If you hold long enough and the chain keeps working, then probably yes. However, this 10x return is guaranteed against the dollar and not real value. The gov. is committed to devaluing currency over a long period of time.
This is definitely true but btc buys you more of almost anything else too (btc/X): X is one of s&p500, housing, gold, etc. except maybe $nvda or $tsla. For example the btc chart in dollars looks the same as in gold.
A part of the valuation comes from miners who gets their returns cut by half every ~4 years. They have an interest in having the price (at least) double by then.
How much work have you put into having the value of your house double every four years? How many people are invested in your house appreciating like that? If your house appreciates, do a bunch of bankers and hedge funds also get rich along the way? How many politicians have you taken to lunch and on ski trips with the proceeds from the last time you sold half of your house when the price doubled?
But it has been a bubble and popped/crashed/recovered 4(?) times now - it seem fair to start considering it as a cycle rather than a bubble. I don’t know much about crypto or finance, so maybe I’m completely wrong
I wonder if it is something about it feeling like the digital future. As long as the future never arrives, there's always some potential? Other bubbles were pegged to more well-defined trends?
There's nothing future about bitcoin. It exist today, works well today, you can use it for payments, buy a house and in some places pay off your debt or credit card.
You want to own something? You need to be capable of keeping it safe. If not entrust it to someone who is and hope they don't steal it.
The same goes for everything in life.
The fiat banking system has demonstrated what it does when we trust it with our fiat money. It steals it (through zero-reserve banking aka infinite debasement).
With bitcoin I can audit the wallet they hold for me at any time (public keys) and know that they can't debase it.
I don't believe it is zero-sum.. Or at least, not rigourously. I feel the Market Capitalization of BTC must have been bootstrapped at some extent. It seems impossible to me that the sum total of what people have paid to have their BTCs to be more than $2.02T. In other words, the value the market gives it has given value to BTC out of nowhere.
Each transaction has a buyer and a seller. So in that sense it is a zero sum game. However the total market cap can go up and down and create value out of nothing (just like stocks).
It is really negative sum game. As there is constant drain from mining, in buying and then operating equipment. Lot of that is not recovable and do not actually improve anything.
A transaction is zero sum, the market is net positive. For the market to be zero sum, the market cap would have to be constant. If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.
I would have to agree beforehand that the share is worth $2, or else I wouldn't have bought it from you at that price. Somehow the share was already $2 before you sold it to me, but you got it for $1, how come? Your example is nonsensical.
> If I buy something from someone for $1 then sell it to you for $2, I gained a dollar and you own a share that's worth $2.
It's easy to see that this is nonsense: I could buy a widget from someone for $1, then turn around and sell it to my brother for $10000, does that really mean the widget is now magically worth $10000, and we doubled our collective holdings? No, what actually happened is that we together still have that same $10000, plus a worthless $1 widget.
Once again, the trade is within the context of a market and the market values the "widget", Apple Stock, Oz of gold or whatever as whatever people are willing to pay for it. That's how markets work. Individual Opinions are largely irrelevant.
