Here is a point-by-point factual enhancement:
1. Timing
The important feature of timing is… you need money for something. These things come and go and go up and down. Same thing with Bitcoin. It goes up and down. It largely stayed flat for most of its history until 2017. That’s about the period that Asia discovered crypto and went all-in on it. This then led to a period that lasted until late 2020 during which you could flip a coin to figure out whether it was going up or down and, DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU NEEDED REAL MONEY LIKE NORMAL HUMAN BEINGS, lost a lot or gain a lot. You know, like Vegas. Starting in late 2020 (notably when the pandemic was spreading and deepening worldwide) there was a fairly steep rise to new heights. What will happen next, but don’t be certain that HODLRing is really going to work out. But, HODLRing has that feature that means NEVER SELL, so your savings strategy is a pure belief system. We’ll see.
2. Supply and Demand
First of all, there is no such thing as “infinite demand”. Hard to say if the author is just fooling with your attention span. Yes, corrupt governments and “international conglomerates” (hard to tell who that really is referring to, but..) run by eccentric egoists who can manipulate people and some institutions…
And when you see the phrase: “…is going to be like nothing we’ve ever witnessed before” recalls a certainly US politician.
3. Scarcity
Scarcity can be a value enhancer. But this exact feature of crypto that is wholly idiosyncratic. There are LOTS of crypto coins and some that are even more constrained that Bitcoin or Ethereum. But they are worth nothing. Bitcoin and Ethereum were first movers and, like every MLM or Ponzi scheme have more adherents and promoters. Just a little while ago you couldn’t give away Dogecoin and with a little promotion by a widely known egocentric manipulator overnight become known. Scarcity without value is just scarcity. And value is one of the most idiosyncratic of human influences.
4. The Blockchain
The original patent for Merkle Tree data structure is 42 years old. It spent much of its life searching for a purpose until a modest modification and application by “Satoshi” has turned mediocre technology into something. And blockchain is not a protocol, it’s a data structure, but hey, the writer ain’t technical. Everything else said is either irrelevant, not true or uninformed hype. And the main purpose he vaunts –“immutability” – is a feature of several data storage appliances. And the good thing about these, they support microsecond latency and high throughput and you can spread them around very easily and they are uncrackable.
4.1. The Blockchain – “Decentralized”
This is a fiction. If your strict definition is “not in one place”, ok. But the falsehood pushed by the “community” ignores the fact that not just PoW platforms are vulnerable, so are all the other variants: PoS, PoR, etc.) These are human systems which means there are humans who can change the code. You many not need to worry about a cabal of node-runners, but you do need to fear a blackmailed team of coders. And then there is infrastructure that is needed (TCP/IP internode networking most of all). This belongs to whatever country/company makes it available and, as in the case of China, can say what can run where. There’s more, but this is enough to take away the fantasy of decentralization. And, no, DFinity (https://jsadove.medium.com/dfinity-the-apotheosis-of-decentralization-is-here-59fc50a0ca7e) is paradoxically even more centralized.
5. Network Effect
True, Bitcoin is the first mover and has had that advantage. But it has so many problems… 8 minute transaction completion duration, 66% concentration of mining in one totalitarian country, the fact that concentration requires only one black-swan event and game over. The fact that the overwhelming majority of ownership is mediated through the conventional financial system means that a run on a valueless asset is a huge likelihood. Right now the drop is due to suddenly China enforcing the laws against crypto that have been on the books since 2017: https://www.mondaq.com/china/fin-tech/944330/regulation-of-cryptocurrency-in-china
6. FOMO
The last thing anyone should do is carry out an action based on FOMO. That was the mechanism that Bernie Madoff based his illustrious career on. And every other Ponzi scheme.
7. FIAT money
The notion that inflation matters absolutely is the same as saying being rich is the route to happiness. Inflation has been around since the modern age in advanced democratic countries. And there has been only one instance where it mattered, the Weimar Republic. You know post-WW1 when Germany a) was forced to pay vast reparations and had little control over its own economy. Elsewhere, it’s plain mismanagement. But the biggest deception about this supposed evil is that inflation with wages and prices keeping pace in a well-managed economy is what has given the world (in the form of the western liberal democracies) the greatest advance in human living standards ever. Inflation, Schminflation, in other words.
Conclusion.
The biggest institutional investor, Michael Saylor settled with the SEC for fraudulent accounting and runs a company whose revenues have declined every year since 2014, so that he is resorting to BTC to pump up his company’s value is not surprising. He’s run out of ideas and like so many others, looks to the casino as a way to save themselves.
