It is amazing to think that only a few years ago you could take an old laptop, download a miner, stick it in a closet and it would spit out something now worth a quarter of a million dollars every few days. There are a lot of problems with Bitcoin. If you look at my comment history you will see I am pretty down on it for all sort of reasons I won't go into at the moment. However sometimes you just have to take a step back and admire how crazy impressive it is that Bitcoin has reached this point.
Disclaimer: I'm invested in Ethereum, and not Bitcoin. There is no good reason that Bitcoin is still going up once Ethereum came on the scene. Transaction times, transaction cost, decentralization, future development work, consensus under one leader all favor Ethereum. The only reason I see for Bitcoin to still be strong is that it has name recognition and first mover advantage. People talk about "Bitcoin" and "cryptocurrency" as synonyms. If you want to "get into cryptocurrency" you buy Bitcoin. I think this is a bad thing, but I don't know what it means. Anyone have any insight with a differing opinion as to why I am wrong? Does anyone know a good reason (technical or economic) Bitcoin is going up while Ethereum is not?
ITT: effective consensus that the utility of Bitcoin today is its popularity in the "gray" (or black) market.<p>How does anyone not believe this is a bubble which will burst as previous ones have, at the first sign of the next inevitable crack down?<p>Blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin at its current value is surpassing poppy level speculative inflation.<p>I get the notion of accepting high risk of loss and incredible transactional friction when trying to move back to a fiat currency.... but only for people who are either desperate to exfiltrate funds etc.<p>For everyone else it seems like a comically bad time to be buying in. Beyond comical, really.
Years ago my boyfriend at the time said "hey we should buy some of these bitcoins, they're only a few pennies each, it'll be fun!" Boy do I regret missing that boat...
I am really curious if the situation will be the same after November. At the moment it seems people are eager to buy into Bitcoin in order to have the extra chain that will come out of the forking as Bitcoin Gold.<p>The precedent with Bitcoin Cash was bad in this aspect, because it created a valued blockchain (albeit of lower value!) out of the blue. People want this to happen again.<p>Invention of the money tree... :)