Reward and risk are strongly related. Nobody should know that better than startup people.
Bitcoin is a religious subject among the tech crowd.
The most fascinating thing about BTC has nothing to do with 'block-chain' - it's the manner in which it has created hype among tech circles.
Techies look at it from a tech perspective, financial types from a financial perspective.
From a financial perspective, BTC is downright bizarre. Even the 'threat of disruption' aside, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
But from a tech perspective, is uber-cool.
So it's hard to have a discussion about BTC because almost nobody talks about it as a financial instrument - it's always about tech.
The amount of systematic hype is surreal - constant streams of articles etc. etc..
It's going to get bigger before it gets smaller as the hype is just starting to reach mainstream.
I am really impressed with it as a technology. It's absolutely brilliant.
But when I put on my business hat, I'm still not seeing it. For quite a number of years I've been asking for proof of daily use among significant market segments. For just as many years, I've been getting, "OMG THINK OF THE FUTURE!!!" as an answer.
I have some hope that we're at peak BTC hype, though. A lot of the enthusiasm (and the bigger scams) seem to have moved on to smart contracts, ICOs, etc. It's much harder now to ignore Bitcoin's years of not being very useful.
There are an amazing number of people who own a little BTC and are in on the hype.
And this is like Facebook 2007, where I already thought 'everyone was on it'. No. The 'rest of America' is just learning about it - then the 'rest of the world' - and then the other 3 billion or so people who are barely on the Internet. FB grew for quite a very long time after 'we thought we all were on it'.
BTC though is tricky to access, my Mother is on FB, she will never buy a Bitcoin.
But I do believe BTC has a lot of popular hype to ride yet.
I suggest it will start to wane quite a long while after the press stops talking about it daily. A lot of people will just 'hold' so I don't think we'll see a crash though.
There are caveats:
The press is notorious for flipping on things. They could turn on BTC and make enough noise. Since it's highly speulative, it's easy to see a flood of people rushing out to 'cash in'.
And of course governments: A Scandinavian country could opt to regulate it, or treat it like 'real currency' and require transparency etc. - which for any other currency would be 'great' because it's validation, but really, the whole point of BTC is anonymity etc. - esp. for black market transactions, so really, it's not a good thing.
It's a brilliant and fun excercise we're going through, but since it's doubtful BTC can ever be an actual currency or medium of exchange, I really wish we would 'move on' because it's not really a useful thing in the end.
Somebody may come along with an actually useful crypto - but i don't think that BTC or the ICO's we're seeing are it.
