Bitcoin’s price and adoption go hand in hand. without growing adoption, we shouldn’t expect sustained price increases. After all, demand (and thus price) is a reflection of real-world usage. But here’s the challenge: Bitcoin can’t compete with fiat for everyday transactions yet. So how do we bridge that gap?
When we see Bitcoin’s price surge, it begs the questio... Will it remain just a speculative asset? If so, that makes it a risky long-term hold, especially if adoption stalls. Worse, if whales and corporations dominate supply, they could manipulate the market, turning Bitcoin into a game for the wealthy rather than the many. That would defeat its purpose entirely.
So if someone doubts Bitcoin’s future over these concerns, how do you convince them it’s here to stay and grow?
The adoption you are referring to is to have more people use it on a day to day basis as a means of payment and then price would increase. If technology is put into place that allows for more usage or basically increase the number of use cases, it increases velocity of BTC units, but this is not unconditionally connected to price increases. There is an important distinction that must be made.
Compare it to gold and ask yourself what the use case of gold is for the average guy. You can now comment that gold can be used to manufacture jewelry or electric items and I agree. But since you are bringing up the case of day to day spending in essence, nobody uses gold for day to day payments. This is at least not the case for the vast majority of people. Yet
gold' total market capitalization is like 10x of that of bitcoin and payments is not a relevant use case at all for gold. In other words payments is not the one and only key for bitcoin to grow. More and more people will realize that it is the superior tool for value preservation and growth because velocity doesn't matter that much. It can have a huge impact if the whole world uses bitcoin for payments because it would have to have a certain amount of market capitalization in order to be able to serve transaction demand, leaving aside the bottleneck problem here.
The most important thing for bitcoin is to not get attacked in its core architecture. Exchanges will be hacked, people will be hacked, but not the network itself. It is funny sometimes how it is framed in public when an exchange gets hacked and the question is asked whether bitcoin is safe. Lockers do get robbed from banks, people get robbed off their watches. Cars get stolen. Credit cards get hacked. In some cases there is insurance and recourse, but in many cases it is not. But nobody would shout out that Rolex should be banned because a man got robbed or Visa or Mastercard should be shut down because data is sold on the dark net.
You should define what you mean by mass adoption. It is not like everybody owns gold. But there are some players owning a lot of it! In bitcoin the same will happen over time, some big players will come out on top and in this particular time, normal people have the opportunity to make use of this great innovation as an investment tool in the first place. If it becomes a major currency when technology is introduced for easy to use higher transaction capacity, in my opinion that is a plus. But for now I think it is clearly an investment tool and not a payment tool, but that doesn't reduce bitcoin's potential to grow beyond gold's market capitalization.