I'll make it really simple to everyone who can't understand why bitcoin value drops.
It costs around 5 billion dollars a year to maintain bitcoin mining. That includes the electricity and the development and production of machinery.
According to various sources there are around 5 million active bitcoin users. To me, this user count is too optimistic, but even with this optimistic count it costs 1000$ per year for a single bitcoin user to maintain bitcoin mining.
The only way for not having bitcoin holders pay for this circus with the value of their coin is to spread to new investors. That means that bitcoin needs minimum 5 billion per year just to maintain it's price. If this were a pyramid scheme, then every user would have to attract minimum 1000$ worth of new investments a year just to keep the pyramid from collapsing. As soon as the flow of new investors will slow, then bitcoin will start to collapse under its own weight and that is a lot of weight thanks to the inefficiency of PoW mining.
True. ''Wasteful is one word for it. De Vries’ analysis showed that the blockchain-based cryptocurrency’s annual electricity consumption is around 32.36 terawatt-hours, around the same amount of energy used by the entire country of Serbia. He also showed that all of Visa’s transactions use about the same amount of energy as 50,000 households, while Bitcoin uses nearly three million houses’ worth''
Obviously there is something wrong here but I do think there are solutions for it like using the energy from mining farms for secondary uses.
Also, bitcoin is quite slow compared to many other coins. There is going to be a time where other top cryptos get direct fiat trading so people don't have to buy bitcoin just to buy other coins and eventually bitcoin will fall from the number 1 place. In fact I think it would be a good idea because this market is basically like 1 huge cryptocoin, everything goes down if bitcoin goes down, diversification is virtually useless when crashes happen.
The answer is moving forward from the current PoW model that is heavily flawed.
Major flaws of PoW come out when creation of ASICs is possible. This creates the need to build new machinery that can only solve one problem, and that problem doesn't even has to exist. Overheating of the mining sector is inevitable with PoW and that also creates problems with market stability. If the price drops, the miners can't just switch their mining farms to become regular server parks. They are stuck, and the only way in not going under is to blow up the price with debt and shadier shenanigans.
PoW could only work if the work can be done by home desktops and building specialized asics isn't possible. Then you would get decentralization, cheaper costs and more stable market. But I think that even better models like pos and newer hybrids have also surfaces.
I compare bitcoin a lot to Apple II. Both were based on old concepts, but were very innovative products themselves, with a lot of future development potential. Knowing that bitcoin will be obsolete soon and will only keep it's novelty value is as logical to me as knowing the same about Apple II 1980. Fanatical ideas that bitcoin will be the global reserve currency etc. are just as dumb to me as someone saying in 1980 that Apple II will be the supercomputer of the future. Sorry, but I see a lot more potential here then just gimmicky actions that apple 2 could offer then, and bitcoin can offer now. Crypto-assets will become A LOT more complex in the coming years
Not only are bitcoin transactions low, but the development is also extremely low. Bitcoin has hard time in developing in it's block size, while other crypto-asset teams are developing and testing new more efficient and complex mechanisms for upkeep and distribution. If comparing to Apple2 again, then it's like fighting over the question if the space bar should be 10 or 11cm long, like it was the major factor for future dominance, while the rest are building exponentially more practical and complex models.