Money didn't begin as speculation. It began as lumps of gold exchanged to transfer value. There are great benefits to cryptocurrencies, but all the talk is remaining just that: Talk. There are excellent applications for blockchains out there, but we're in the dot-com boom phase of it right now. We're going to see a mass death of cryptocurrencies, followed by a dip, and gradually: Realistic applications of the technology. Nobody wants to hear this, though, because fortunes are being made.
@infernalturtle I'm past the point of feeling certain that it's going to rise, and have now reached the point where I'm waiting for it to fall. It's violating the long-term projection line I like to use at the moment.
@infernalturtle Granted, it took off for two years between January 2013 and September 2015 too, but I'm not sure if that's a healthy thing... https://snabeltann.no/media/qS9-F1Coh3Jd4dKUrLc
@infernalturtle It almost doesn't matter when you buy Bitcoin, because even if you buy at a peak, the baseline is going to reach what was formerly a peak very soon anyway. It's going to continue making people money for a while, but for how long? I'm not concerned with how long the hype cycles last. I'm more concerned about how long that logarithmic growth curve (shown as straight in the image) is going to hold.
@infernalturtle There is one law that always holds when you speculate: If you're making money, someone else is losing money. If you can imagine a big bank account with all the invested money in it, who keeps refilling that account so that others can cash in on it? There must be a hell of a lot of people losing money on Bitcoin out there. I suppose this is true of any financial instrument that doesn't pay stockholder dividends, but still...
@infernalturtle It just doesn't seem likely that an exchange rate is going to continue to multiply at a rate of 3X per year forever, which is basically what that line is indicating. No financial instrument has ever sustained such growth over time. The hype cycles in Bitcoin are basically hype cycles on top of something that's already growing at an insane rate.