I don't know. I remember a few years ago when people on reddit would get excited when some cafe in Bratislava or wherever started accepting bitcoin, or when Steam started accepting bitcoin. Now cryptocurrencies seem... boring. I see lots of people talking about "store of value", but actual use of bitcoin for what it was intended seems to be decreasing. And now people who want to gamble can just buy NKLA or SPCE or options on zero-fee brokers, which weren't a thing when bitcoin hit all-time high.
This is just my impression as an outsider, of course.
Don't think you ever would? Opinions can change rapidly when you're struggling to buy food.The article's thesis isn't really that the utility of Bitcoin will increase, it's that the utility of the dollar (its primary competition) will decrease. If your dollars will be worth half tomorrow, it's a no-brainer to get rid of them ASAP and put your money in a currency that isn't being printed rapidly.
In the states, using crypto is a taxable event. Until that is changed, they can only be stores of value, not currency, as I have no interest in recording every transaction with the IRS. I don't see a differentiation within cryptos coming from USG, so the crypto ecosystem can only be one or the other?
Pension funds and other financial institutions. These were either locked out or didn't believe in bitcoin. If you were a Pension fund now you're probably keeping an eye on the space to help your returns.
Last bubble they didn't, this time, we will see.
Just to add here, the transaction fees you have to pay are highly variable, see chart fee chart for the last 30 days[1]. As of this posting the market clearing rate for a typical transaction is about 0.000325 BTC[2], or around $3.73. However, a few hours ago it was as low as 0.000005 BTC for a typical transaction, or around ($0.058).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/FYpGpES.png
[2] a random google search says a typical bitcoin transaction 250 bytes. this is a different unit than the one in the linked chart, which uses satoshis (0.00000001 BTC) per byte.
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc,eth_left=FeeTotUSD...
Look at the Ethereum space. That's where most of the action is these days. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the current hype. The ETH2 phase 0 is projected to go live later this year (this time for real :-). 60% of Tether is an ERC20 token now. etc.
Oh, and if you are interested in drama and have missed it, look up the Quadriga story. That story is so unbelievable whacky, no screen writer would have been able to come up with it.
Ethereum does have a lot of really interesting things going on that are super cool. But I wouldn't take this to mean that Bitcoin isn't developing or that it has somehow become stodgy or less relevant.
Bitcoin's developments are more the field of payments, decentralization, and privacy. These parts are not flashy, but are absolutely fundamental for its usability as money and store-of-value in the future.
The biggest differentiation though is that Bitcoin has an explicit inflation rate while Ethereum actually has no specific monetary policy at all. It is up to the devs and its scarcity could be undermined.
They're both extremely interesting for different reasons, but for those of us who got into crypto through economic reasoning about the gold standard, scarcity, government control of the money supply, etc. - the things many have seen for a really long time as the problems at hand - Bitcoin is by far more directly addressing them.
It's "boringness" at the moment means these objectives and economic motivations are becoming more agreeable.
No. Look at Bitcoin first.
If Bitcoin fails altcoins will most certainly fail too. There is a reason why Bitcoin does not change that much, it has to be safe and trusted for storing value. It is not a "move fast and break things" project.
> Look at the Ethereum space. That's where most of the action is these days. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the current hype.
Bitcoin is DeFi (Decentralized Finance), if anything.
"Finance" is much more than just payments or store of value. Bitcoin is way behind Ethereum in that regard.
Of course, that doesn't matter if you don't think that decentralized finance makes sense to have.
Proof-of-stake replaces this massive electricity waste with game theory. Every validator must put up a deposit (in ETH) to participate. If it cheats, it loses that deposit. The damage it can do to the network is limited to less than the deposit. Therefore, it's never profitable to cheat - and so they won't, or if they do, they will go bankrupt, remove themselves from the network, and self-limit the problem. And transaction validation can now be split among thousands of nodes (instead of having those thousands of nodes all validate the same PoW), which means the network can scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
