if I invest in Bitcoin today, am I still an early adopter?
Real investments have a return derived from capital. A house, for example, can be rented out for money. Or a business can earn profit and distribute it to its shareholders. You can try to buy and sell houses like people did during the RE bubble for profit, or try to buy and sell stocks like a day trader, but these are still fundamentally different from an "asset" which has no means by which to generate a return on its own.
You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It's just another currency. Do people claim that forex is not investing?
Not really though. You can buy a few novelties online and there are a handful of places that accept bitcoin, but realistically it is not "just another currency", it's an IOU for usable money.
Yes, all the time. It's clearly speculation (in the technical sense)
I'd say, more so, the distinguishing factor between an investment and speculation is that an investment is used to facilitate a business process that could potentially create wealth whereas speculation is a bet that something of value will be worth more at a later date.
It's like, I think that lithium is gonna be short in the near future. It's really useful stuff. But I'm not buying kilograms of raw lithium to hoard in my garage, I'm investing in the companies that oversee the element's mining, processing, surveying, etc. And maybe looking at commodity options in the short term, but given what happened there with aluminum...
Crypto can play a similar role.
Now this is what I come to HN in the morning for.
Options and derivatives are risky. A merely volatile asset that never expires is pretty conservative in comparison.
Many other coins have gone up 2x, 5x, even 10x in the last weeks/months.
Bitcoin going from 4K to 20K in 4 years (ie 5x) is relatively tame.
Why like 20k (as opposed to like 100k or like 1k)?
You just have to do a calculation involving the number of people on the planet to figure out when the supply of new suckers runs dry and the price crashes.
I'm bullish on crypto but McAfee is... well something else.
Just don't consider it an investment, and don't put anything into it that you'll miss. Investments are tied to real world value, returns and having a say, bitcoins have no real world application or substance outside of financial crime.
https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-can-you-buy-with-b...
Bitcoin's network is not scaling well.
LN, for example, is adding degrees of centralization to achieve better scaling. Human systems have a tendency towards centralization and consolidation of power/authority as well, as we see in various ways already with Bitcoin (China, Ver, Core).
There's overwhelming evidence to believe that the future of Bitcoin is much more centralized, at which point it starts to resemble the systems we already have but with horrifying disadvantages: your entire transaction history is public to everyone, your identity can be linked to your wallet through exchanges, etc.
Another example is that the electricity cost to run the system is going up at an unsustainable pace. Eventually they'll have to switch to an new way to propagate the blockchain something other than Proof of Work mining.
Most likely though, these problems will be solved with some kind of hard fork rather than BTC dying.