>We've seen the exact same cycles over and over and yet no one seems to "get it".
This is the wrong assumption to start from. You should think of the opposite assumption. These people fully understand Bitcoin and other stupid investments.
I thought long and hard about all of this and there is nothing to "get".
>Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
Here is the short story. Everything is up. What makes cryptocurrencies special? That they are entirely fictional? So ultimately, since cryptocurrencies aren't used as currencies and instead treated as assets with 0 return like gold the expectation is that it merely catches up with inflation. If it goes up faster than inflation then it is a bubble purely driven by human irrationality. In other words, Bitcoin is a bubble/speculation sentiment index. You can benchmark any other asset against Bitcoin to mostly "cancel" out the speculation part of the market.
>All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
I can believe that the value of 1€ is high enough to buy a house and then get smacked in the face by house construction companies who build houses for 200k€.
Meanwhile with Bitcoin that is fair game since there is no company that accepts 4 Bitcoin to buy a house no matter what the current value of Bitcoin is. There is no economy that is making the price sticky by making people consider what you can actually do with the currency. Since you can barely do anything with Bitcoin its value isn't based on the existence of an economy that exchanges it, it is merely based on random thoughts of random people who want a self fulfilling prophecy aka a bubble.
This is the wrong assumption to start from. You should think of the opposite assumption. These people fully understand Bitcoin and other stupid investments.
I thought long and hard about all of this and there is nothing to "get".
>Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
Here is the short story. Everything is up. What makes cryptocurrencies special? That they are entirely fictional? So ultimately, since cryptocurrencies aren't used as currencies and instead treated as assets with 0 return like gold the expectation is that it merely catches up with inflation. If it goes up faster than inflation then it is a bubble purely driven by human irrationality. In other words, Bitcoin is a bubble/speculation sentiment index. You can benchmark any other asset against Bitcoin to mostly "cancel" out the speculation part of the market.
>All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
I can believe that the value of 1€ is high enough to buy a house and then get smacked in the face by house construction companies who build houses for 200k€.
Meanwhile with Bitcoin that is fair game since there is no company that accepts 4 Bitcoin to buy a house no matter what the current value of Bitcoin is. There is no economy that is making the price sticky by making people consider what you can actually do with the currency. Since you can barely do anything with Bitcoin its value isn't based on the existence of an economy that exchanges it, it is merely based on random thoughts of random people who want a self fulfilling prophecy aka a bubble.