[Edit: * was up-left, mistakenly.]
BTC is also currently down from its peak, no one knows if it's currently "trending up".
Not sure what you're disagreeing with. Point is, if I can't predict reasonably well what I'll be able to buy in a few months with the currency I'm using, maybe what I'm using is not meant to be a currency.
> And your time frame on BTC is too short. Yes, it's trending up, and also becoming less volatile over time.
I'm sure I can find a time frame over which BTC is up. Not sure that helps much. It's "trending down" since August 2021. It's "trending up" over the last 10 years. What comes next is anyone's guess.
Regarding volatility, whenever I look at it, all the sources I can find point to some volatility being at least constant over the past few years (I linked a source in another comment which indicates sustained volatility over the last 7 years). I've seen 3 different ones so far. Do you have one that would indicate otherwise?
I could find one[0] but it's pretty bad, it starts with the yearly chart showing that the volatility is not declining, then shows a daily one over 7 days and shows a decline over this period.
[0]: https://medium.com/@silvestrimichela.s/is-btc-volatility-goi...
It's more of an ideal, e.g. the ECB targets this. In practice there's a margin of error, the question is how big it is. Once this error (for the currency you use, e.g. USD I assume, given your comment) and the volatility of BTC are close enough, we can consider BTC as competitive as a currency. Until then it's not.
At any given time almost every asset is "down from its peak". It's impossible to be "up from the peak". The best-case scenario is to be at the peak, but that doesn't last.
If you bought in at the peak, when it was trading at double the all-time high as of just a month or two prior, then you lost of bunch of money when the price returned to normal. That's a fairly predictable outcome. But before it started shooting up in December of 2020 it had never been above $30k for more than a day or so (if ever), and since then it hasn't gone below $30k, and for the most part has remained above $38k or so despite some rather chaotic market conditions. Over the last two years it's up over 320%. (The S&P 500 is up about 80% over roughly the same time period, measured from its lowest point in March 2020.)
IMHO the recent volatility is mostly due to political factors rather than the market. Regulators can't seem to collectively decide whether they want to adopt it themselves, ban it outright, take the hands-off approach, or just impose one unreasonable regulation after another with the goal of forcing it into the mold of the broken systems it was designed to replace. You'd see the same in any other asset class subjected to a similar political environment.
> IMHO the recent volatility is mostly due to political factors rather than the market.
If that's accurate, that would indicate that this volatility is not bound to disappear anytime soon.
Still, given the incentives to manipulate the market for a profit and the presence of actors such as Tether, I wouldn't discount manipulation as a big part of this volatility.