We’re going hockey-stick! (At least for a little bit)
Edit to add: Glad instead of getting 3 downvotes right off the bat, people decided to spend effort into writing thoughtful comments.
Bitcoin is backed by hoping a greater fool will pay you more for it, and a bunch of GPUs in Xianjiang.
You can try to gussy it up with arguments like “faith and credit” or “the military” or “you can pay taxes with it” or “has industrial applications”, but that’s not the basement level of determining value.
It's an unnecessary and unreasonable transfers of wealth weighted from late adopters to early adopters.
There's a better way. Bitcoin only gained traction and aligned people primarily due to greed and ability to profit off of others simply because of adoption - furthering the army/mob of HODLers who are then become aligned financially, to promote Bitcoin via mostly propaganda, to 1) to push it until it's back to the price they bought it at, or 2) hoping it skyrockets - only because the majority of people are HODLing with their HODL rally call - to then realize a profit.
So of course there's a collective belief it's worth something - because you keep essentially tricking more people with propaganda to buy into it, making it seem like it has more value than it actually does - because the value it has is speculation; now the rest of society will have to fight the greed and mob of HODLers from regulatory capture, as the current latest adopters don't want to be "holding the bag" at the end when there's finally no one left to buy the bag from them; do you understand how, this is why Bitcoin is also correctly compared to a Ponzi scheme as well? Or you'd be happy being the last person to buy Bitcoin?
Funny thing is, no pro-Bitcoiner is incentivized to create a system that would work just as well - better in fact, being able to then do policy like the Magnitsky Act - where there isn't a wealth transfer simply due to adoption; the incentives aren't aligned to be good for society, it's driven by a selfish mechanism - it's just the next evolution of the Finance Industrial Complex, and that's accessible to all via decentralized, global reach it has. BUY NOW!! GET IN EARLY!!
No, and Jack is a big proponent of Bitcoin and has offered buying/selling via CASH. He has been saying he's maxed out cash app's buying service since it's inception in 2018ish (?) with no repercussions.
Furthermore, their purchase/holdings could represent the amount outstanding Square has to have as reserves after daily operations--Square is CASH's parent company, which allows for the buying and selling of Bitcoin, not some IOU like Paypal.
I think they may be finally rolling out Bitcoin acceptances via the Square POS system, ideally with LN (something Jack has financed in the past). Something I wish we had during the pandemic to allow small businesses to invest in and convert to just keep the lights on, instead most got wiped out from dealing with fiat and may never come back again. .
I just hope you guys on HN start to realize the 2 biggest names in Fintech are already Bitcoiners, Jack has been for some time but Elon (who was arguably more important than Thiel, who also has Bitcoin investments, in making Paypal) has only recently made it public, but was also at one time regarded as potential person for who was 'Satoshi' for a reason. IN addition to the Worlds richest person, or was until the Tesla stock dip this week.
The SEC should have gone after Citadel, Melvin, Robinhood, etc... instead they had what even one politician said was 'political theater,' but they didn't and instead they go after things that change the status quo, which this may be... or until the status quo has adopted it in a way that it's beneficial to them, and while it we (bitcoiners) would be remiss to say we built this architecture for them, we knew one day they would of out of self-interest join.
That's where are now. I'm not entirely convinced it's not them lowering the price to get a better buy in position, both Microstrategy and Tesla have enough to make the market move in that direction. I'm just thankful they did and I got to buy more on the way down.
I actually wonder if Coinbase offers this as a service, as in you pay Coinbase XX million for services rendered and they start dumping coins on the market to help its high net worth buyers buy billions worth of bitcoin via OTC at a lower price. But this is just unsubstantiated conjecture on my part, though not entirely impossible. Then blame Kraken as plausible deniability and rinse and repeat.
Edit: typical HN downvote brigade... I expected more from this place, and felt that people would challenge the idea, not the message/messenger.