Finally to those that still use the "BSV shill" phrase - I'm not suggesting anyone buy BSV. It makes no difference to me if people buy it, because if the price goes up for speculative reasons thats meaningless (that person will want to sell it).
Every asset is speculative in nature unless you can't store it, there is no such thing as "true value" or "fair value" if people didn't buy gold for speculative reasons it wouldn't be worth a fraction of what it's worth now, only a small percentage of that gold is actually used.
People look for scarcity, a hedge against other means of assets that are highly inflated, they only do that in an attempt to be able to sell/exchange that asset for a larger value in the future, if people didn't buy
BTC or any other crypto for that matter just to be able to exchange them for more, none of those coins would have existed in the first place.
I understand that there are some people who MIGHT be in it " for the technology", I would bet against their existence, or in the worst case, I am sure they are a minority, and the minority doesn't drive the market, it's the majority.
On the other hand, more adoption doesn't always lead to more value, we could have double the adoption with 99% less value, if tomorrow everyone and their grandmother start using bitcoin there is no absolute certainty that price/value will go up, but if they buy it as a store of value instead - price will increase without a doubt.
I do think you are smart, I enjoyed reading your comments, however, the problem with your logic (and most of the BSV, Bcash) supporters is that you seem to think that "useability" and "value" are related, which is NOT the case, the proof is, BSV has much more daily transactions and it's almost free to transact, in fact,
BTC is one of the slowest (if not the most)and the most expensive to use, but
BTC has 100,000% more value than BSV.
Have you ever thought about the possibility that cryptocurrencies might never beat the old system? what makes you think that a blockchain which is bottlenecked by so many factors will beat a single high-end server in terms of speed and price? maybe the majority of people don't plan on using crypto for their daily payments? if speed and cheap fees are the only two things bitcoin can offer then it's worthless, we already have fast and cheap means of payments.
Maybe if you think about it this way, you will understand that
BTC derives its value from "consensus", not only miners' consensus, investors, the average joe, and joe's grandmother, the MAJORITY of people agree on
BTC, they have no problem with the blocksize (they probably don't even know what that is), they just know it's a scarce asset, has very low and known inflation rate, secured by tens of thousands of nodes and millions of mining gears, those factors alone have been more than enough to keep
BTC as strong as it is today.
The block size debate has been milked a thousand times before, so there is no need to go over it again, and as far as the price expectation, I won't say I am certain that you are completely wrong, I know that the next few months will most likely be bullish across all markets and then soon after that the stock 11-year-old bubble will burst, that will be the first burst with
BTC around, we don't know how will crypto market as a whole react to that, it could take it to the moon, or it could drag it down for a multi-year bear market, we shall see.
Thanks for taking the time to write this detailed response. I understand your position as I have had similar thoughts in the time I have spent learning about Bitcoin, however in this time my opinions have changed.
I've held the speculative vs utility value belief for
many years and I still do. I think that eventually utility value will dwarf speculative price action as Bitcoin matures. Whilst I can see the comparison to gold wrt store of value, I don't think that is the same as thing as speculative use we see now in BTC (and other tokens). Store of value is "number doesn't go down", whereas speculation (as I am using it) is "number goes up".
I believe that deviating from Bitcoin's original design where 'it doesn't really hit a scale ceiling" was a mistake and that the sigmoid "adoption" curve was significantly set back - remember as companies adopted BTC for payments (MS,CEX,Steam etc) and then slowly over the years walked back that position. I see this as a direct result of BTC no longer being useful as digital cash. Digital cash needs boundless scale.
Since the original Gox spike I would suggest that all price action on BTC has been purely speculative based on FOMO. I don't think that is the same as gold. This explains the price differential. BSV is the ugly duckling and so has virtually no speculative value (perhaps even negative!?). This is due to the still widespread belief that crypto is designed to 'beat the system' (yes I did once think that was its purpose), and BSV being clearly in opposition to this. So the whole crowd on Bitcointalk and in Cryptotwitter are dead against it. I was in this camp, now I'm not. Now I understand the power of SCRIPT and what it enables, why bitcoin is not anonymous, why the protocol has to be fixed (and can be.. SCRIPT is your '2nd layer').
The reason I think (now, more so then ever) that utility will dwarf speculative value is because I can now clearly see just how big (tx throughput) Bitcoin can be. I see big companies that are well underway implementing massive scale operations that were previously unthinkable, both due to lack of scale and lack of functionality - Bitcoin fixes this
. As this plays out, then those tiny sub-cent fees add up to A LOT. That's what will drive miners to move hash rate. That's what snowballs and leads to chain death. That's your extinction event.
Satoshi had all this figured out and once you see how it all fits together it's incredible. Knowing what is coming is enough for me, when I posted this thread it was based on price action from gox and "all things being equal" things have changed a lot so I can handle being tarred and feathered
Enjoy your price pump! I know what its like, the euphoria, the disbelief at it making new highs, more euphoria ... good times
and don't let it mess you up too much. I'll sit this one out, feels kind of peaceful for a change