Bitcoin is not a store of wealth or digital Gold - its fools Gold. Bitcoin tries to replicate the properties which make Gold unique as an an alternative to fiat currency. Its not a store of value, people only own it because they think its going to be worth more in the future but it has no intrinsic value! You can look around and see that no business owner accepts Bitcoin as payment, they just convert them to pounds or dollars via Bitpay to try and pretend. There's nothing unique about it, there is no limit to the number of digital currencies that can be created (we already have over 10k) and why did everyone stop using Internet Explorer browser? Because of Chrome.
Wrong... 650 Billion Dollars says otherwise. Tell me. What makes Gold so special as a store of wealth ? Why is is worth $2k per ounce?
Because Gold is 5000 year old trusted store of value, its got nothing to prove. Your market cap quote has just proved how Bitcoin is not a store of value, going from 1.2 trillion peak in mid April to 645 billion today - 55% wiped of its value in a week and were not even close to done yet, probably will rally to $40k in the short term before tanking to $20k then sub $10k, charts and data don't lie everyone can see. A lot of retail investors have be sold the dream crypto is the new digital Gold but like I said its fools Gold, but you can make money from Bitcoin if you got in really early and thats great but spare a though for those who bought in at $60k. Doge will be 0.10 soon too.
But as a self acclaimed "whale" (LOL), why have you not sold if your beliefs are so strong that it doesn't have value and will dump soon?
I'm only a whale in shit coins like zeppelin dao and Bonfire. I hope I didn't come across as a troll as I want crypto to do well, I just don't like them being lumped in same categories as other commodities for marketing purposes and the fact you only ever hear about the upside and people need a reality check. I'm seriously underwater in Coinbase stock I should never have bought which seems basically tied to how well cryptos are doing (even thought the company is still very profitable as is) which is sideways at best at the moment. I want to see it recover, I think it will but might be in for a crypto winter..
Lol, I had this problem understanding too. If you bought 1 BTC at £45k on Kraken, for example, did Kraken take your £45k, give you 1 BTC (but how did they get it?) and then make some money on top because of exchange fees. So your cash goes somewhere, but you trade it for 1 BTC which is worth the equivalent liquid at that time. It's like buying a Ferrari at the dealership for 100k and then driving it away, tomorrow it's worth 95k because the market sets the value. But I'm very interested in where your cash goes from the exchange. How do exchanges provide BTC. Where does it come from? Surely someone somewhere has to mine that BTC to give to you. Or ???
Exchanges are just marketplaces for Buyers and Sellers. That's all there is to it really. They operate an order book. Crypto Exchanges are the same as FTSE and NASDAQ are exchanges for Stock and Shares. The current price of any asset is set by the last known bought or sold value. The price is determined by the market.
Last night I converted all my alt coins while they were still at a tiny profit to BTC and Eth only. I did some research and punted on the Internet Computer Token looks promising.. you see I love crypto nearly as much as El Salvador
Check out HNT aswell. Really good use case in terms of Helium Network being pretty disruptive tech. LoRa Network built by people rather than individual company and eventually passing data ....fleet trackers, sensors etc. Currently a 20 week wait for hardware and 5G data transfer in pipeline.
It's not a stupid question at all. The 20k went to the person that you bought the Bitcoins from, it's really that simple.
It is probably worth you doing some research into the history of money and how the financial system works, because then you will have a better concept of what money really is. Personally I think it's an interesting subject.
I also wonder how feasible it is with the energy consumption involved, with most of the west trying to reduce their carbon footprint.
Cryptos use a fraction of the energy consumption of the traditional banking sector, and whilst some would argue they will not replace this sector and therefore aren't needed, the same was said in the early days of the Internet and look where we are now. Innovation requires sacrifice for progression; electric car manufacturers are hardly producing cars with green energy..
Covid has allowed UK, EU and US governments to hide the biggest global financial crash in history. There was uproar when they bailed out the bankers in 2008 but go and look at UK public debt levels today compared to 2010, when we were told that Labour had destroyed our economy for a generation or check out the Fed's balance sheet today compared to 2008 when we had the great crash. Whatever they want us to believe we are living with hyper-inflation, you can't pump that amount of money into an economy and not be. I WAS a sceptic of crypto currency but fact is that even if it is a scam, I now believe you have a bigger chance of losing everything if you hold FIAT currency than if you hold Bitcoin, FIAT is without doubt a ginormous Ponzi scheme that could be close to collapse.
This week bought 8k worth new ACH token at 2p after reading white paper. They get partnered with Binace yesterday who need them bad and go to 20p that is insane in 24hrs.. I can see how people becoming millionaires overnight in crypto. If I'd just grown some bollocks and done a couple grand I'd made a small fortune.. next time..