• KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    That was just people chasing fomo and the “greater fool”. Basically some people are dumb and don’t want to miss out. Other people know the company is crappy but think they can sell to a dummy at a higher price. Eventually people think “it’s different this time” and pay way too much money. Last dummies are left holding the bag.

    Exactly what’s happening with Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies. There’s no value attached to the currency besides hype, which eventually fades. The USD is reliable because the US government only accepts it as payment for taxes. You need it. No one important accepts only Bitcoin. So you don’t need it.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      No one important accepts only venmo, yet it is a popular platform for payments. Nobody outside of the US has to pay taxes to the US govt yet they still choose USD. The value of the currency come from the same things that bring value to all currencies: people’s faith in its monetary policy and network effect (how many places you can spend it). All currencies are speculated on by traders, this is not unique to Bitcoin.

      Bitcoin has maintained it’s monetary policy in a stable state and worked 365 days a year, 24 hours a day for 15 years without a single day of downtime and without being hacked. And for reasons of math and physics, it will continue to do so. Nobody, no matter how powerful you are, can print Bitcoin that isn’t meant to be printed or spend money you don’t have the private key to.

      With Bitcoin lightning, you can send a transaction across the globe in under a second with pennies in transaction fees. This can be accessed by anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access, regardless of whether they have access to stable banking infrastructure, which Billions of people, with a B, do not.

      Bitcoin’s total market cap is over 800 billion which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Higher than Sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than Vietnam. On average, adoption and market cap grows every year no matter which metric you use to measure it.

      Every day, every single block on the bitcoin blockchain is full of transactions. People pay for that space, there is no empty space left in any of the blocks. People are sending money from A to B with it. It secures those transactions. That is its use case and value.