The amount of idiocy in this thread is just appalling. You guys are chasing away the otherwise normal (I'm not even hoping for intelligent!) people from an otherwise interesting topic, so please, stop this non-sense, and use your brain, people!
Anyone who is "hoping" that bitcoin will go to $1000-2000 in 20 years is just... seriously.
Ask any bitcoin expert, and they will tell you without exception that bitcoin is HIGH RISK. It is an "experiment", as some would call it, and can fail. Again, it is
HIGH RISK!!!!!!!So what does that mean? Well, in order for something HIGH RISK to be LUCRATIVE, it must also have something else. Can you guess what that is? No? Well, let me tell you.
IN ORDER FOR SOMETHING HIGH RISK TO BE LUCRATIVE, IT MUST HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY FOR HIGH RETURNS.No sane person would choose a high risk option if the potential returns are less than a low risk option.
Bitcoin is currently ~$400. Going to $1000 means a 2.5x increase. $2000 is 5x, and $5000 is 12.5x.
So what kind of returns can you get from other options? Let's look at some slightly higher risk companies, companies in the tech sector. OBVIOUSLY these companies are still MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH lower risk than bitcoin. It would be like gambling $20 at normal roulettes vs playing Russian roulette.
Let's look at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba. Some of these companies haven't even been around for 20 years, so Let's look at 10 years instead.
In the 20 years from January 1996 to jan 2016,
Apple went up ~100 times.
Microsoft went up ~10 times
From Jan 2006 to jan 2016,
Amazon went up ~13 times
It's hard to tell how much alibaba went up since they haven't been public for that long, but I know that Masayoshi Son's investment in 2000 yielded him more than 1500 times his initial investment.
These are just NORMAL tech companies, again, MUCH LESS RISKY than bitcoin. Yet even Microsoft went up 10 times in 20 years. But at that point microsoft is already a huge, established company without as high a potential. If we look at Microsoft from 1990 to the end of 1999, in that 10 years, Microsoft went up ~100 times.
Even absolutely normal and virtually risk-free companies like Johnson and Johnson, Coca cola, and many, many others rountinely make a much greater return than a mere 2.5x in TWENTY FREAKING YEARS.
You're probably not even beating inflation with a mere 2.5x return in 20 years!!!!!!!
SO WHY IN THE WORLD, WOULD YOU WANT TO INVEST IN BITCOIN, IF YOU THINK THAT ITS POTENTIAL RETURN IS THAT LOW?
Its absolutely idiotic, considering just how risky bitcoin is. If you're going for a 2.5x return in 20 years, just deposit your money in your Savings account. Seriously.
If bitcoin's price is a few thousand dollars in 20 years, that would mean that it has failed. Period. In which case, it would actually probably be lower than a few thousand. So in reality, the chances of bitcoin being worth x thousand in 20 years is quite small, basically non-existent.
And yet some of you go like "stop dreaming for $10,000 bitcoins and be more realistic". HA! Even if bitcoin was $10,000 each in 20 years, that would still be a failure. It would certainly not have been a good investment, CONSIDERING HOW RISKY IT IS.
Seriously people, use your brain! If you think bitcoin will fail, that's totally alright. It's a completely valid opinion, since bitcoin IS high risk. But just picking some random number that's slightly higher than the current price, and thinking "it would be nice if we reached that" without considering the timeline or anything else is just... ugh! Makes me want to throw up.