some peeps simply don't have time for a 20 year long bear market.
To be clear: I am not expecting a 20-year bear market for Bitcoin! That was a
reductio ad absurdum to show that when corrupt politics and irrational markets are involved, even gold can take a hell of a beating. Historical worst-case extremes. My point: It doesn’t mean that gold isn’t a sound store of value.
Nothing is risk-free: Not Bitcoin, not gold, assuredly not dollars. Long-term buy-and-hold for anything is a trade-off. Spend
the time value of money sitting on your capital, and embrace long-term systemic risks, to avoid short-term risks and market irrationality.
I think that anyone who sold gold low was a fool—mindrusting gold! On a related note, I positively predict that in the long term, starting with almost nothing now, I will probably wind up with more BTC than most of the people who are worried now.
besides, 260/850 or more properly 260/650 (because gold was above $650 flat top only for about 7 days) is JUST 69.5 or 60% correction (with at least two bear rallies to ~77% of the flat peak, an equivalent of about 53K in btc). Super long bear with multiple 2X rallies is preferable to 80% down in just half a year (well, we only went -70% so far, to be more precise).
Bitcoin has always been orders of magnitude more volatile than gold. When Bitcoin was up, this made some thoughtless Bitcoiners sneer at gold:
Look, our gains are so high while gold almost sits still! Now, the shoe is on the other foot. Now that Bitcoin is down, gold’s % performance
in extreme gold bear markets looks great. I don’t think that either line of thinking is justified: My proposition is that Bitcoin and gold are complementary assets—both good, both necessary, with some very different strengths.
BTC probably has
much more upside now, due to being such a young market! Big long-term growth potential. BTC also has the practical advantages of being less difficult to obtain anonymously—and of being oh so much easier to store in your own self-custody.
Aside, I find it amusing that two classes of people usually like to sneer at gold:
Some (not all) Bitcoiners, and Warren Buffet. Not only Buffet. When the gold market bottomed around 21 years ago, a stock-market professional of my then-acquaintance told me that gold was a bad investment. Hahahah. I didn’t believe him then, and I don’t believe the naysayers about Bitcoin now.
institutional involvement did not pan out as a value stabilizer; this, at least, is clear.
With the possible exception of a few particular investors, institutional money was never Bitcoin’s friend. My theory, hereto stated somewhere (not searching now), is that to sustain the onslaught of highly-capitalized institutions who treat BTC merely as an instrument for extracting fiat profits, Bitcoin needs more adoption
as money (both s.o.v. and medium of exchange). It is
not a new opinion on my part—not at all.
Some of the types who are greedy for fast moons get excited about institutional investment, without really thinking this through. I generally see institutional investment as a challenge that Bitcoin must survive and master, just as it has prevailed in the face of other challenges.
For the record, my current personal text:
Take profit in BTC. Account PnL in BTC. BTC=money.
The problem with institutional investors is that they account PnL in USD (or EUR, ...). Thus whenever they successfully gain profits instead of losing, they extract capital from BTC rather than giving BTC healthy long-term growth.