Topic: Why Bitcoin cannot drop in price - page 4. (Read 3831 times)

Exactly that's what I wanted to say with my post.

My conclusion: If Bitcoiners want to maintain Bitcoin's leadership, they MUST care about the ecosystem of "Bitcoin as a currency" and encourage real-world usage. They must also care about scaling, because the ecosystem growth will be "capped" in a state that is probably much too small for a serious payment network, if we keep with a transaction capacity of less than, let's say, 100 tx/sec.

Otherwise, Bitcoin will fail  - or be a niche currency/play money forever, with occasional speculative bubbles.

Bitcoin is not and cannot be digital gold [...] If Bitcoin is not transacted (traded, used as a means of payment, etc), it will lose any value and significance since the value that it has follows from its specific use, not from its qualities directly.

You can see in the news of the etherium price bubble. Most of the person who invested in etherium thinks that is is the next bitcoin so they rushed to buy. Soon the water will clear up and people will panic. Will it affect Bitcoin if etherium price collapse? Because therr are also people who bought etherium sold their Bitcoin to get the former. What would happen next??

The high level of demand for bitcoin may not last forever. Why invest money in something than you don't use and that has no capitalization. If you will not develop trade with bitcoin we may be witnessing the collapse of bitcoin.

If wishes were horses, beggars might ride

Just because Satoshi deemed Bitcoin as a means of payment doesn't magically make it into one. We have what we have, that's why I told that we should stick to actual facts. And the facts are not very good since even when Bitcoin is seemingly used as a medium of exchange, it is no more than illusion. It gets sold as soon as it is paid with. Further, Bitcoin can never become a genuine store of value even if it gets accepted as a true means of payment in a sort of Bitcoin economy, pretty much for the same reasons why no fiat currency can be a store of value, i.e. for the lack of this very value

bitcoin has its up and down, but until now we have seen btc going up despite all the problems.
and yet the august 1 issue is coming.

bitcoin has its users, from the time its coming up and until today. those users helping bitcoin to grow like today.
and in the future, i believe btc will become more important. countries will adapt btc, ppl will use it as a payment method.

That inconsequential thing is the whole purpose of bitcoin. I don't think Satoshi created bitcoin with the intent it to be a store of value, more as a currency to challenge the banking system. I had mentioned in one of my last posts that the store of value aspect of bitcoin is just an extension of it being a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system. If bitcoin fails as a medium of exchange there would be no store of value

That is where also the real importance of scaling solutions is: As a "digital gold" Bitcoin does not need much transaction capacity - but it also loses a large part of its potential. It does need sidechains and other similar solutions if it wants to be a medium of exchange for hundreds of millions or billions of people and sustain itself as a payment network

I think the real usage of Bitcoin as a means of payment is inconsequential at best

Since most of Bitcoin value comes via speculation (i.e. "those who see bitcoin as a "cash cow" to milk for more money"). You personally may not not quite like it (I certainly understand your pains), but your dislike can't change anything in this department. That's why I said that we should cut the crap and face the facts in the first place. Apart from that, I can't possibly agree that Bitcoin is "the most secure and the most decentralized cryptocurrency" out there. If you disagree with this, namely, that Bitcoin today cannot be considered as safe and decentralized, then "there is no point even arguing with you". In fact, by "some other coin" I meant Litecoin as the most likely candidate to take Bitcoin's place if the latter fails to scale up properly (I changed my post to reflect that)

In fact, it may happen even without external and deliberate influence but just because of Bitcoin price declining for a sufficient amount of time on its own. And this is the point I want to discuss

And remain the No. 1 cryptocurrency at that

If we are to cut the crap and face the facts, Bitcoin is at the top of cryptocurrencies simply because it has managed to attract the biggest amount of fiat (dollars, euro, etc) compared to other currencies (note that this has nothing to do with the so-called "market cap"). And it did so because it has been outpacing most other coins in terms of generating profits in the long term (while generating less losses when it didn't fare quite well, say in 2014-2015), apart from being the first mover, of course. Some coins have recently been (or had been in the past) more profitable than Bitcoin but they all lacked consistency, i.e. the capability of generating profits over long enough time frames. Conversely, if Bitcoin starts generating losses and that wouldn't be temporary while some other currency shows more profitability over the same time span, people will start losing interest in Bitcoin as a speculative asset and turn toward that currency. The inference is that if you want to make Bitcoin die a painful and miserable death, you should, first, make its prices at least stagnant, and, second, pour enough cash into some other coin (more or less decent in terms of technology behind it, say, Litecoin) while (and this is the most important point here) keeping this growth for a certain period of time until the process turns self-sustainable and self-reinforcing

That might not make a lot of sense in the past when Bitcoin was strong (since that would be outright prohibitively expensive), but things may change if, for example, Bitcoin fails to scale successfully. In fact, it may happen even without external and deliberate influence but just because of Bitcoin price declining for a sufficient amount of time on its own. And this is the point I want to discuss