Topic: [2019-07-22] Bitcoin Is ‘Best Long Term Investment’ Per 4 Percent Americans: Stu (Read 303 times)

i'm sure they've spent significant money on polling/focus groups. they've said they are primarily going after users in developing countries, with emphasis on remittance payments: Facebook’s Libra May Be Quite Attractive in Developing Countries

libra could be used in developed countries as an alternative to venmo, square cash, etc but i don't think they are aiming to dominate that sector. at least not at the outset.

I've seen a lot of these studies in the last few weeks, and I wonder what kind of questions they ask .. I'll give you an example of Libra:

2% of Americans Trust Facebook’s Libra More than Bitcoin: Research

New Survey: 49% of Americans and Brits Don’t Trust Facebook’s Libra

Most Germans Skeptical About Facebook’s Libra, Only 12% Welcome It

I wonder, did the Libra team do not research to see if people would be interested in Libra? because I doubt the Libra team had not done research, I don't trust this research

If only four percent of Americans believe that Bitcoin is a good prospect for long-term investments, this is not so much. True, banks and the US government are ambiguous about cryptocurrency and often warn their citizens about the possible risks of investing in cryptocurrency. This, of course, gives certain negative results for cryptocurrency. However, over time, this percentage will increase all the same as the states legalize cryptocurrency and enter it into our lives.

That is not why I mentioned Venezuela.  I actually mentioned Venezuela because they've had (a) tremendous inflation over the course of the last decade plus, (b) had totalitarian socialists/communists/fascists in charge for more than 20 years, (c) had tremendous seizures of businesses and assets (like Cyprus in 2013) over the last two decades, and (d) capital controls (like Cyprus) over long periods.  Even if someone who did purchase bitcoin using Venezuelan bolivars for $20000 each in December 2017 would be way ahead of the game at $10000.  Keeping it in the bolivar would've meant losing roughly 50-100% plus per MONTH. (https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/inflation-rate-mom) And "Venezuela's Inflation Rate Projected to Hit 10,000,000% in 2019" (https://fee.org/articles/venezuelas-inflation-rate-projected-to-hit-10-000-000-in-2019/).  Anything kept in the bolivar is lost.

The choice was: keep your money and business there, find someway to protect oneself from the authoritarians in the government or attempt to get them out of the country.  Many people couldn't get out and lost everything because they couldn't transfer money overseas (like Cyprus limiting it to $5000/month at one point).

Precious metals are a fine store of value, but they are less portable than a private key, particularly if one is attempting to fly out of, say, Caracas or Nicosia (Cyprus).  Anyone in Venezuela who had the foresight to purchase bitcoin at any time between 2010 and now has found bitcoin to be a great store of value compared to pretty much everything in Venezuela, even in December 2017.  Obviously purchasing when there is a mania going on is more problematic, but a few years from now the probability that even those who purchased in Dec 2017 are ahead of the game even in non bolivar terms is quite high.

As far as LBC, I hadn't looked at it.  I don't know if any merchants there are using bitcoin, I doubt it would show up in any official figures anyway since Venezuela has essentially collapsed. If I had converted assets to bitcoin in Venezuela, I wouldn't convert back while in Venezuela, I'd leave and go almost anywhere else.  Suppose you had purchased $200000 of bitcoin at $10000 or $20000.  At worst, you could leave Venezuela now and go anywhere and have $200,000 or $100,000 in bitcoin (depending on when you purchased) or you didn't purchase it you'd have nothing.  I know my choice.

Look at Cyprus in 2013, they gave plenty of "haircuts" (a % of the money taken by the politicians) to people's and company's bank accounts (see, e.g. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/my-bank-accounts-got-robbed-by-european-commission-over-700k-is-lost-160292 ) - this guy lost a ton of money because the government "robbed" everyone there.  In my view, most people should own some crypto, 0.1 or 1 (preferably more) bitcoin to protect themselves from future events like this.  It is similar to home owners insurance, sure you pay a few thousand dollars per year and hope you never need it, but you still do it.  With crypto, you can buy your insurance once and have it for you and your family as long as you don't sell. 

