A dip is still ongoing at the moment. Also, ETH's next big upgrade is a few weeks away; expect a big price jump if all goes well.

Ok. So that implies that your advice to 99% of people is to stay out of bitcoin and altcoins?

its way higher, that 99% probably applies to people who have already invested in them

Yes

How much direct directional exposure should you have to the Singapore dollar or Swedish Krona then too?
I am quite OK with having 0 for those two, crypto and any other currency speculation you can name.

Think it's slightly different though because Crypto is potentially a huge global currency

Changed my opinion on this.

Actually, the no-knowledge holders are very important and if you zoom out for a second and don't look at it from the angle of "giving good advice", there is another way to look at it.

The type of people who "blindly" invest into something will do that anyway irrespective of people channelling their inner Buffet. If you tell them to stay out of Bitcoin, they will go to a $hitcoin where they feel more welcome.
They do provide liquidity and they do increase the number of people invested, perhaps become a true believer. As a consequence of that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is crucial in something that relies on a network.

Our job as Bitcoin advocates is to get them on board of our team. We can give resources, teach them best practices, tell them to not invest their life savings, but if you tell them "you can only join our club if you read the whitepaper" is bad.

If they ask how to buy BTC, tell them to go to Coinbase. Wait for the "hold your own coins" and air-gapped stuff until they're ready (most people will never be)

To all the do-gooders, I also believe you are optimizing your Karma this way

BUMP! I hope you listened and got rich. And have now sold almost all of it. Though if you haven't sold, it's not too late. Sell sell sell!

I don't mind a small bitcoin allocation currently but alts = poop. Crypto is still insanely diluted/overpriced from the insane bull run. But I can see bitcoin making a recovery when people start to understand that most alts have zero fundamental value and the ICO pyramid scheme dies off. Be on the lookout for potential game changing news (ETF etc)

I'm also less and less convinced bitcoin can succeed long term from a technical perspective but it might have another big run in it.

BTC is still up 4x from the time where people told him not to invest. Whats my point? I dont know but I find that fact extremely interesting

At what price/when did you sell?
If you deep dive into the technicals it's obvious that bitcoin is rat poison and has no future and either a settlement layer or a global currency. It's deeply flawed on several different levels in a way that can't be fixed. There's a reason Satoshi snuck in a 1 MB block limit even though that would kill scalability.

Simple question, what if you are wrong?

If someone comes up with a new decentralized coin that can scale as a currency, then I shove all in and make money with little risk.

I suspect that no decentralized coin can scale. Public ledgers run into size limitations on current and near future hardware with even small volume, and there's no obvious way around that. It was this fact that diluted Bitcoin over 50% with alts - basically a supply increase/massive inflation - and it was these fundamental throughput limitations of the technology at even a small number of transactions which stopped the run up in the 5 digits and made it crash 70%. These aren't theoretical things any more - we've witnessed actual bitcoin failure as a currency.

As for being wrong, I made 5.3x my maximum exposed capital last week trading options with little risk, so even the megabull case Bitcoin is an inferior option for me. There are way better returns to be had in other things with less risk imo. It's not 2015 and Bitcoin isn't $200.

The real use of BTC is not as a method for payments (at that, its pretty ****ty) but as a store of value, similar to gold. And as gold, it can trade at any price because its mostly a 'psychological asset'. Nobody uses gold to buy groceries but rather, humanity spends a gigantic amount of financial and human capital digging it up from the ground just so people can hoard it and do "nothing" with it.

BTC could go up another 10x from here for no reason other than people decide it to value that way. In fact there is a good case to be made that BTC will have another wave of store of value speculation fueled by hedge funds and institutions, could never happen or it could happen. Point is, if it does happen returns will be exponential. Those who are skeptical are facing a giant assymetry against their opinion

This is wishful thinking imo. Bitcoin dies if it can't be used to transact. Gold has both industrial and jewelry uses (mostly jewelry which accounts for 50+% of use) which provide its value; it's a pretty bad misunderstanding that makes people think it's a pure store of value.

