Nice feel good article...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-was-designed-for-a-financial-crisis-so-far-its-working-wellThere are many who argue that Bitcoin cannot be a store-of-value based on its whipsaw volatility but valuable insight can be drawn from gold’s price action during the 2008 financial crisis.
Gold certainly doesn’t look like a safe haven after a 24% plunge in less than 2 months, even more worrisome is the fact that the S&P 500 remained flat during that period. Therefore, is it really fair to analyze any correlation over such a short period? Does that sharp movement in price invalidate gold’s resilience during market uncertainties?
The fact is that Bitcoin has zero correlation with other asset classes.
Said in laymen terms: Honey Badger doesn't give a fuck.
Don't get me wrong. I largely agree with your sentiment, but why exaggerate, fillippone?
If BTC had zero correlation, then why are there times when it moves together with other assets in the short terms...
Sure, the long term is very likely to be different, but the matter is far from settled, especially in the short term... and in fact, there are quite wonderful arguments in regards to short-term correlations that lead many folks into convoluting short-term and long-term to their peril.
I won't comment again my
own theory about "mining capitulation" induced dump in bitcoin, only to be reinforced by general asset classes crash. So Bitcoin capitulation started for reasons
all inside the bitcoin "ecosystem" only to be later reinforced by general market crash.
Again, I doubt that such absolutism is accurate. Of course, bitcoin has its own price influencing dynamics, but it is not completely isolated from various things going on in the outside world that both affect liquidity and also manipulation incentives of whales to identify a bitcoin price trend and then to exacerbate such price trend in order to profit from such exacerbation.
Bitcoin going down because other asset classes crash (Equity, Debt and Gold) going down could lead you to think that bitcoin is still used as a gambling tools by many.
It is used for gambling/speculation and as a long term investment/store of value.
Trading bitcoin has low correlation to other asset classes and high volatility, this is a wonderful instrument for scalping (beware: this doesn't mean in any way it is a profitable strategy to scalp on bitcoin).
Sure, you are conceding somewhat here about the short-term abilities to both speculate and to potentially take advantage of likely inevitable volatility, even though of course, not everyone is going to be profitable by engaging in such short-term speculations.
So, despite the digital gold is the best narrative I can think of while dealing with bitcoin, this proved to still be a narrative, not supported by data and market evidences.
Of course, I largely agree with you that bitcoin is both better than gold, and it is likely not necessary to invest in gold in order to achieve some of the same investment objectives.. so fuck gold...
but on the other hand, gold can still likely have some good short term and long term investment performance, especially relative to various other traditional assets, but doubtfully, from either your perspective or mine that it is going to perform as well as bitcoin or even has such relatively upside potential as bitcoin.
Actually, if you want to have a ray of light, you can think that bitcoin is not the one you observe on the exchanges.
As
beautifully pointed out by @Plutosky on the Italian board, bitcoins used for trading are only a minuscule part of the whole bitcoin used out there.
Can't argue with you there.
If bitcoin would have been a pure gambling tool, given the enormous swings during the last days we would have seen a great surge in bitcoin transactions and a subsequent rise in transaction fees. Ok, we observed a rise in both metrics, but nothing comparable to what would have happened if we had observed a "rush" to the exchanges to trade bitcoins. We observed a few weak hands running to convert into Fiat, a few buying) but the vast majority of hodlers kept on...hodling.
Of course, we still seem to have some potential liquidity issues in bitcoin, including the likely outrageous out of balance dumpenings that were occurring on 3/12 that seemed to have been attributed to Bitmex, but also seemed to have drug the whole BTC price down to such a level that was becoming more and more difficult to sustain, which likely is part of the reason why BTC prices ended up bouncing back so hard once Bitmex was shut off and the dragging effect of that one exchange had seemed to create such considerable short term arbitrage opportunity. Personally, I speculate that if Bitmex had been left running, then the arbitrage opportunity would have become greater, yet Bitmex's measure to actually shut off its exchange for a short period of time was a means for Bitmex to salvage its own reputation and perhaps even its ability to continue to operate in the space with any kind of possible level of confidence - even though it seems that a lot of bitmex account holders are quite pissed off about the situation that had taken place, and of course, other bitcoin HODLers are not very happy regarding how Bitmex's situation seemed to have had such a BIG downward drag on BTC prices, and maybe even bringing BTC prices down further and for longer than reasonable and prudent... (irresponsible, in other words).
If we look at LN statistics we see that the allocated bitcoins in LN are almost unchanged. Sign that no one thought their precious coins were at risk committed to a LN channel.
Number of allocated BTC coins actually slightly increased over the market dump: sign that the LN user didn't think their coins were at risk being committed to a channel instead of rushing to a fiat exchange.
So, don't infer anything about bitcoin only looking at the price: the price is one of the many aspects of bitcoin, but there is much more to deal with than price.
Not going to get any argument from me on that point, either.
Edit: Nutildah made some similar points as I made above, in responding to fillippone (of course, before I did, but I wrote my above post before seeing nutildah's response.