Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
smooth
on 19/05/2015, 21:05:20 UTC
This isn't a moral criticism, but a practical one, as argued in the post. Stores of value can change, but this cannot be a fast process as that contravenes the very definition of "store of value." Not unless it absolutely has to happen (facing catastrophe), as I also mentioned.

Well, again, there is no fast process at work here. <0.1% of the store-of-value from gold, fiat, etc. has shifted to Bitcoin. In fact the real number considering all store-of-value asset classes is probably far less than 0.1% but that's an easy number to use. If 0.2% moves to some other cryptocoin next year that will still be an extremely slow process, but Bitcoin will likely be left behind at that point.

I don't disagree, but I have assumed the context here is basically Bitcoin investors "branching out" into some altcoins. One could make a somewhat valid criticism that this context is changing to small degree, the best examples being Ripple and Ethereum and maybe Dogecoin, where they are actively trying to source users and investors from outside the Bitcoin community (BitShares to an extent as well).

Many of Monero's new adopters/investors come from outside the Bitcoin community, though I'm not entirely sure it is for the right reasons. The most common is being vaguely aware of Bitcoin but feeling they missed it. That may be an indication of a problem with Bitcoin's speculative pumping being getting ahead of its (nearly non-existent) adoption. I question whether these are the right reasons because I saw a lot of the same thing happening in 2013 when people looked for cheaper altcoins (generally pure trash like LTC or worse) and got slaughtered.

Some (e.g. Krawitz) claim that the bigger the better and investment drives adoption, but I'm not sure about that. At some point it becomes too expensive, the fundamentals don't support it (or at least, don't appear to), that just scares people off, discouraging further adoption and encouraging (smart and dumb both) investment elsewhere.

Bitcoin investors really should hedge though. The logic of that is as about as close to infallible as you can get. Underweight if you like, but still hedge.