto without fiat. This onramp altcoin could then be used on decentralized bitcoin exchanges to buy Bitcoin, all without ever relying on fiat/banks. The purpose of such an altcoin wouldn't necessarily be to accrue a lot of value in itself, but to at least have some reasonable value in the market to provide no only a reason to get it in the first place but to enable the liquidity of that value to be used by the people to buy bitcoin.

I was just thinking this would seem to be the best way to onramp people into Bitcoin without relying on fiat/bank onramps. Obviously such a crypto token would have to be designed in such a way that it couldn't be easily exploited, because the design would be to spread tokens easily to anyone in the public, but obviously have some sort of limiting way to get them so people can't just pick up tons of tokens, as in, they need to be limited enough that they have some sort of worth.




Anyway, for anyone interested in this though expirement, how would you go about designing such a crypto token?

The crucial things being:

1. Anyone can accumulate some of these tokens without needing to buy them, but there must be some sort of way to limit the accumulation, and stop the issuance mechanism from being hacked/spammed by interested parties.

2. It should take some sort of actual work, though it should be easy enough for anyone to do, this isn't an airdrop. There needs to be something done to promote an actual value here rather than just a free token.

3. How would the network be secured? It doesn't have to be all super decentralized, its okay if its a "centralized s**tcoin" because the point is just to easily onramp people into crypto without having to buy crypto. But the network needs to be secure enough so that it stays operational and afloat.

What sort of Bitcoin services would you like to see get built out? And what do you think is required for mass adoption, let's say onboarding the first billion people?


Bitcoin DEXs
I think we need large liquidity Bitcoin decentralized exchanges. DEXs are popular in the Ethereum ecosystem, but Bitcoin DEXs are very low volume and illiquid and therefore the prices are awful. We need to start seeing Bitcoin DEXs with many millions of dollars in volume per day and prices near market price to allow people to easily pick up bitcoin privately, rather than getting tracked by centralized exchanges.

Bitcoin-first online merchants
We also need a Bitcoin-first popular website. Someone needs to create Amazon for Bitcoin. Yes it'll be great when the already established e-commerce websites start accepting Bitcoin at naturally that is needed for mass adoption and acceptance of Bitcoin as a currency, but that could be many years off. In the meantime I'd like to see a successful bitcoin-first online shop open up so that it actually becomes easy for anyone to buy things online with bitcoin. I'm sure there are bitcoin online shops but there's no Amazon for bitcoin where people are like oh you want to buy things with Bitcoin just go here!

Decentralized Bitcoin lending
Probably also a decentralized collateralized lending platform. The lending platforms have gone out of business because they have been centralized companies. Non-collaterized lending with Bitcoin won't work because that requires legal enforcement, but collateralized works because that already involves financial enforcement (you don't get your more valuable Bitcoin back if you don't pay off the loan). I'd like to see a decentralized bitcoin lending protocol start giving people with much of their money in bitcoin options to leverage that wealth without getting rid of it and without risking it on a company that might fail.


What do you think? What other basic services do you think are needed in the Bitcoin ecosystem to make it better, more usable, and more ready to enable mass adoption?

Interesting question about the future. Bitcoin is humanity's money for the digital age. It's secure, decentralized, sovereign, global, open and hard money. There's nothing like it in the world and it is so hard to make something like this that after countless attempts the rest of the crypto world simply gave up on trying to be like Bitcoin and gave up on trying to be money and had to go the route of smart contracts/apps/tokens instead.


But, given that the digital age is just beginning, and presumably will last for the rest of humanity, do you think there could ever be a technology, whether in 50 years or 200 years or 5000 years or whatever, that could be better and more powerful money than Bitcoin and potentially replace Bitcoin?

