The world needs a censorship-resistant digital vault to store wealth. Bitcoin is basically a very cheap "Swiss bank account as a service" for the world's unbanked.
Some use cases I can think off the top of my head:
(1) You are from Syria and need to flee war and escape into Europe – however bank transfers into Europe are almost impossible if you are a common Syrian. Bitcoin allows you to take your wealth with you, in your brain, as you escape across the border, by just memorising your twelve word private key.
(2) You are from Venezuela or Zimbabwe – The government has issued capital controls and is devaluing currency by the day. You transfer your wealth into Bitcoin in order to offset capital erosion due to hyper-inflation. When the situation stabilises, you transfer your Bitcoin back into fiat.
(3) You are Saudi billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal. The government freezes all your assets in a political coup. If you have a portion of your wealth in Bitcoin, you could protect them from government expropriation and anonymously transfer them to associates or family members abroad.
I truly believe that Bitcoin will serve the unbanked of the world. We're not there yet, but these are very early days for crypto.
Sorry for the long winded response, I get excited when talking about BTC.
In the case of a correction your cases 1 and 2 could end up very poorly off indeed.
BTC as a store of value has some brittle pieces. I'm not as confident in the current direction.
These developments could make Bitcoin (mostly) unusable and thus worthless. Would you still buy more?
Why would a person with low wealth invest their life savings into a highly volatile, recently developed instrument, when they can just buy jewelry, gold, etc
For the latter use case fewer objections readily come to mind, but this supports the reputation as a tool for those who are barred from capital markets due to illegal activity (whether real or politically contrived illegal activity)
Consumer applications (like Coinbase) will emerge to support the local population who can use it via smartphone and not need to understand public/private key encryption etc.
how would you get a meaningful number of people who have never used the Internet
They use the Internet; they just call it by a different name: Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram...
Why would a person with low wealth invest their life savings into a highly volatile, recently developed instrument, when they can just buy jewelry, gold, etc
Gold, jewelry, etc can be stolen or lost.
At least jewelry and watches are a relatively stable store of wealth.
There's a 'no one knows' stigma hanging around the cryptocurrencies. It's risky enough risking an escape from Syria, without adding a risk that traders are going to suddenly sell en-masse before you withdraw the funds.
I mean a transaction today can cost $3-4 USD. With valuation rising, and the network automatically paying out less per block, we could soon see a flooded network that is asking for $10-15 for a transaction. Is this an impediment from it becoming a large scale value store?
I don't know. I just don't get a good feeling from them.
So yes, its a little more centralized than Bitcoin, but everything I read really gives me the impression that they're handling things in the right way, so as to have a balance between network performance and distributed safety, without any one person/group being able to manipulate the ledger. So there'll never be any mining farms that can throw their weight around.
If anyone is really curious, do your research and I think you'll find the tech to be pretty interesting.
Index-based ETFs should be the way to go for casual investors. Put some money in half-a-dozen index funds from the US, EU and Asia, and you'll get a low-fee, relatively stable and 7% average yearly ROI.
I think it would not be a bad idea to just follow investment advice; take a well performing index or ETF and stick to that. Maybe invest some into bitcoin again after the bubble has burst and it has a closer to reality value.
In terms of real investment ETFs and - to a lesser extent - individual company shares are still the way to go.
I would love to strike gold, but it's complete gambling at this point and I'm likely not putting in enough to see life changing dividends. I never would recommend someone to invest in Bitcoin but if they have extra money and are looking to gamble in an interesting way go for it.
If the transaction cost keeps going up, well, that value diminishes, doesn't it?
A lot of people hate BTC on this forum cause they feel they missed out.
It's a confidence trick - is it bad to be a con artist? Or is relieving the gullible of their hard earned cash a noble pastime? There certainly isn't any actual value being created.
But if a bunch of greedy bastards wanted to pay off my mortgage, I can't see I'd have a problem with it.
At the time of this writing, I have investments in BTC, LTC, XMR (Monero), ARK, and RDD (ReddCoin). While BTC does represent around half of my total crypto investment, I wouldn't be completely screwed since one of the alts would probably take its place. I could see either Monero or one of the Bitcoin forks taking over in that scenario.
So, answering the question, I'd still invest in crypto. But I wouldn't invest in Bitcoin directly anymore.
