At $500+, I don't know why anyone in their sane mind would hold Bitcoin. You aren't going to make +100% gain from $500 in 2016.
Let's break out the list:
1) Because it's literally a free money asymmetric trade, which is why the price is going up. The odds of losing are far lower than gaining.
That is what rpietila was preaching at $1000, $600, $300, but afair he got mighty quiet at $150. I was on the opposite side of all those calls.
Hope you aren't going to repeat the fatal mistake of marrying an asset. Marriage is for once-in-a-lifetime relationship between
individuals. An asset is a
groupthink phenomenon.
2) There are only two monetary instruments on earth immune to cascading deflationary collapse of fractional reserve fiat from debts and loans going bad: Bitcoin and Metals.
Until at least the end of 2017, the US dollar will not be deflating because the rest of the world is already deflating, is $10+ trillion "carry trade" short the dollar, and the chaos is sending massive international capital stampeding for a safe haven in the US dollar and US dollar assets such as the USA stock market and trophy real estate. Armstrong has been predicting this since 2012 and he explaining it will radically accelerate probably after the BREXIT vote.
BTC, gold down, US dollar up. Sorry man. Longer-term gold, CC up, and US dollar up. 2018+ a global monetary reset.
3) If I buy gold, it has less utility than Bitcoin. Where can I spend gold? Nowhere. All I can do with gold is mail it back to the gold dealer for 90% or less of what I paid for it. Bitcoin utility is currently higher than gold for most people, yet the market cap is zilch. Expect a correction to occur with Bitcoin market cap increasing because this is a truely distorted market if the tiny market cap asset has more acceptance and utility than the huge market cap one.
Those whales who invest in gold don't trust Bitcoin as an asset. Those who use Bitcoin for transactions are not that numerous. Bitcoin is caught in between two markets it can't do either one very well. Why do you think I am going to fix this problem! Because I see precisely where the problem is and how to fix it.
4) Market cap is determined by market makers and market makers plan to raise the price. People don't build 100 million dollar mining facilities and then let the price be determined by sheer luck or fate.
The mining profit will come from increasing transaction fees × transaction volume. The problem is that increasing the block size too much will lower the fees. This is why this has been such a contentious issue. The mining cartel in China wants to make sure they can set the block size to maximize that multiplicative product. Why do others not able to deduce what is so obvious to me
5) Bitcoin moves in bubbles and there was an extremely long bear market accumulation period with observable hard floors. Whenever a long accumulation period occurs on an actual liquid asset, the price explodes afterwards. If you think Bitcoin is not going to see big moves, you are mistaken.
Volume matters. We have very low volume on this rise.
6) The inflation rate is going from 8% to 4%, so it's actually a real currency now instead of some hyperinflating bullshit.
Bitcoin's volatility makes that entirely insignificant. Bitcoin can't be a currency until it has an economy where it is the unit-of-account. Well it actually has one, that is
Bitcoin is the unit-of-account the crypto gambling economy.