I think the odds are kind of high that bitcoin will have no use or value at all during the coming financial implosion.
I wanted to buy an expensive item the other day, for which I needed to transfer EUR to GBP.
My first thought was to use Bitcoin for the 'fast easy transfer' of wealth. Obviously, I couldn't be bothered with transferring funds to Stamp, where I still haven't submitted to their ridiculous KYC requests, and I shall never transfer funds to Kraken ever again, cos these fuckers robbed me, told me my computer must have spyware and then told me to fuck off. This left LocalBitcoin. By the time all the vendor premiums were factored in, I would have been taking an 8% haircut on my capital. Fuck that! Better just taking a shafting from the banks!
Instead, I used Transferwise and incurred a fee of 0.36%.
In the developed world, Bitcoin really has no viable use beyond speculation and black market transactions and Bitcoin totally relies upon fiat currencies and their associated infrastructure in order to have any purpose whatsoever. I could see Bitcoin really taking a bid during periods of instability in one particular fiat currency should external currencies remain 'strong', (I am thinking CNY v USD here), but in the long run, Bitcoin is of course vapour.
Whilst crypto is here to stay, Bitcoin is to crypto what the Zeppelin 'von Hindenburg' was to trans-Atlantic flight. A monstrous looking contraption that got a hitherto impossible job done, until it all went up in a ball of flames and was replaced by better alterntives.
And why bitcoin can't compete with gold and silver in that new system in the long run:
Bitcoin is a currency not money. If you don't agree, YOU don't understand finance. It's a Rube Goldberg machine and nothing more. No random bullshit made up of completely arbitary variables created by humans is money. Money represents goods and services or the ability to do work. It's required to be connected to some type of commodity or energy resource if you're abstracting the system away from barter, otherwise the system is easily gamed and implodes as always.
Bitcoin is not a real commodity, it's a poor immitation like some type of tranny. The sunk cost in so called "creating" a bitcoin in the past does not transfer into delivering anything tangible into the future. It's more like a steady state system that can catastrophically fail and vaporize all imaginary "wealth" attached to it at any time - the glaring trait of all currencies past and future. One of the main reasons the noble metals are valued (gold and silver) are the anti-corrosive properties to defeat time itself, which guarantees you the ability to transfer that unit of account from the past to future, UNLIKE bitcoin.
Still very curious about this sudden change of tune that seemed to totally and 100% coincide with the Bitfinex scam r0ach? Cos you never lost a single penny there, right!?
I of course agree with you that Bitcoin is vapour, but that doesn't mean that there still isn't a good 35% up move left to come in Bitcoin before the fat lady sings? Isn't it your job to take advantage of market swings regardless of any philosophical concerns about the underlying asset?