Van Eck The Investment Case for Bitcoin

[fillippone]

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Bitcoin is still in beta, as they say.

I tend to agree with this.
Even if I am a true Bitcoiner Believer, I think this experiment has just been started, and there are a lot of proofs to be secured before we can call it "complete.
Gold has been ruling SoV function since millennia in human history.
Bitcoin, digital gold, has been with us only a little bit more than 10 years.

There are a lot of things to make Bitcoin perfect that are going to be added in the coming decades, and we are just at the beginning of the story.
For sure institutional investors are looking at the price only, but there is so much more than this.
And there is space for everyone, I would also say.
 

[amishmanish]

I hope that the really huge, mainstream institutions don't jump into the fray. Once they get in, what is the utility aspect that remains for bitcoin to continue to grow upon?? Bitcoin hasn't realized any of its potential till now. It is not yet established as a transactions alternative due to scaling issues. There hasn't been enough open source products based on bitcoin that have gained huge user bases.

The single use case that is being touted is Digital Gold. I don't think thats enough or irreplacable if institutions takeover in a big way.

The market is pricing in future utility, future adoption. Just like it's now pricing in fiat devaluation by buying up hard assets and risk assets, long before real inflation sets in.

Speculators gonna speculate.

Doesn't mean Layer 2 scaling solutions (Lightning, Liquid, RSK, etc.) won't get better, or won't be adopted. It's just that investors have a way of front running high growth investments, before they fully materialize.

Bitcoin is still in beta, as they say.

That is a way to look at it i suppose. Nkw that you mentioned it, i guess its much like the Tesla stock where Tesla's market cap against that of other comlanies combined is becoming a meme. "Pricing in future utility". Great point. Where do they teach this stuff??

Personally I am excited about the L2 use cases and features like streaming payments becoming a norm for small artists, investors, bloggers and small businesses.

RSK sounds exciting because of the prospect of smart contracting, which Simplicity was gonna do it but we never bear much about them. Plus smart contracts have really been taken up by ETH and the DeFi community in a much bigger way.

[sana54210]

You should also focus on the rankings of it and the giving points. Bitcoin as a potential store of value gets 3 while bitcoin adoption gets 18 instead, I think that is half true. Sure there is bitcoin adoption is a lot higher these days but that doesn't mean that bitcoin store of value is not really that bad, it is doing awesome.

Look at Grayscale and Microstrategy for example, they have decided that they are an investment firm with some money at the side that they are not investing at the time, and said "why don't we put this money into bitcoin instead of keeping it in dollars" because they normally did that, had dollars until they found a place to invest it, but since they turned it into bitcoin they have managed to over double their profit, how could that not prove the world that bitcoin as a store of value is something everyone should consider.

[fillippone]

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Look at Grayscale and Microstrategy for example, they have decided that they are an investment firm with some money at the side that they are not investing at the time, and said "why don't we put this money into bitcoin instead of keeping it in dollars" because they normally did that, had dollars until they found a place to invest it, but since they turned it into bitcoin they have managed to over double their profit, how could that not prove the world that bitcoin as a store of value is something everyone should consider.

Of course Microstrategy choice was right, ex post, given the surge in pricing. We have to think about the SoV function in Bitcoin: for sure it is going to be fulfilled in the long run, but in my personal opinion the volatility is too high to be considered a good store of Value. Of course you can object that s long the drift is so positive, you can neglect volatility, but still, this is the major obstacle, together with track record, for Bitcoin to be considered a true Store of Value.

[jaysabi]

If we're talking about diversifying an investment portfolio, then Bitcoin should be one of the best options.

The fact that Bitcoin is giving good results during the previous years really is something to consider.
Michael Saylor does have a reputation in finance already, that's why people and even institutions will trust what he envisions. That is basically it in my own opinion.

Michael Saylor’s reputation isn’t one I’d be touting. He’s been notably prescient in his bitcoin timing, but his huge blunders stick out more in my mind when it comes to reputation. In 2000, he settled a case with the SEC for inaccurately reporting MicroStrategy’s performance for several years and paid a penalty of $350,000 and paid further disgorgement of about another $8 million for his behavior. Earlier this year, he published a rant against social distancing despite the fact that the world being ravaged by a global pandemic. The guy has hit it big with bitcoin, but he’s not exactly trustworthy or a paradigm of enlightened thought outside of bitcoin. And his constantly hyping bitcoin at this point cannot be separated from his financial incentives to do so and can no longer be considered to be a point on principal. It’s a very unpopular opinion around here, but Saylor definitely seems slimey to me. Shilling for Musk to get Tesla to put some of its cash into bitcoin is the most recent example when it makes zero sense for Tesla to do so due to the extreme capital needs of that company, which Saylor should know (or else he’s not as smart as everyone claims) so his effort was solely about pumping the price of bitcoin for his own financial benefit. The guy is just a constant salesman, and I hate that he’s Bitcoin’s great champion right now.