I've dealt with this elsewhere in detail. Gold's value derives from its unique golden shine and durability which makes it highly valued in jewlery and for ornamentation (gold plating - for which is highly suited due to its incredibly high ductile properties, making a little stretch a very long way, pushing up the price per weight).
You can apply that same logic to any penny stock or even more so, any alt coin. Basically a reverse Pascal's Wager for ****coins.

This is the standard "I have no idea what I'm talking about but I'm good at regurgitating things I read on the internet" argument.

To be a store of value it actually has to have value. If that value is not in transactions then it pretty much has no value. This is why I have never been excited about bitcoin (or alts) because I can't figure out how they have any value at all. None of the bull cases I have ever seen or read about have convinced me that this isn't a new variation of vaporware. Most bull cases revolve around the theory that there is a wall of money coming for bitcoin and you will be able to sell it higher. Eventually someone will have a real usable case for digital currency but I am pretty sure that bitcoin in its current form isn't it.

JFC 3 terrible takes in a row, congrats guys.

Gold jewellery is desirable because gold is considered valuable. Gold is considered valuable because it is rare. You have everything exactly backwards. Cubic Zirconia is also very shiny but it's worthless because it's not rare.

Every BTC bull buys into the censorship-resistant, politically neutral store of value / digital gold thesis. You may not buy that thesis but that's beside the point.

Holding value in an asset that is unseizable and free from central bank printing IS the use case of BTC.

Do you realise that off-shore banking is estimated at 15-20 trillion? What in your opinion is the reason off-shore banking exists?

Funny that they came from the only 3 people in this thread who actually make money trading

This nails it. Everybody should re-read this a couple of times and think it through. Because for some reason, people keep misunderstanding this basic point.

Pretty much the only reason to decentralize something (read: make it very inefficient) is to make sure NO SINGLE ENTITY can force their power over it. Bitcoin has done this EXTREMELY well for almost 10years now. This is spectacular and fascinating. And it's why the market is willing to pay $6k+ for something that has no 'intrinsic value' (lol).

No, it's you who have it completely backwards. The pleasing yellow shine of gold is the source of its use in jewelry and ornamentation, which puts a bid under the supply inflation from mining, which is not trivial (as much as fiat).

Scarcity plays a part in all prices, but gold is not valuable just because it is rare. There are plenty of rare things that are not valuable.

This is nonsense. Most bitcoin bulls buy in because it's a ponzi and they're speculating that the price will go higher. The second biggest use case is for illegal activity and gambling. After those two (the majority of the market cap), you have the libertarians that give a **** about it being politically neutral and censorship resistance.They are a tiny meaningless fraction in terms of market cap.

As something that provides these qualities, it is also NOT rare. I can make an MVPcoin that has the same properties. And other altcoins which rose to $100 billion far faster than bitcoin were centralized (Ripple) and not censorship resistant, so your view on what's causing the demand is fundamentally wrong.

To you. You're projecting though; to most people this is of little value. Most people don't buy guns to protect themselves from government tyranny, even though you might. The gun market isn't decided by hardcore libertarians. Neither is bitcoin.

Reliable risk diversification for the wealthy. Why do you think Bitcoin, which could plunge 90% in a day if say China took over mining, would take over this role? The wealthy would certainly never want bitcoin, and exchanges are all subject to KYC for the less wealthy. The flow of funds is also completely trackable.

Why is/was the market willing to pay $122 billion for centralized Ripple? Why did it grow faster than Bitcoin? I think you haven't thought this through or done the most basic thinking to falsify your hypothesis.

Why does the price of Ripple matter to the price of Bitcoin? All I'm saying is that people are willing to pay 6k+ a coin for Bitcoin.

There is a ton of dumb money flying around, but that's another story.