Now I know there's gonna be people who say don't worry Bitcoin is good lol I'm not asking if Bitcoin is in trouble I'm asking how likely do you think it could ever be superceded. Gold lasted as the best money for all of humanity until we moved from metals to paper and to digital. Presumably there isn't something beyond digital technology but given that we are just at the start of the digital age what do you think? Would even a technically superior digital money be able to displace the network effects of Bitcoin? It would likely have to be far superior to Bitcoin to even have a chance, like the motto goes you have to be 10x better to beat the current competition. Would it even be possible for a later digital money technology to be THAT much better than Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself could certainly be better in a few ways, and of course is upgradable. But to make something better from scratch and no network would be something else.


What do you all think? Is Bitcoin the final money solution for humanity or do you think there is some possibility in the near or far distance future that there will be another 'bitcoin-like' moment in history where someone will revolutionize money all over again and create something so much better than Bitcoin that it overcomes Bitcoin's network effects?

If you could design Bitcoin from scratch today, how would you design it? What changes would you make?

Obviously Bitcoin is anchored into previous decisions by the effort to keep it immutably perfect hard money. So keeping that in mind, designing it to be immutable from today forward, building it from scratch today, what design changes would you make today?

We all know about the Lightning Network. And while it is great for handling enormous loads of transactions nearly instantly and at very low cost, it also has some tradeoffs like you can't take receive more Bitcoin than you've sent at any given state of your node, liquidity could sometimes be a problem at least until LN expands more, money can only be sent if the receiver's node is online, and the whole idea of needing watchtowers and needing to keep the current state of your channels so that your channel partners can't act in bad faith and try to steal from you.


LN is great but its not a perfect solution and in an ideal world for Bitcoin I figure there would be more L2 options for Bitcoin with different or maybe even fewer tradeoffs.


So I'm wondering are there any other L2 solutions for Bitcoin that are being worked on or have been proposed? I read in the Fall someone talking about rollups I think on Bitcoin, though I'm not clear about what rollups actually are, I think I just know of them because I've heard about them as L2 used on Ethereum. Lightning is the only L2 blockchain solution that I actually know how it works so I don't know what other sorts of L2 solutions have been invented and which ones could work on Bitcoin and which ones are possibly being worked on for Bitcoin.

You all know of anything besides Lightning?

Alright folks, unless there is another major crypto company/protocol collapse, the bottom is almost certainly in and there is a good chance Bitcoin will start rising out of this bottom range in a few months.

So now is the time to accumulate if you haven't started yet!



Who's gonna be DCA'ing into Bitcoin this Winter and Spring while prices are still super low?

I managed to pick up 0.5 BTC last year but I started a bit early before LUNA even collapsed so I had an average buy-in in the $24,000s.
But now Bitcoin has been sitting solidly in the mid-teens for a while so super cheap Bitcoin is ripe for the picking!

I just picked up 0.1 BTC today with my trading profits during these first nine days of the year.
Hoping to add well more than 0.5 BTC to my long term stash by the end of the year. My goal is to add 1 BTC total between 2023 and 2024 before the bull market really starts cooking again.

For those of you still trying to build out a Bitcoin stash you can be happy with, including those of you trying to get up to being a whole-coiner, this will likely be the last year you can make significant progress on that as it'll start getting real hard to accumulate tenths of a bitcoin when the price is mid five figures, high five figures, and in the six figures.

Who is accumulating and how much are you hoping to add to your stash this year?

Anyone else love how cheap Bitcoin tx fees get during bear markets?

I just sent my first transaction in a while and it cost all of 38 cents (1921 sats).

Critics complain Bitcoin is all expensive to use, except when a bull market isn't actively going on fees are cheap. I remember last bear market fees got down to the 5-10 cent range. Not too far from there at this point.

I paid a 0.0063% fee on my transaction! Last time I sent a transaction when fees were higher about a year ago I paid a 0.001% fee (but that was me moving most of my bitcoin). Meanwhile whenever I go fill up on gas I'm getting charged about 2.9% extra for using a credit card....ahhh legacy systems!