It’s a great victory lap to people who didn’t buy into morons on youtube who said Bitcoin would reach 250k-1 million in a year, and doubled what they put in when we were in a bear market the last few years. Anyone who invested 4+ years ago is likely looking at some nice profits already and to come.
250k is certainly reachable, just not yet and could take awhile. 1 million is such plain stupid.
In fairness, we'd probably have gone $100K+ easily last cycle if FTX hadn't been taking USD from people who wanted to buy Bitcoin and then pretending to hold Bitcoin for them but not actually ever securing it for them. Bitcoin's price goes up when demand outstrips supply, and creating a bunch of fake paper supply is the most effective and really only way to suppress the Bitcoin price. Combine that with the Terra/Luna collapse that destroyed Blockfi and a bunch of other Bitcoin-adjacent companies and I think we definitely had an artificially much lower blow-off top last cycle than would have happened if those frauds/blowups didn't occur and create massive forced selling and loss of confidence for market participants.
I hardly think this is the time for a forum victory lap. People invested a lot of money in crypto thinking Bitcoin would reach $100k, $250k, even $1 million by some estimates, backed by hundreds of hours of podcasts and lengthy essays. Today we're still only at 70% of the market value Bitcoin was during its 2021 highs. Which arguably were only possible due to a unique set of COVID lockdown-based circumstances.
While I have sympathy for people who got wrecked last cycle, let's not be so charitable as to call what they did "investing". The kind word for what they did is speculating, and a better word is gambling. Anyone who did their homework thoroughly knew that the correct holding period for Bitcoin is AT LEAST 4 years, and ideally much longer. While someone who lump sum bought the $69k top and never bought again is still down ~30%, literally every single person who started dollar cost averaging Bitcoin at any price including the $69k peak became in profit when it reached $30k in late June. And today at $47-49k they are significantly into profit. Obviously those who lump sum bought at $15k or $20k are even more dramatically in profit. So I don't mean to "take a victory lap", but when I spent the past year and a half exercising my thesis which seems to be proving out correct over time, I think it is natural to be pleased and to give an atta boy to others like The Crypto Guy and McGarnagle who also had the discipline to weather a major drawdown and exercise the same thesis.
I am curious as to how BTC and ETH were able to maintain the specific floors they were at the better part of the last two years. About $20k for BTC and $2k for ETH. I'd be lying if that simple fact wasn't a case for at least some legitimacy behind these two.
The floor price is set by the small but determined group of people like The Crypto Guy, McGarnagle and I who will continue to buy at any price, and whose ability to buy larger chunks of the supply increases as the price goes down. The lower the price of Bitcoin, the faster the highly committed Bitcoiners are able to eat up all of the available supply from willing sellers until there is no longer available supply from willing sellers, which is the point we've reached over the past year. That's when the price goes up again because new willing sellers need to be coaxed to the table by higher priced bids. This does not apply to 99% of crypto coins, as there are few if any hodlers of last resort for those - they usually just mostly die off and make their holders poor.
I'm still not sure BTC has much use and I'd argue that's been proven to be more of the case than not considering the tremendous market growth the last 10+ years and continued lack of common use cases for consumers.
The killer use case for BTC is riding the wave of monetization over time and experiencing increased purchasing power. Which is essentially the same use case as the stock market for most individuals. Nobody cares about the cash flows or the products when they own NVDA or TSLA or SP500. They care about the fact that they are holding assets that are scarce and will appreciate in value over time. Bitcoin mining has a real world use case for its energy arbitrage implications, but I reject the notion that Bitcoin itself needs another use case besides storage and appreciation of purchasing power until the point that it fully monetizes and gets legal tender tax treatment, in which case it could in theory function as an actual currency.
This is also in response to your lengthier post that I didn't quote, but i'm still not conviced something you admitted and outlined to be so volatile would be an intelligent store of wealth. Much has been said about the detriments of holding your money in savings or in an IRA but i'm still not sure you would be able to tell someone with a straight face, "Hey don't put your money into your 401k or in a Roth IRA, put it into Bitcoin!" and be confident they'd be investing their life savings responsibly.
I think there are two misconceptions here.
1: "Bitcoin is volatile" - No, Bitcoin is not even remotely volatile. It is the most secure and most consistently operational and effective computer network in human history. Throughout all of 2020-2023 the Bitcoin network experienced no volatility whatsoever except hash rate and fee rates, both of which are naturally normalized over time by the difficulty adjustment and miner/transactor incentives. The volatility is in the fiat exchange rate of Bitcoin, which is reflective of Greed/Fear cycles experienced by human beings, and is a feature of or unique to Bitcoin itself.
2: "Volatility is bad" - No, volatility is not bad if your goal is to increase your purchasing power over time. If your goal is to merely "store value" but not have it increase then yes, bitcoin is a bad investment. I'd recommend gold for that purpose since the cost of a hamburger or a car in gold is roughly the same today as it was a hundred years ago. The type of volatility that Bitcoin experiences (+2000%, -80%, +1000%, -80%, etc.) is highly conducive to increasing your purchasing power over time. The caveat is that you need to make sure you are not over-exposed to the point that you are a forced seller to meet expenses, that you avoid leverage that could make you a forced-seller, and that you not become so over-exposed that an edge case failure of the entire Bitcoin system (unlikely though it is at this point due to the Lindy effect) could bankrupt you or put you in a hole that is too big to recover from. Obviously this varies from individual to individual based on net worth, ongoing cash flows, and job security.
I think that for the average person who does not understand Bitcoin very well, a 2-5% portfolio allocation makes a lot of sense. But for someone who understands it extremely well and experiences no urge to panic sell when it goes down by 80% to find a new floor, I believe that 50+% of portfolio is reasonable. Those who have put 50+% of their portfolio in Bitcoin in the past and held for 4+ years have a 100% historical probability of increasing their purchasing power. And though historical performance is not indicative of future performance, I believe it is game theoretically extremely likely that this trend will continue into the future.