Hopefully not too soon. I just bought $30,000 in BITI, an ETF that tracks the inverse of Bitcoin. Basically the only way to short Bitcoin from a typical retail investment account.
This seems like a bad idea all around. BITI, like many “ETF that tracks ___”, tracks daily changes, which means as price chops around you’re continually losing value, i.e. BTC can break even over a year and BITI will lose value. Then there’s the issue of it tracking a deflationary instrument that is essentially guaranteed to rise over time unless it were completely eliminated, just due to people losing BTC via bad/lost hard drives.
I hope you're right but bubbles tend to go through an exponential blow-off phase before the crash which often takes out shorts who were right but too early.
Not when it has repeatedly demonstrated over more than a decade that it is completely incapable of supporting a sane, usable model for financial transactions that isn't 99% scams, drugs, and burning giant piles of energy every time someone actually tries to use it as money.
Decentralizing the monetary system is potentially a laudable goal. Bitcoin has failed to accomplish it. Failed. Move on.
Many years into crypocurrency being a thing, we have a non-theoretical answer to this question: apparently not, no. Not for legal purposes at least (people do get value from it as a way to buy drugs or other illegal things/services)
This. Censorship resistance === Cannot undo fraud. A money system that cannot claw back ill-gotten gains is NOT "giving power to the users", but rather giving power to the con-men! Worse, fraud is such a huge return on investment that any system that enables it such as bitcoin does inevitably will have a market driven by fraud, because it easily out-competes the more legitimate business.
Bitcoin isn't full of fraud because "it's hard to track", or "there's nothing better to do" or "because it's new/unregulated"
Bitcoin is full of fraud and only fraud because a system that doesn't allow you to take back transactions unilaterally makes legitimate business HARDER than fraud, and for less return.
The other main "easy fraud" monetary system is gift cards, and they have to expend enormous effort and money on anti-fraud measures and just eating losses so users don't constantly have their money stolen. Crypto doesn't even have that, and in fact, literally cannot have that, because there is no empowered entity to do so.
