I hope that people who got in last year or earlier this year are starting to sell some of their bitcoins, at least enough to cover the cost basis. I wouldn't be surprised to see a very sharp fall soon.
Unless these people have invested extra money they can afford to lose for the reasons to save them from inflation and confiscation. Then they still have enough cash to pay the bills, so why should they get back to fiat?
E.g. I myself and many of people I know are not going to sell a single Bitcoin unless any sort of personal or global disaster. And many of them are going to spend their BTC over time to avoid interaction with banking system as much as possible.
99% of the people who ultimately argue about avoiding the banking system engage in behavior that is either morally questionable or explicitly illegal. I'd say about 1% are true "what i do with my money is my business and my business only" libertarians
I guess I indeed missed this recent confiscate event. Can you point me to where I can read about it?
Last major financial disaster I've heard about is Cyprus. Where people deposited money in the banks, the banks gambled with the money and lost it. Which is "slightly" different than confiscation. The involvement of "governments" and "entities" only helped the depositors to lose less of their money.
Bitcoin is vulnerable too. A dedicated effort by collaborating governments could destroy or severely damage Bitcoin, by e.g. blocking the protocol, seizing powerful hashing equipment, downing exchange websites, performing a 51% attack, and so on.
This notion that Bitcoin is some robust, untamperable currency system is simply incorrect.
Or just make things uncomfortable for the people changing coins for other currencies.
It's sort of interesting how the liquid dollar market for bitcoins makes it impossible to judge whether someone accepting bitcoins as payment trusts it much.
Precious metals are not easy: either you store it somewhere where people ask questions and can block your access to it, or you store it in your pocket and cannot easily spend portion of it when you need.
And the spread between bid/ask in the real world is large. Unless you own "paper" metals, you aren't exchanging them for the rates you see on the ticker.
That may not be a good idea. The SR pegs are based on a moving average, so even if the vendor you're buying from priced his goods to the dollar, you may well still be overpaying. (And given how fast the exchange rate has increased, if the vendor did not peg to the dollar, you'll probably be overpaying a ton.)
