Bitcoin and Its Discontents: What Elon Musk's Buying of the Cryptocurrency is Telling Us

For years folks have debated the value of bitcoin. Warren Buffett has declared it a gigantic hoax. Economists have struggled to see if it fits in the convention of money. Is it a store of value or a medium of exchange? One theory argues its value tracks the number of users, a social network effect. Promoters of course see it as the future, giving rise to its own word, hodl, which means to hold for the long-term.

Recently, major banks have belatedly begun to suggest there is a long-term value to bitcoin, first and foremost based on its substitution over time for gold, and ultimately as an alternative asset class, supported by its improving use as a money substitute. While institutional bitcoin ownership is estimated to currently stand at less than 1%, that too seems in the process of change.

But now the debate has been settled. Elon Musk, our new arbiter of all that is in and out, has purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin and announced that Tesla plans to accept it as payment. Bitcoin predictably has jumped to a record high, in excess of $46,000, and now is up more than eight-fold in the past year.

Source: Investopedia

Regardless of whether bitcoin in the short-term gyrates unpredictably in value, it is timely to ask not what bitcoin is worth, but what its valuation tells us about ourselves.
The enduring beauty of bitcoin lies in its origin. It is typically defined as a peer-to-peer digital currency whose ownership is recorded in a secure account ledger, known as a blockchain. Lose the private key to access this ledger, as reportedly many early buyers have done, and the investment is lost forever, even if it amounts to millions, or now even billions of dollars.

The key missing word here is government. Whatever else it is, bitcoin at its core is a deeply thought-out protest medium. No permission is sought from the government for its creation, its valuation or its internal rules. It is peer to peer, meaning it existence and trade is purely between individuals. What better definition of freedom.

From this perspective, bitcoin’s meteoric rise sends the clearest of messages. People distrust government. Deeply. The more the distrust, the higher bitcoin will rise.

I still think it’s a government program of a kind to collect people’s wealth and leave them nothing.

Until I know for a fact, by having it traced backwards and having nobody government official in the beginning, that is my opinion on cryptocurrency.

Having said that, I wish I could have gotten in the ground floor so I could have cashed out by now.

How did the big stones once on Yap Island to store “value” store value? How does paper used in currency store value? For that matter how does gold store value?

Because people beleive it does and accept that it does !

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/11/11/yap-island/#:~:text=While%20Yap%20Islands%E2%80%99%20primary%20currency%20is%20the%20United,disks%20can%20weigh%20as%20much%20as%20seven%20tons.

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