The problem is nobody can tell where the top is, and there IS a top, these things don't grow forever (you can't have infinite growth and it becoming infinitely valuable).

Now there are multiple things that might happen when growth stops:

* 1) The price stabilises and bitcoin/crypto becomes a major standard currency, which people want to use and spend. This certainly isn't going to happen for btc due to transfer fees, but could feasibly happen to a different coin. I think this is unlikely because there are several factors that actually stop crypto being an ideal currency (e.g. non-reversibility in case of fraud or dispute resolution).

* 2) The price stabilises and everybody keeps their money in crypto because it is a store of value. Personally I find this unlikely as I think most bitcoin 'investors' actually want to see their money increase in value rather than the value stay static.

* 3) The price stabilises and crypto doesn’t manage to become a standard currency which is easy to use everywhere - and although initially people hold their money in bitcoin to see if there is another rise, when it doesn't come people start to withdraw funds to realise their gains (if bitcoin isn't growing what's the point holding it?). As people sell bitcoin the value drops and never goes back to it's high. As more people exit the bubble is burst.

I personally think number 3 is by far the most likely outcome, however it's impossible to tell where the top is. I think the most sensible approach is to acknowledge it’s likely a bubble, and if you invest funds to acknowledge you are effectively making a gamble that the bubble won’t pop yet (and you are confident that you will realise when to sell before the rest of the market does and not hodl all the way down like we saw with gme).

The amount of institutional investment this round offer legitimacy and absolute scale of potential that can't be overlooked by anyone that's been paying attention.

Honestly, for the amount of forward thinking technologists that call this nook of the internet home, there is a ridiculous blind spot for cryptocurrency. It's actually ridiculous to me that such forward thinkers could be such luddites.

Will it take another decade before you realize we're there - or if not yet, where this is going?

But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of froth and solutionism in this space, which is OK, but it also understandably puts off a lot of people who see it as a scam-ridden wasteland.

That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.

Monero is the 'ideological' best cryptocurrency in my opinion, and I've hedged my bets across a handful of coins that I think at least offer something valuable to the future space.

Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and although bastardized into a 'gold like store of value' completely detached from its original use case I'd still want to own a decent amount because why fight momentum.

I agree with everything you say (wild west token scams, tether backing and sketchy accounting) but I think there is too much benefit at the core for one to disregard the entire space. The cream will rise to the top.

I understand that people are disappointed by this thus seeing the idea of BTC as a whole as a "failure", but given the fundamental properties of the system (finite supply, distributed network) it was never possible for BTC to become a currency used widely in everyday high volume transactions. Impossible.

Hal Finney even recognized this in early discussions predicting BTC wouldn't be used in high volume but more likely as a reserve asset, which BTC can absolutely be. Functioning as a digital gold, despite people's aversion or annoyance at this concept. Acting in concert w/ other payment methods or fiat currencies used for payments, taxes, commerce, transactions. A store of value to complement inevitable debasement or dilution of uncapped supplied fiat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

And that's fine, because the beauty of satoshi releasing it as open source spawned an entire ecosystem of ideas and implementations, so while his 'baby' may not be what he envisioned the basic idea and problems solved live on through evolution.

It certainly has when you consider that by cash Satoshi meant cash as a bearer instrument.

Unlike a federal reserve note—a piece of paper—that represented the thing that’s valuable—gold, bitcoin itself is the thing of value.

For ETH to trade real-world assets it needs everything else that the real world already provides: laws, courts, verification systems. Hell, it actually needs that even for digital systems.

This is why, try as people might (in over a decade) they have yet to achieve literally anything that isn't a currency with it.

You can represent them, but that's about it.

For Ethereum contracts to be enforceable in the real world (and even in the digital world) you need significantly more than just representation.

Black swan refer to unexpected events, right?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

There are literally no fundamental societal aspects that cryptocurrencies modernize. Unless you call speculation "not modern".

These are all just words that amount to nothing but marketing. To be all that these coins need to painstakingly re-create all the institutions that make passports, money etc. possible: laws, courts, trust systems, enforcement etc.

There's literally nothing in the "fundamental societal concepts" that they modernise.

You realize that this a) doesn't constitute a fundamental societal concept and that b) sending secrets outside of government control isn't even a novel idea?

> and fundamental development of the society.

There's still nothing new or fundamental introduced by cryptocurrencies, and they rely on existing concepts old as time to even function outside their bubble.

Eth 2.0 for example was talked about for years, I'm still here getting wrecked on fees.

Lightning network for reducing BTC fees is another beauty we hear less about now days.

Wondering what's the chance of it becoming the speculative anything-goes plaything of the entire big biz financial world without a central bank to keep them (at least marginally) in check.. and with lotsa money of the 'small people' on the line?

I can't for the life of me figure out why HN keeps hating on bitcoin for the past 10 years since ive been following this site has but has been pretty much spot on about every other tech related subject. It initially discouraged me back in the early days but once you GET it, you realize its one of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the history of mankind.

I think with bitcoin you simply can't read about it but actually get your hands dirty and fully use it to really understand the potential it is going to have.

Of course not. Anyone is free to make a settlement on Mars and choose their own currency.