Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

Personally I think Bitcoin has at least two bubbles left before it pops permanently. So $1M price could be achievable.

The real question is what happens when it does reach a ceiling. At some point there's not going to much more potential interest for Bitcoin, and what then? Are people gonna start moving their pension funds to Bitcoin? I think the governments will crack hard down on that, because you really want investments in building the economy, not in a pure investment/gambling scheme.

If most people start thinking there's no one else interested in buying their Bitcoin down the line, it'll crash hard, and the crash will likely be permanent. Because there's no real value behind Bitcoin. The money you invested is already spent by someone on something else.

The reason why it's interesting that Bitcoin keeps having bubbles is that there's not much reason to think that will stop. Yeah, the value keeps growing over longer time periods, but eventually a bubble will be so large that it'll seriously disrupt the economy, and that's when you'll start to see governments and peoples attitudes change.

> I enjoy reading comments about Bitcoin here because even without any venture backing, it achieved a bigger valuation than all of the Y Combinator companies COMBINED, yet people still think it is unstable and has no future.

The problem is that the valuation is more imaginary than the valuation of any company except for those that are just Ponzi-schemes.

Most money put into Bitcoin has been cashed out or used for mining expenses. If everyone tried to cash out, the price would very quickly race back down to zero. If the same happened with a stocks in a corporation, at some price level someone would just buy up a controlling stake of the shares and liquidate all the assets for a profit.

This is a common claim, but nothing is ensured here.

Almost everything else we put a value to has a more real underlying value that's also growing. Gold has uses in technology, with stocks most companies have real assets that could be sold off, even with art I think most people would be willing to buy an art-piece for the right price. The value of a Monet for me might be a tiny fraction of its valuation, but it's there. But nobody has any underlying interest in a Bitcoin. Its value as a currency for paying for products and services seems to be diminishing as well.

You can't make more Bitcoin, but you can easily make more cryptocurrencies, all with the same limited supply (which according to some people means the value MUST increase). And they're all equally interesting. The one exception with Bitcoin is that it was first. You could say it has a tiny bit of underlying historical value.

To me, I think it implies that it's inevitable that Bitcoin will have a crash that's very deep and very long lasting. It's impossible to predict when though. In the very long term it'll probably increase due to hits historical value. But by that point I doubt it'll significantly outperform other investments.

I also think there's a very high likelihood that many governments will regulate cryptocurrency exchanges to death at some point. A rally against Bitcoin specifically can easily be justified as part of the fight against climate change, since it wastes so much energy.

I don't own any cryptocurrency and can't put a dollar valuation on such an achievement, but it's certainly not an everyday thing.

In the fall, Paypal adopted Bitcoin in their payment network.