Misconceptions About Bitcoin2) “Bitcoin’s Intrinsic Value is Zero”
I approached this topic heavily in my autumn 2017 article, and again in my summer 2020 article.
To start with, digital assets can certainly have value. In simplistic terms, imagine a hypothetical online massive multiplayer game played by millions of people around the world. If there was a magical sword item introduced by the developer that was the strongest weapon in the game, and there were only a dozen of them released, and accounts that somehow got one could sell them to another account, you can bet that the price for that digital sword would be outrageous.
Bitcoin’s utility is that it allows people to store value outside of any currency system in something with provably scarce units, and to transport that value around the world. Its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, solved the double-spending problem and crafted a well-designed protocol that has scarce units that are tradeable in a stateless and decentralized way.
In terms of utility, try bringing $250,000 worth of gold through an international airport vs bringing $250,000 worth of bitcoins with you instead, via a small digital wallet, or via an app on your phone, or even just by remembering a 12-word seed phrase. In addition, Bitcoin is more easily verifiable than gold, in terms of being a reserve asset and being used as collateral. It’s more frictionless to transfer than gold, and has a hard-capped supply. And I like gold too; I’ve been long it since 2018, and still am.
Bitcoin is a digital commodity, as Satoshi envisioned it:
As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold but with the following properties:
– boring grey in colour
– not a good conductor of electricity
– not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either
– not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose
and one special, magical property:
– can be transported over a communications channel
If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it.
-Satoshi Nakamoto, August 2010
Compared to every other cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has by far the strongest network effect by an order of magnitude, and thus is the most secure in terms of decentralization and the amount of computing power and expense that it would take to try to attack the network. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies, but none of them have been able to rival Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization, decentralization, ubiquity, firm monetary policy, and network security combined.
Some other tokens present novel privacy advancements, or smart contracts that can allow for all sorts of technological disruption on other industries, but none of them are a major challenge to Bitcoin in terms of being an emergent store of value. Some of them can work well alongside Bitcoin, but not in place of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the best at what it does. And in a world of negative real rates within developed markets, and a host of currency failures in emerging markets, what it does has utility. The important question, therefore, is how much utility.
The pricing of that utility is best thought of in terms of the whole protocol, which is divided into 21 million bitcoins (each of which is divisible into 100 million sats), and combines the asset itself with the means of transmitting it and verifying it. The value of the protocol grows as more individuals and institutions use it to store and transmit and verify value, and can shrink if fewer folks use it.
The total market capitalization of gold is estimated to be over $10 trillion. Could Bitcoin reach 10% of that? 25%? Half? Parity? I don’t know.
I’m focusing on one Bitcoin halving cycle at a time. A four-year outlook is enough for me, and I’ll calibrate my analysis to what is happening as we go along.
бесплатные bitcoin Instead, the effects of increasing the money supply are transmitted, over time, through an expansion of the credit system. The credit system attempting to contract is the market and the individuals within an economy adjusting and re-pricing value; the Fed attempting to reverse that natural course by flooding the market with dollars is, by definition, overriding the market’s price setting function, fundamentally altering the structure of the economy. The market solution to the problem is to reduce debt (expression of preference) and the Fed’s solution is to increase the supply of dollars such that existing debt levels can be sustained. The goal is to stabilize the credit system such that it can then expand, and it is a redux to the 2008 financial crisis, which provides a historical roadmap. In the immediate aftermath of the prior crisis, the Fed created $1.3 trillion new dollars in a matter of months. Despite this, the dollar initially strengthened as deflationary pressures in the credit system overwhelmed the increase in the money supply, but then, as the credit system began to expand, the dollar’s purchasing power resumed its gradual decline. At present, the cause and effect of the Fed’s monetary stimulus is principally transmitted through the credit system. It was the case in the years following the 2008 crisis, and it will hold true this time so long as the credit system remains intact.bitcoin satoshi bitcoin p2p bitcoin miner bitcoin wordpress ethereum монета A peer-to-peer network that removes the need for trusted third parties;Protection from accidental lossbitcoin отследить tether usdt claymore monero bitcoin today bitcoin акции bitcoin прогноз bitcoin вконтакте xpub bitcoin кошель bitcoin bitcoin check sgminer monero bitcoin mining bitcoin banks курс tether продам bitcoin kurs bitcoin decred ethereum reddit bitcoin китай bitcoin bistler bitcoin monero калькулятор bitcoin математика заработать ethereum monero minergate биржа ethereum 1080 ethereum настройка ethereum bitcoin in