His arguments for investing in it in 2011 made sense but in 2020 they no longer do.<p>- Past performance has plateaued for years.<p>- Use cases are niche instead of regular transactions.<p>- Since the use cases are niche there is few uptake drivers.
Interestingly, past performance of the last 9 years did not change much in terms of perception:<p>1. People who believe that Bitcoin can eat the world, do not care when it goes up and down. Periodic rallies are unsurprising and upper limit is still to be reached (at very least, the entire mass of gold - about $8 trillion). It's still early and cheap at current $200 bln capitalization.<p>2. People who do not buy the premise ("displace fiat and physical moneys"), or don't think that Bitcoin is going to deliver ("something better will come along"), do not care about the price either - it's just a giant bubble waiting to pop.<p>3. Plus a crowd of short-term speculators who are no different than Forex people, just with higher volatility at hand.
If bitcoin were as useful as pundits suggested, we'd be using it by now. 12 years is a long time to validate an idea. The mobile phone was adopted by pretty much the entire world in under 7 years.
He bought in at $3, and as of 2017 he had a 1000x return on his investment. Today that would be circa 3000x.<p><a href="https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-3000-1000x-entry-point-six-years-ago/" rel="nofollow">https://falkvinge.net/2017/06/11/right-money-bitcoin-hits-30...</a><p>Interestingly, he was very wrong about the 2nd reason to buy BTC (it hasn't exactly replaced the existing financial system), but the other two -- past performance and "civil liberties" (for drugs, ransomware etc) were close enough.
> Use case: the key advantage for bitcoin is that it does away with all bureaucracy, all transaction fees, and perhaps foremost, all transaction delays and gatekeepers in the financial system.<p>Can anybody comment on the state of this today, right now?<p>Personally it seems like bitcoin would involve _more_ bureaucracy and delays for me than using the regular banking system. However I'm sure I'm not representative.<p>Are there other situations where bitcoin does, <i>right now</i>, reduce bureaucratic overhead?
It's not clear why the article is claiming that there are no transaction fees in Bitcoin, my understanding was that high transaction fees was one of the main reason that Steam, for example, dropped Bitcoin support (I think it was something to the tune of several dollars per transaction, targeting for the transaction to be finalized in <30 minutes?).
I guess diversification is for losers, then?<p><i>Even if</i> Bitcoin were the best investment out there, putting all of one's savings into one asset is gambling. If one has financial responsibility to/for others (e.g. dependents or clients) it's malfeasance. Even the people with the very best ability to predict the future hedge those bets.