What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
I really doubt that anyone is buying bitcoin for the collapse of industrial civilization. The more prepper-case for bitcoin comes from either very high inflation, financial instability, and/or severe capital controls. It's not implausible that these conditions coexist with the continued existence of industrial civilization.
It's not implausible because it's happened many times before in history. For example, if you were a Jew in Germany circa 1936, Bitcoin would have been very very valuable to you. In much the same that diamonds were valuable to those in that time and place, because of the ease by which they could be hidden and smuggled against the authorities' wishes.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html
Its easy to skew this if you don't understand the underlying tech, but Bitcoin continues to work despite a supposed exodus of miners (best example being the last fork with BCash), what secures the network are the nodes, not miners. They're just participants who are rewarded for appropriating the network with hashing power.
As for the price dip, well I welcome anyone to buy $100 of BTC and hold onto a $100 and see which is more valuable now that the Federal Reserve has dropped Interest rates to 0%, and is issuing a $700 Billion QE program:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/federal-reserve-cuts-rates-t...
> They should never be there anyway, Bitcoin is a waste of time.
Personally, this couldn't have come at a worst time for me as I stepped down from my day job to undergo my SpaceX interview(s), I've turned down some gig/jobs in the last month too, but I'm glad that I have BTC as a cushion with some cash on hand.
When margins are squeezed only the largest vertically integrated players survive.
And yet, that's not what happened when it forked Bitmain (who may have had 70-80% of Bitcoin's hashing power at one point) was the one to take the hardest hit and essentially folded; its founder was exited and disgraced, and the company was pivoted to what seems to be primarily an AI business now [2] after that utter failure to 'prove' what you have said is accepted as 'Truth' when its not simply true when it played out in this space.
I think what many, especially those not actively working or participating in this space, seem to not understand is that Bitcoin, and to some extent cryptocurrency in general, is defying the supposed 'conventional wisdom' by just exisiting and then disproving them with these occurences.
Most of the criticisms are cherry-picked and mis-focused to react to it in a negative light--eg the ICO craze had nothing to do with Bitcoin.
After all this time I don't see any of those price drops as bad, its allowing newer participants to into this system if seen as investment, that they otherwise may have not been able to enter. And for those that were using to transact for goods/services during this volatility it may have hurt, but as someone pointed out merchant adoption is not so large that it could kill a business right now, not to mention there are ways to mitigate this with other instruments (tethered to USD and such).
Also, the thing most people don't seem to understand either is that Bitcoin mining has spurred on tons of renewable energy projects and has since migrated to that to capture said efficiencies [3] as documented by the International Energy Agency. The network is estimated to be operating on 70% renewable energy, and is growing with projects like Theil's backed bitcoin mining facility in Texas [4].
1: https://www.ccn.com/bitmain-jihan-wu-micree-zhan-stepping-do...
2: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-mining-giant-bitmain-...
3: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...
4: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...
That's nothing.
That's a rounding error compared to the compared to the 4.4 trillion dollars spent each year by the government.
The market cap of the S&P 500 is still well over $20 trillion. It fluctuates more than $700 billion in a single day.
If anyone wonders what this is, it's a demeaning name for the Bitcoin Cash fork, used to discredit it.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
You have the same issue with Bitcoin, because it is deflationary it is in the holder's interest to not spend it, because it's future buying power will be increased.
So if you look at how bitcoin was distributed you have early holders that have a tremendous amount and have been rewarded for it.
Add to that speculation and you have this whole cycle ramped up on steroids, with huge swings up, and then down, and all the while the value continues to increase because it is designed to do so.
The problem was that bitcoin tried to solve two problems, but should have only solved one.
The first problem was how to transfer value in an untrusted network which was a great success.
The second, was unneeded, which is to make it deflationary as some sort of perhaps response to the inflationary world we live in.
But the reality is that the inflationary world was designed by economists so that wealth continues to circulate. Yes, there are still issues. Yes we have imbalance. But inflation does case wealth to circulate, though not as quickly as some would hope for.
In bitcoin, you have the exact opposite, wealth gets accrued to early backers and just sits there.
Funny, I built a fintech startup on helping the cannabis Industry from their supposed 'cash' problem(s): predominately having too much of it and not having banking, or having thier cash taken indefinitely by the bank/paypal upon closure of their account(s). While also doing B2B transactions where banks/CC companies failed to lend them services, despite having Local/State laws permitting so. None of which Cash seemed to prove as useful as you think it is.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way: rather than looking at it as a paradigm shift in what programmable money can do, you are measuring Bitcoin by how it fails to function (or dysfunction) as your local Fiat currency does.
That's a very poor measure/metric, as for being able to use it day-to-day, provided you're willing to operate within a KYC/AML system, you can have Visa Credit Cards that draw from your source of BTC in real time/previously loaded, depending on what service you use.
Merchants who accept Bitcoin is a constraint, mainly a tech related one, but just like how many restaurants now take UberEats/Doordash/GrubHub that amount to a growing/large(r) percent of their revenue (moreso when States are limiting restaurant hours or outright operation to online orders only [1]) you will see new use cases appear which Bitcoin's layer 1/2 can utilize natively as a private p2p system.
I think its very telling that despite guy's like Jack Dorsey backing Bitcoin, who I think understands the fintech landscape, and has been orientating Square to be integrated and compatible with it many of you still refuse to see the shift has already happened.
Price drops happen in Bitcoin, I've been in this long enough that it doesn't phase me anymore; and is the only real antidote to the supposed 'what about the early adopter whales' issue people bring up, personally I'm using some of my discretionary budget to buy more.
I'm not here to convince you to use Bitcoin, or why it would work for you/your business: I'm just pointing out why what you said is skewed and not framed correctly. Otherwise you'll have to do what IBM did: offer a good salary for consultant fees to do so. :)
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/15/corona...
Does the difficulty factor of new blocks get dropped in response to losing hash power? Is the fee / mining reward balance predictable? Does the network become non-functional for xfers below a certain value at some point?
The mining reward stays the same, though it drops by half every few years (one such drop is approaching in May).
The network actually becomes non-functional for low transfers the other way - when there's too much interest, and too many transactions, the fees to get a transaction through start to rocket. At the peak of the 2017 hype the y hit around $50-70, IIRC.