I agree with you though, given the halving in ~9-10 months, additional use cases, and more vehicles that allow people to invest or use bitcoin, the future looks bright - but as always, it seems a pretty binary proposition: it will eventually be worth a lot of money or very little.

To me it seems extremely unlikely that 11% of Americans own bitcoin.  I know two other people locally who do out of a ton of people - and one of them is quite well known in the crypto community.  Lots of self-selection and not a random sample, this is key:  "This survey was conducted online within the United States between April 23–25, 2019 among 2029 adults".

4% seems like a lot too, but it is at least somewhat more believable.  If 11% of the US population owned bitcoin, that would be around 34 million people who own some.  Extrapolated to include "developed countries" that would be 4 or 5 times that.  Seems pretty unlikely.

If someone did a true random sampling for 2052 people, I'd be more likely to believe these statistics.

( https://medium.com/blockchain-capital-blog/bitcoin-is-a-demographic-mega-trend-data-analysis-160d2f7731e5 )

I agree, it is always best to own one's coins by controlling the private key, but realistically I know that grandparents or older aunts and uncles are not going to do so.  So it is preferable to own shares in an insured, monitored ETF vs a fly-by-night exchange with poor security.

I dislike most of the public's view on Bitcoin. I have too many friends asking me about bitcoin as an outlet to profit off, and make money overnight with the prices, instead of seeing it as new technology or a new payment option. The people that only come into bitcoin aren't real supporters of the coin, but instead, people who get involved with crypto and bitcoin because they think it has a future are the people the media and we need to attract to our community.

It does seem like a very viable survey though, the stats are pretty fair. 10% of all Americans owning BTC is surprising, but not a crazy number.
This is very well said. Bitcoin is probably the most convenient and easiest to liquidate investment out there.

Maybe I'm too far gone to be objective about this but 11% feels like another ludicrous figure to me. I just cannot see that high a percentage of people willing to take a bet like that. If 35-40 million Americans owned some we'd be hearing considerably more about it than we do, though we do hear plenty.

It's subject to debate but turning Bitcoin in a cash cow isn't really was it was supposed to be. So we wanted to be out of the finance industry but we 're replicating the same thing with the crypto market :/
When someone is investing in something, buying it at $xx,xxx and reselling it later at $xx,xxx, I call it speculating. If you're investing in something to use it later, you're investing.


So by saying this, your point is to say Bitcoin can be used as a store of value? I don't think it should be considered as it... as we agree, the goal is to preserve your asset right? How investing in Bitcoin is supposed to protect it? Imagine someone who invested back at $20,000? I know what you're going to say: 'Its value will increase in the future so no problem hold'. Which I agree too, but it's again speculating, we're not protecting anything doing this. Yes, some people use it as a store of value, it doesn't mean they're good at accounting, they just take a risk to use it as SOV.

I wanted to look through the news to remind me when the crisis started in Venezuela, but I found something else, and I see why you're talking about it today.

Yes, maybe they wanted to leave the system to protect their currency against the crisis (when it was? 1-2 years ago?). We come back to what I was saying, their goal was to protect their asset. But what would have happened if it was in the period of late 2017? Losing 50% is not at all what we call protecting an asset.

I know you mentioned this country because the news reported an increase in the volume on LBC since 2018 (here) but check again and see the situation today, the volume decreased by 80%...in 3-4 months...
Also, we don't know if they're using it to speculate to for their daily needs. At least I haven't heard about thousands and thousands of
merchants turning to Bitcoin. Show me otherwise.

According to this article 11% of Americans own Bitcoin. So it makes sense that ~40% of Bitcoin owners also think that it's the best long-term investment, while the rest might like other investments more, or view Bitcoin as too risky to be considered the best. I think it's a quite good number for Bitcoin's adoption at of now.

