My shower thought the other day:
How much money would Coinbase have, if instead of building the company they had just bought Bitcoin back in 2012 with their seed money?
I think it had dropped to about $7.50 around then.
How much money would Coinbase have, if instead of building the company they had just bought Bitcoin back in 2012 with their seed money?
I think it had dropped to about $7.50 around then.
Not to say it's impossible, but their work and approach definitely helped bring Bitcoin to the masses.
My point is more that I find it a bit sad that 'just buying bitcoin' rather than doing work paid better than basically any work anyone has done since 2012, even building insanely successful startups.
If you live in Venezuela, converting to BTC even if you cannot buy anything with it but perhaps Columbian or Brazilian currency at a slight loss, is a hugely valuable capability, with significant advantages over both traditional fiat currency exchanges and custodial stores of value like gold.
What is the total global demand for cryptocurrency for this use case? Certainly not anywhere close to the total market cap of first world fiat currencies, but also probably still much higher than today’s total market cap of BTC.
This stands in contrast to smart contract and d-app marketplace currency like ETH, which has a completely different hypothetical valuation model.
Which means selling shovels is still roughly 30x better than buying shovels.