It's becoming increasingly necessary to split the "making the internet work properly" faction from the "holy shit free money" faction in the crypto-currency situation. THERE IS NO FREE MONEY. There's only risk: if we can't make the global economy more efficient, your BTC hits $0
Let me give this to you on the back of an envelope. Global trade is, say, $50tn. That's physical goods. If BTC etc. make global trade 1% more efficient, that's worth $500bn. A year. But for that to happen, people have to be selling cars and office buildings using the blockchain.
If we aren't getting the mainstream industrial/financial economy to use blockchains to make the underlying global economy more efficient, this is just a bubble, and the blowout will be *devastating*.
It's going to take prolonged, targeted investment to get the global econ shift.
It's going to take prolonged, targeted investment to get the global econ shift.
All this volatility is basically caused by a lack of fundamentals: BTC is basically pure risk - either the long game works, and it's under-priced, or the long game fails and it's worth zip. Tides of emotion and guess work blow the price around like a carrier bag in a gale.
You don't get price stability until the industrial uses of BTC etc. can be measured. "We could pay by wire and it'll take three days, or blockchain and 5 minutes." That, or track-and-trace etc. are why businesses would choose to pay in crypto. But prices have to be more stable.
I cannot stress this too much. Until there's a large mainstream industrial user base for crypto, the entire ecosystem is at huge risk. This is why @sweetbridgeinc is so important: they've *absolutely* nailed all the thinking around the industrial case. I learned most of this here
This is not a complex argument once you see it: the value of BTC etc. depend on it being more efficient in some aspect of global trade than USD. If that isn't true anywhere, eventually the value will drop: store of value only works if there is demand for the underlying assets.
