If Bitcoin doesn't go "to da moon" then it has no utility and the speculators will dump it down to zero. So no, the quote is meaningless to me.
I agree 100%, Bitcoin is useless until we reach $50,000 per coin. /s.
To me the whole point of Bitcoin is that it's not controlled by one person, if people are using it as an investment then I have no problem with that. I'm sure most people who want the price to increase only want it to increase because they hold a huge amount but as long as Bitcoin has real life use and value it'll always be considered useful / valuable and to me that's more important than what the price is. Bitcoin will do the same job if it was at $1 than if it was at $1000. The only difference I can think of is people will be more likely to dump their coins to take advantage of the price.
The same can be said about any altcoin as well. If you think that every altcoin is of equal value, then why not just make your own? Price and adoption go hand-in-hand. If someone tried to send a billion dollars worth right now and cash it out, it would crash the market. So it's not useful for those purchases yet.
I don't think every altcoins is of equal value, you might have misunderstood me. I could create an altcoin but it would never be used for anything that holds value and also, what can my coin offer that other coins don't offer?
I do agree that price and adoption go hand in hand, we can see from past results that as more and more merchants have adopted Bitcoin the price has gone up.
The point I was trying to make was that as long as Bitcoin can be used to purchase something it will hold some kind of value
I would add: at a valuation leading to a 7.7B USD market cap, Bitcoin is
already quite useful (as a medium of exchange, for example). Maybe not 'changing the world' useful, but good enough for a bunch of
nerds like us early adopters to make use of this currency prototype and show the world that it works.
Fact is, we all (or at least most of us) hope for big price increases *now*, regardless of how much of it is speculative and how much of it is actually absorbed by increased usage. That's the mentality I had in mind with this topic. (and, yes, I include myself it the preceding critical remark)