I think it was one of the better from mainstream media: no more doom and gloom, or Bitcoin is a scam that is going nowhere. This time, the Economist, is recognising that until there are two people in the world that believe it has value, Bitcoin will exist. It might not reach the moon, but it will not reach zero anytime soon.
They call it the cockroach theory, and I believe it is a massively underrated feature. As much as this forum would like it to be stamped out, for some irrational reason, Bitcoin is here to stay, like it or not. It's just a piece of technology after all.
Does it matter? That's (mostly, in terms of its value) true of gold too for example.
I'm not a BTC/cryptocurrency fan or proponent (though I read the paper, was interested, mined as it was profitable at the time, and still hold some just as ~part of a diverse portfolio~ FOMO) but it's here, it exists, people can and do profit from it or store their wealth there - more volatily than gold, historically, sure, but it's not completely stupid and it's clear at this point it's not going to just go away.
That’s not strictly true (I’m pretty rented housing fits the definition of a productive asset) and certainly not true at all when compared to bitcoin or gold
Are you classifying it as productive because you can receive compensation (rent) for lending someone your house? That's true for all property. In the case of money (which includes bitcoin and gold), it's called interest.
not necessarily true: many social phenomena stick, and later you can find usage for them. Gold was mainly a social thing for a long time (embellishing armors and weapons) before some usage was find (connectors and other stuff). This may, or may not, happen for cryptocurrencies even if they aren't very useful today.
> Gold was mainly a social thing for a long time (embellishing armors and weapons)
Gold’s role as an instrument for storing and transferring was infinitely more important than that. And it worked quite well at that before stable and competent governments were a thing. It was extremely useful (much more than it is today)
do you have any source on that? I got none, just my opinion formed over time. Might be wrong. If that's the case, I'll restate it as follows. I don't see why a technology that bears no initial utility couldn't find it in the future. Again, I'm not sayign it's definitely the case with Bitcoin. Using cryptography in some clever way to record transactions though... but yes, some hype is definitely misplaced.
> The second reason is that, with each boom-and-bust cycle, it becomes clearer crypto is not a bubble like tulip mania in the 1630s or the craze for Beanie Babies in the 1990s. Although bitcoin is a volatile asset, its price history looks more like a mountain range than a single peak, and appears closely correlated with tech stocks. Yet it is only moderately correlated with the broader market. An asset that swings up and down, and not in parallel with other things people might have in a portfolio, can be a useful diversifier.
> That bitcoin has established itself as a serious asset seems to be the source of the latest surge.
If this doesn't sound like some naysayers finally turning around in order to not look too stupid later in retrospect, then what?
I don't know what it is, but to answer your question: This could be people who were either burned so badly that they're not abandoning their assets due to a sunk-cost fallacy, or those who think they'll benefit from another round of pump-and-dump.
As long as the sha256 snake doesn't bite its tail, everything will be fine, unless someone finds an exportable weakness in your algorithm, brute force collisions are still pretty unlikely. Well, one of the challenges is also surviving solar storms. I don't know about you but I prefer something tangible that is physically in my possession and at the same time is cryptographic without electronic components (Impossible really, whoever achieves it is a new god)
> I don't know about you but I prefer something tangible that is physically in my possession
That comes with serious drawbacks, the primary one being exchanging it with other people (1000 miles away for example). You'd be paying a heavy price just so that you're able to physically touch it.
1) solar storm destroys your country. It would wipe the traditional finance sector. Servers. Backups. Records. All destroyed. How do we restore everyone’s wealth to what is was?
2) solar storm destroys your country. You hold bitcoin so you either wait for electricity to be restored. Or migrate to another country.
Solar storms won't kill computers, they aren't EMPs but magnetic storms that induce currents in coils. It'll destroy power utilities that could take months to years to repair.
Your comment has about the same amount of relevancy to a generic Bitcoin story as saying "9/11 never forget" in the comments of a story about Boeing airplanes.
It misses more interesting aspects or theories about bitcoin - it’s scarcity or how it supposedly incentivises clean energy.
It also misses an obvious reason it’s pumping which is the looming approval of the ETF’s supposedly in January.