If they haven't accidentally done this, they've definitely got some balls
It's very reminiscent of stocks that rocket 500% in a year, while almost nothing in the underlying company changed.
A couple other examples: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2019-02-07-bitcoin-inefficie..., https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2024-11-20-nobel-prize-winni.... This bothers me, you can't respond to a genuine critique with "but look how much money I've made!"
Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there), but really this sort of site makes it seem like it is a bubble with the sort of "blind to history" boosterism.
Go read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or Market Wizards series, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, or any number of books about financial history and there are endless people saying 'it will never die and all the doubters are just wrong' before any big market crash.
It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.
Let's assume bitcoin has a tiny but positive probability of running the world economy in, say, 50 years. Ie bitcoin is a lottery ticket.
The fair value for a lottery ticket is some positive number. In 99.99..% of cases, the ticket will expire worthless. (In 0.00..1% of cases it will be worth quadrillions.)
The fair value of a lottery ticket is not a bubble, even if most lottery tickets expire worthless.
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Now, of course, it's still possible to overpay for lottery tickets. Eg if you buy an actual lottery ticket in retail, the whole transaction usually loses you at least 50 cents on the dollar for lottery taxes alone.
But that's a separate issue.
Lottery tickets were only an example.
All are criticism that can be evaluated on their own but it's irrelevant how much bitcoin grew since they were made.
but i think the primary point of the comment was to highlight the "Bitcoin has been declared dead 478 times" part
The first quote i got was "Bitcoin is evil" and then the subtitle "bitcoin worth now 10000%"
Bitcoin is still evil and it has very much to do with the value of bitcoin.
This page is ignorant and shit :(
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
Has been proofen often enough.
State actors can just hurt your famiily. State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
That actor has to know that you have something to be touched for in the first place. Which is not the case if you buy crypto without KYC unlike with the classical brokerage, for example.
> State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
Is paranoid and not serious. Yes, they can do a lot in theory, but on practice even basic level opsec avoids it.
In reality if somebody from the state is already after you explicitly for real, you are going to die or be in prison. I can't really argue with that. Most people are not under active confrontation with the governments, but under passive snooping and pity everyday legal risks that make their lifes miserable.
In most cases they don't send hitmen neither for "foreign agents" labeled people from Russia, nor for sanctioned Russians outside from the US, for example. My point is about people who are not active fugitives, but, you know, want to keep their stuff with them without risking neither their country bank freeze, nor western-based financial infra freeze because they hold the wrong passport.
Chinese firewall is real.
Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.
And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.
Like Joni says, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone."
My situation compares to a remittances transfer like Western Union https://www.westernunion.com/content/dam/wu/EU/EN/210439812_... which charge about 4%+.
Cash-to-cash is free, but it loses value while it sits under your mattress.
Also the transaction cost. Is it any better?
Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.
Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.