Are we excited yet?

Did anyone else read the article by McWilliams in yesterday's IT? https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/03/09/david-mcwilliams-bitcoins-real-value-is-based-on-the-greater-fool-theory/

It's dreadful stuff.. full of lazy analysis, cliches and inaccuracies. He seems to have totally forgotten the interview he did with Saylor a while ago where he seemed to have accepted BTC as an asset rather than a currency.

Not worth the time reading, btc bad, no value sums it up, feels like he's picked paragraphs from other places

BTC is both assset and currency, just like gold. The fact that both are currently more used for one purpose than the other doesn't alter their intrinsic nature. Portugal and several other countries and several US states consider BTC to be a currency.

A Georgian piece of furniture is an asset, you can't pay for things or transfer bits of it as payment, which you readily can do with BTC if the recipient accepts it.

As for McWilliams, I havent seen anything coming from him that could remotely explain why he seems to be held in such regard, other than he's Irish.

It seems during a bull cycle there are categories that usually do well, and most within that category will take off. Last time it was decentralised finance, this time the categories seems to be AI and also seeing DePin mentioned a lot lately, others can probably throw in more categories.

Still a gamble and wouldn’t want to throw money in there that can’t afford to be lost entirely.

Right lads I reckon we are in for an interesting week. A proper break of 70k or maybe a rejection?

I always find these moments more stressful than buying in big red days

Keep in mind cigarettes in prison can be used as "currency".

BTC can be used as a type of money, like other similar divisible items, but that's not to be confused for automatic suitability as a currency.

We could hypothetically pay for things in e.g. Tesla shares, but we don't for obvious reasons. The same applies to BTC, where it's more commonly used as a speculative asset. 99% of it's use is in speculative trading.

For example, think of buying a house with BTC, before you've finished signing the contract it could have moved up to 10% against the buyer or seller, paralysing the sale. Sometimes excuses are used (it'll stabilise with "time", "market cap", "adoption") but this is why, apart from novelty purchases, we liquidise our assets into something relatively stable (e.g. cash) before making purchases.

Somewhat. It would be more accurate to say, BTC is both an asset and can be used as a type of money.

I have actually used BTC to purchase things many years ago, but I absolutely own to mostly using it as a speculative store of value. You could buy a house with it and it shouldn't be problem value wise as the current transaction times are about two hours, so any value change would be constrained and the buyer and seller would likely accept that the value can vary rapidly.

Not disagreeing fully but technically we can use just about anything to "buy" anything.

Indeed it's possible, doesn't mean it's feasible in general.

Sitting on BTC incurs speculative risk, buying/selling incurs risk. Exactly the same as buying something with e.g. shares. This is why the public/business doesn't do it.

If an enthusiast wants to go through hurdles to buy/sell something in crypto or shares or assets, cool, but most of the time it's typically easier and makes far more sense to just to buy in cash.

Stable-coins are a different thing altogether, and indeed they can be used as currency (if the underlying mechanism doesn't implode like Terra/Luna)

As I said, you should do the maths. You might be surprised. But let me give you an idea: For the scenario I posted (buying at 15k, selling at 75k), later buying back in with a 20% drop means that person will be better off until it goes more than 4X that buyback price compared to the "hodler". Whereas buying back in at a 25% drop, the multiple is over 19.

What would you pay for a 1Y put option 25% OTM? Not cheap I'd guess

I'm also uncertain as to what you say "has never happened before"? A drop of 20% of it's value?????????

Oh yea, I was very unclear. I was referring to the other posters assertion that it will drop 50% from here. I don't believe btc has fallen more than 20% after brushing the previous cycles ATHs in the past. Yes, contrary to popular wisdom, I am using past behaviour as an indicator of future behaviour.

I'm not quite sure I understand your example or are we just ships passing in the night. But if you pay a 20k cgt bill, you will only have 55k left so you cannot rebuy your 'whole coin' at 60k. I presume you are omitting the tax for the sake of the discussion and if that's the case then yes I can only agree with everything you said.

This specific situation I would be very cautious about selling now in the hope of buying lower. Like everyone else I was not expecting this run up this fast and was expecting some more higher lows, I even imagine some sort of sell the news event after the halving but I've learned to accept whatever this crazy rollercoaster decides to do and try not to second guess it

Great start to the week, Bitcoin being gobbled up, I really do think this is different now with Bitcoin. A lot of stable money in there now with etf and people unwilling to sell. Is just a question of at what point does scarcity really set in.

Part of the value is that it is not the dollar (or any other inflation hit currency).

What is the intrinsic value of gold, apart from being pretty it has limited applications. Why does it have a 15T market cap? Someone decided it was worth that much and people are owling to pay for their slice. Most people who own gold don't hold it for its physical properties and most only hold it on paper.

As I small time investor, you would be a damn fool to buy in now. There may well be gains but the fall is coming so why buy now. If its worth buying now, surely it was worth buying at half the price before now.

I’m not an expert on the crypto market, I mostly just have tried to filter out the nonsense information on the internet and listen to those that are fairly grounded and have a logical reasoning for their predictions with a track record of reasonably accurate predictions, and from what I can gather this is only the beginning, at this point the market dictates that the alts have to catch up to keep pace with bitcoin, could be wrong of course but this appears to contradict your sentiment, it would seem by all accounts that not buying in now is foolish, buy exactly what is the only outstanding question.