Originally Posted by
gimmick
The basic reality of BTC is that it's speculative asset with name recognition. Nothing has changed in the last 5 years with that. It's whatever with the latest rise. It's close enough to the top that when fiat printers go brrrrrrrrrrrr it get's some of it.
The fundamentals still suck. It does nothing it was supposed to do. I don't really see a good reason to bump this thread yearly to repeat that.
It's not scaling any better, the transaction costs aren't going down, it's not even remotely private, it's not cutting out the middleman, it's not burning any less electricity to do something better than other forms of payment, it's not attracting new businesses to adopt it and a 100 other things it's not doing.
Some of the above you can assign to hype and some of it is in the white paper. Really doesn't matter. But if BellyBuster want's to make case for how awesome BTC is, then tell us what it does better than it's competition.
All of the above is why I'm surprised it had a comeback since the early 2018 crash. After that, it was generally accepted that bitcoin would never have any practical use besides gambling, illegal purchases, and sending (medium-to-large) money around on the internet, and that many of the criticisms of the existing banking system now applied to bitcoin as well.
I thought the love affair was over, and we would see a slow trudge back down to a much, much lower level.
Well, here we are at all time highs again, despite nothing changing, and I can't really explain it. Maybe it's both the name recognition (as gimmick said) plus the rise of NFTs, which in turn bring people's eyes back to bitcoin, even though only indirectly related.