This is an article written for Bitcoin Magazine BEFORE China decided to not allow the settling of accounts via Bitcoin. I still think a lot of the reasoning in it applies, and I still believe BTC will be > $10,000 in the coming three years.
Disregard the point about China buying.
I fully believe in the idea that the price of a bitcoin can safely floor itself at $10,000 in the following two years. I also assume that the bull market bitcoin currently finds itself becoming will show prices above $10,000 in the interim.
I believe we will hit $2,000 in February; and while I don’t suggest it, I would not be surprised if it happened before 2013 ends.
That being said...
Differentiating between intelligent and not-so speculation is the most valuable asset to any endeavour carried forth in the arms of more than one person; Bitcoin included.
Speculation is a huge aspect of Bitcoin, hate it or love it. Speculation has to be a significant piece of Bitcoin, if you understand what an investment is.
An investment operation – as dictated in 6th Edition of Security Analysis – has the property of being, “... justified on both qualitative and quantitative grounds.” (Dodd, Graham. 107)
Quantitatively, Bitcoin is fantastic. There are a lot of things I can say, but I’d rather be lean and put it this way: It started at, “you can buy one thousand of them for a dollar”, and now it’s, “you can buy one for one thousand dollars.”
It’s been a volatile upward trend, day-to-day; when looked at over four years the increase in price has been anything but. The price from 2009 to present has been a positive exponential hike .
Understanding the satellite-price of Bitcoin falls to the realm of qualitative reasoning.
Who is buying them? What are the financial objectives of these buyers and sellers? When have the prices fluctuated most? Why did they fluctuate the way they did at these times? Where is the discrepancy that has to fall back to the mean? How does each domino come to knock over the next?
Before I continue, I must claim that I do recognize Bitcoin as investment that will return your principal, and a satisfactory return. But this belief only applies to a long-term holding strategy.
Bitcoin, as it is now, is a speculatively deadly game for the second wave of early adopters. Why?
New adopters are two years behind in a certification undefined by standards, wrought only with highly motivated and knowledgeable people. New adopters have no stomach for watching a price drop, and much less the foresight to anticipate some of the rebounds – as was the case with the Silk Road Scare.
While many in-the-know readers frequent Bitcoin Magazine, some proportion will find themselves marginally less-than-informed. This is for you, because I know what it’s like. It isn’t conclusive, just a window at what I – no top grade analyst – believe is going on in the meshwork.
The Buyers
China is buying them , at least to the extent that the person checking out the $1000+ price-tag is concerned.
Here it is, point-blank and blunt: China doesn’t want the USD to be the center of economic gravity. It’s not personal, it’s not aggressive. They have, along with India, one of the largest emerging middle classes in the world. China needs to be liquid. It needs to be able to pay its people now, because today and tomorrow are history’s past and present.
China can’t service its labour as effectively if a great deal of its value is tied up in US debt. It can’t wait around for the Fed to run a hedge fund with the sole aim of offsetting short-term debt payments. For China the only option is to accept as many options as a free market will provide, Bitcoin is another out.
Diversification has been a long-time strategy of the shrewd.
The Financial Objectives of Buyers
As a Bitcoin advocate, I believe it would serve China well to keep diversifying its checks and balances so that they’re not bottlenecked by the business cycles and inflation of American currency. I wouldn’t have endorsed and used Bitcoin myself if it didn’t possess spectacular advantages.
The USA already knows this so they’re buying too. If China is going to chalk up the price of Bitcoin, it’s a good way for the US to chalk down their debt and make real gains by getting into a currency-commodity-asset for which they expect an increasing global demand, regardless if they can fully regulate their citizens or not.
Whether you’ve watched the vagaries of the consensus reached by the Department of Homeland Security or not, the underlining themes of the rather stale progression were...
“This can be innovative. People have used it illicitly. We don’t know what to do yet.”
Assuming that the government is run by people not too superior in ability and foresight than our own – and assuming that the average government employee in the financial division of the Federal government is about as informed as the new adopter, I am inclined to assume that China and USA are pushing each other forward in a race for the future of finance.
It’s a race neither wants to lose via lack of action.
People in government need be perceived as being actively productive. They will take steps to make sure that any metric of their actions be twisted into some form of advertisement for their upcoming elections. No government wants to be the government that let the golden ship sale while the bureaucracy was counting tickets up along the docks.
They’d rather go down after the Heart of the Ocean like in 2008, than let things take course by themselves in every way a social agenda via minimalist governments should.
Largest Fluctuations
As far as I’m conservatively concerned, there have only been two really majour crashes.
The first huge crash was one that found Bitcoin coming down from $33 to less than $2. The second crash happened in April of this year – having a peak of $266 fall over 60%.
The Causes
In the first case, Mt. Gox got hacked. In the second case, Mt. Gox shut down because too much traffic was stressing their servers. In both cases Mt. Gox was a central point of failure.
After the liquidity and business risk issues were addressed, Bitcoin got onto its merry road again. Mt. Gox is no longer the big player it is, and thus cannot create the liabilities it once did.
This happened with the Silk Road Scare as well.
The Discrepancy That has to Fall back to the Mean
Right now, the price is inflating. Part of it is a bubble. ‘How much?’ is the important question.
This question is directly dependant on how many buyers are speculators as opposed to investors. Adopters in developed countries, who aren’t infrastructure-builders, are mostly speculators. Insofar as traffic is coming in from the G8 countries at rates faster than the launches of new services, you can bet that this growth is all speculative.
But, but, BUT! I did say that Bitcoin from my perspective is an investment! And the day that this is truly reflected by stable price growth and circulation is when countries outside of the G8 begin to produce goods and services tied to the infrastructure of Bitcoin.
The adoption of Bitcoin by the developing world will remove so much speculation from the space because these less-than-developed outlets have no other currency with the same advantages as Bitcoin with which to speculate against. Litecoin doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to accommodate this gargantuan feat, and we haven’t even heard the names of most all other alternative coins.
Litecoin, for matters other than developing the world, is nowhere near Bitcoin in infrastructure, and its advantages aren’t as hard-set as everyone seems to think they are. Beyond a faster hash-rate, it really doesn’t provide much more than additional volume.
Now that people in the space are speculating about ASICs for Litecoin, that’s just a signal that the currency is about to be turned into another mining game, and every time it fluctuates it will make Bitcoin seem more stable by comparison, even if only for the sake that Bitcoin has been around longer and will have a longer track record by consequence. For that reason alone, anyone valuing Bitcoin on a security basis will have reasons to choose Bitcoin over Litecoin.
In a nutshell: China and USA are buying them in the race for the potential future of finance. The majour sources of crashes have been decentralized and thus minimized as a liability (i.e. Mt. Gox isn’t what it used to be). To make yourself more than a speculator you have understand that new coins are all coming out as hedges to Bitcoin, insofar as Bitcoin is the measuring stick, it’s going to keep paying dividends; buy Bitcoin and hold for longer than the speculative short term, even if it is intelligently speculative.
Disclaimer: I’m not on Wall Street (which is probably why you should listen to me). I claim no omniscience.
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