I started messing around with Bitcoin in 2013. How many crashes would you say there have been since then? That's how many I've weathered. The longer I've been around, however, the more unsuitable I see Bitcoin specifically as a vehicle for value transfer. It hasn't scaled appropriately and now I'm personally convinced that it will eventually be eclipsed by a more useful cryptocurrency. Crypto on the whole I see as having a lot of promise, but any coin on an individual level much less so. And as for Bitcoin specifically, I see it as a has-been that's coasting on first-mover advantage and name recognition, but as far as competition goes, it's far inferior than all the other major cryptos. If I were buying at this price, that's what I'd be concerned with. Not that crypto will go away, that Bitcoin will.
I strongly support this view. I remember when in 2014 transactions were still fast and cheap but now Bitcoin has become a complete outrage and abomination to the crypto world. The only thing that keeps it afloat today is relentless speculation. But if it goes away one day and prices crash dramatically, we will have a clean slate and then we will see how Bitcoin fares against other cryptocurrencies, more advanced ones and actually usable in everyday life.
I've been expecting the bubble to "pop" or for the price to crash, but perhaps a slow deflating is what we're going to get instead. Could be what we're experiencing right now with the price hovering around 50% of all time highs, or the price could rebound and we resume the crazy upward trek into more bubble territory. One thing that is promising is the mempool was been clearing somewhat and transaction fees are coming down. People are attributing this to SegWit being more fully adopted. Taking that as true, that might help make Bitcoin in its current iteration run more smoothly, but it is still a hard cap on capacity in that it can't really grow any larger. It's going to take a lot more to address that issue. People say Lightning Network is the solution. I don't know enough about it right now to have a good feel about whether or not that is likely to be true. LN seems like a centralized solution to me, which is what people were complaining about with raising the block size to scale.