The third party risk is an obvious pitfall from a Bitcoiner's perspective. But we can also weigh that risk against the benefits -- namely, tax-deferred treatment of capital gains, held in a brokerage account covered by SIPC insurance. An ETF would be a huge improvement from the current ripoff Bitcoin IRA offerings.

Inevitably, people are going to want to hold bitcoins in their retirement accounts. The tax incentives are just too huge. From that perspective, it would be good to see better options on the market.

This is one of the few crypto-related surveys that has a result that feels vaguely believable. 4% is still a lot of Americans but it feels within the bounds of possibility, unlike the ones that throw up figures like 20% of Turkey being balls deep in it. We're starting to get more real world metrics such as app downloads that back stuff like this up.

Exactly, sure there's a good passive income through commercial space/real estate and it is increasing rapidly and I'm planning to buy one if bitcoin shoots a good price again.

But it's more expensive compare to those realty that are still in developing process. Those are my target for the meanwhile and I'll next the commercial one but I'll never leave my best store of value(BTC) and will still keep it.

ETF's are great, but even if they are backed by the underlying asset, which the Vaneck & SolidX ETF is, people still don't own anything but a promise that for every share that they buy, a custodian has X number of coins in their reserve. It's fantastic for those looking to gain exposure to Bitcoin through a non hassle way, but I would always recommend people to buy and store Bitcoin themselves offline.

You only need a sub $100 hardware wallet to store millions or even billions worth of Bitcoin in a convenient and safe manner. It's small and therefore easy to hide, unlike physical Gold where most people store it in bank vaults because they don't want to have it in their house. Good luck gaining access to your Gold after 5PM during business days or in the weekends.

That's good news, as we need people to hold long.
This people combined with young people who buy bitcoins as future investments provide a security level for the market capitalization of Bitcoin.
Americans provide a great portion of bitcoin in the industry and it is a good market as they have good incomes that can fuel the market with more money.

That is a good and very realistic use case for Bitcoin and a good percentage of the population should think this way in protecting their assets and economic gains. Though, of course, it can never be denied that more people can be attracted to the idea of making money especially short-term and that is why many rushed into it back in 2017. Right now, people getting into bitcoin are more intelligent and certainly we already learned the big lessons in the past winter days. Certainly, Bitcoin is very valuable not just because it has limited supply but because it has many real-world uses just waiting for us to experience.

Investing in bitcoin is a valid use, one of many in my book.  Investing and speculation are two different things too. 

Just to be clear, putting money in gold or bitcoin to preserve one's assets from the ravages of central bank induced fiat inflation is a great use for bitcoin.  That is a "real use" of bitcoin and a critical one. Look at the threads from Cyprus 6 years ago, Venezuela etc. Any place in the world that uses fiat should have people investing in bitcoin to protect themselves.

That's not really how we should attract people.

Instead of telling them 'hey, invest in BTC you will make money!' what about to tell them 'hey, see how BTC is useful'. It's better to see them coming as 'real users' and not as speculators.

That's how I think mass adoption should come from. (without denying that there will always be speculators)


It's a market with low performance (a subjective term) but it's a fairly reliable and safe market. Not like gold, but not far away. Something you don't have in the crypto market. There are still great opportunities in but more in commercial real estate (offices, warehouses, etc.). Of course, the yield is not the same but the risks are much lower.

I see that there are other choices for that survey, I'd go first with real estate honestly and will put bitcoin as my 2nd priority. The market of real estate sure is a bubble and locally, the value increases around 7%-8% annually.

For bitcoin, as a store of value which has been determined by most. I think this plays a significant factor that everyone longs on bitcoin because of its character as a good store of value same as gold.

My beginning "investment" (mining/time) in bitcoin hit 9 years a week or two ago - July 11, 2010 after the Slashdot story on it.  It certainly has done well for 9 years, if the next 10 are even 1% as good as the previous 9, everyone who has some bitcoin will be quite happy.

An ETF to help ease of entry for more people (e.g. in retirement accounts, brokerages etc) will go a long way to helping people purchase bitcoin and take part in any future gains.