I will say what I've always said about crypto...
Keep telling me it's a bubble. Keep writing long educated articles about it. All while I consistently get rich. All while it's getting late for you to get rich too.
Keep telling me it's a bubble. Keep writing long educated articles about it. All while I consistently get rich. All while it's getting late for you to get rich too.
In general, yes.
But now you can get rich when you deindustrialize: http://instapaint.com/
Have you ever looked at the price history of gold in inflation-adjusted terms? That is VERY much not what gold does.
For example, silicon valley is full of people that were once multi-multi-millionaires on paper by holding stock that had an extremely high price, but didn't manage to get to sell it until the valuation collapsed. There's much more of them than the actual multi-multi-millionaires.
It's easy to get on the train, much harder to know when to get off. I still remember the anguished posts four years ago on HN from people who put their life savings into bitcoin shortly before the market crashed. One Reddit user on r/bitcoinmarkets posted that he had lost everything and took his own life. It took years for the market to recover. Don't fool yourself, nobody knows where this train is going.
People are really underestimating what a shit storm Bitcoin and other crypto will cause in finance.
I'm pretty sure that's going to turn out to be pension, mutual funds, and banks, just like last time, and everyone is going to be screwed. The question as bitcoin rises is how much has been borrowed against bitcoin holdings in how many ass-backward, half-fraudulent, made-legal-by-obscure-clauses-in-amendments-written-by-lobbyists-and-attached-to-unrelated-bills-with-bipartisan-support ways.
Given the body count of exchanges and coins that have collapsed due to unauthorized access, your spelling error is actually a beautiful thing.
But I don't think that cryptocurrencies will cause a "shitstorm". I'm under no delusion that Your Favorite Bank or Stock Exchange won't exist in two years, or in ten or even twenty. Managing and storing/handling/operating cryptocoins is not for the feint of heart. At best, the most disruption you might see would be the Coinbases of the world having a bigger role in some of the global financial market and traditional financial giants having some slightly smaller role to make room.
Holding bitcoin on your own is better than putting money in your mattress, but it's way, way, way less safe than an insured deposit in a bank. The volatility will decrease but it will at best be subject to the same 0.5-1% intradaily swings that a foreign currency goes through. It would take a substantial amount of time and money for it to settle down that much, though.
(But personally I think there is a difference: there's more-advanced competition now.)