Should an old fart invest in bitcoin?
Short answer. No.
Buy bitcoin if you want to pay a ransom. Buy drugs. Bribe officials. Order an assassination…. And who doesn’t from time to time?
Long answer. If you wanna convert your real world assets into a herd of electrons go right ahead.
Shells, leaves, sticks… all these things survived as currencies for hundreds and thousands of years.
Stacks of intangible zeros and ones? Bitcoin? Why the hell not?
But the idea of bitcoin as a currency strains the old mind.
And the idea of bitcoin as a prudent investment? Hmmm… old mind blown.
A currency is supposed to be stable. See Venezuela, Zimbabwe, the Weimar Republic and other shitholes for implications of unstable currency.
The conquistadors who toppled the Incas in 1533 had shedloads of gold but not much wine. You’d need a sapphire the size of a llama’s testicle to buy a bottle of wine from a conquistador. Bitcoin currently is like that wine. Lots of dollars but bitcoin supply is limited.
The smart conquistadors got a taste for mezcal.
Even if you view bitcoin as a currency, you probably won’t want to invest in it on traditional grounds.
The problem with traditional currency investing is that wins are unpredictable.
Even more of a problem, currency investing is boring. Or at least, it should be.
The traditional enemy of currency is uncertainty. Which destroys the faith of the faithful. Except for anomalies like cigarettes in a jailhouse, almost every currency is little more than faith.
Bitcoin showed the way. But technology marches on. Leave bitcoin. Or use it to quickly move in and out of crypto to dollars.
Bitcoin is a sideshow. There’s much more to crypto than bitcoin. Though you’d hardly believe it from the mainstream media of the past year.
Go quest old fart. You’ll be hearing a lot more about the non-bitcoin currencies going forward.
Pay attention and it might repay you.
DISCLAIMER
Seriously.... "Buy bitcoin if you want to pay a ransom. Buy drugs. Bribe officials. Order an assassination." NO NO NO. Do not try these things (except the drugs maybe). I'm taking a huge risk just posting that screenshot... which you can find here on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market. This is posted here simply to inform old farts about the many implications of crypto. Investments can go up and down. Especially crypto. And so fast that you can lose a fortune before you even realized you had one because the markets never close and presumably you need your beauty sleep. Oh BTW I may or may not have an interest in any enterprise or outright fraud mentioned here. Who knows, I may be even be pumping and dumping. Why the hell not? Currently it's all fair game in crypto. But that will probably change soon in many jurisdictions so keep reading this disclaimer coz you might actually learn something about what the regulators are up to. And for what it's worth I'm not qualified in any way to reliably pontificate about crypto. No one is really at this stage of the game.