The claim made above is that people are/will be buying Bitcoin because of its unique decentralized/censorship resistant properties/store of value. The evidence given in support of this claim is that Bitcoin is at $6000.

I point out that something that shares few of those properties has also been bid up massively, in a manner strongly correlated, often tick for tick, with Bitcoin. Thus, the key driver of Bitcon's price and the key value proposition is likely to be the same thing that drove up Ripple and every other ****coin - ponzi speculation.
No, that's not all you're saying. You're trying to draw unjustified conclusions from this fact without showing your work.

6 months ago they were willing to pay MORE for Ripple than they current pay for Bitcoin. Ripple has few to none of Bitcoin's properties that are claimed to be the core value case and why people are buying. So what is the driver of the price of Bitcoin? It's very likely not the bitcoin value proposition that MVP is putting forward.

What percentage of Bitcoin's current price is dumb money? Can you say?

You are essentially arguing for Mises Regression Theorem. Except that is historically flawled as humans have used pretty much worthless things as money/store of value. Things like Rai Stones (giant heavy stones that cannot be moved)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples
No, because in this case the assymetry is presented in conjuction with a lot of evidence for its bull case. A penny stock usually has no revenues and no real business. BTC has had a law passed in Japan (3rd lagest economy in the world) recognizing it as legal tender, its well known in Asia, in particular in South Korea. Its quite popular among millenials in several countries, including the largest economy in the world.
You have to be blind not to see that more and more people are using it to store value. In fact, a lot of those people that come in (usually for speculative reasons) will trigger a contrarian bug in certain people (usually traders) and be used as evidence against BTC bull case when clearly its FOR its bull case since one more 'true believer' is something good for its future. They are just BTCs version of gold bugs

No, I'm not arguing an abstract. I'm arguing something specific to gold. I'm arguing that gold was valued across large numbers of cultures for its prettiness - even those that didn't value it as money or a store of value. Look at the Aztecs. Its unique prettiness combined with unmatched durability, corrosion resistance, and extreme malleable and ductile qualities (it is the most ductile of the elements) is what drives its use in jewelry or ornamentation (buildings, gilding which was widespread and excellent value due to the thinness with which gold could be spread and its durability) which sustains its value.

Prettiness and desiring of owning that prettiness - gold actually triggers persistent parts of the brain from looking at it - is what provides the value of gold, along with its rarity of course.

My position is that your comparison with gold - and belief that it was valuable just because it had properties of money - is not fact based and absolutely sucks balls as a comparison/indication of where bitcoin could go.
There's aren't plenty of other examples. A handful of people on a few Micronesian islands can't be generalized to larger populations. If we're going to generalize the behavior of islanders, all humans are favorable toward cannibalism.

The fact that the best example/evidence that the "properties of money = money" crowd could come up with is some remote Polynesian island completely invalidates their case. Local drift and weirdnesses in local populations, such as shells or rocks, has nothing to do with large populations - cannibalism being one example, another being Easter Island statues, another being vine tower diving as a rite of passage.
Bitcoin has no revenues and no business at all.
Sure. So what? All ponzis are popular, all speculation bubbles that grow large involve some kind of popularity. If bitcoin could actually function as a currency at any non-tiny scale, the above would have weight.
How do you know what people use Bitcoin for? How do you distinguish someone who puts in $1000 for long term speculation vs one who does it to store value? It has to be the worst store of value on the planet given its volatility. It's dropped 70% in six months. Imagine a bank account that did that.
There are certainly bitcoin bugs. They don't get it to trillions though. And there are also altcoin bugs, who have grown to the hundreds of billions and are growing every day. Gold never had that kind of competition or market cap dilution. There was gold and silver and not much else. Bitcoin isn't actually scarce, which is an enormous problem for it as a store of wealth in the long run. Altcoins have already diluted it by over half by increasing the supply. And if anything comes along that can actually transact at scale, bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin as a store of wealth without properties as a scalable currency is pure fantasy.