| Bitcoin is worth $17k because thats how much someone will pay for it. Right now the blockchain space is in a clear bubble. A lot of people (many uninformed) see the price rise and don't want to miss out. This drives the price higher. At some point there will be a correction. Nobody knows the timing or size. My guess would be that this will not happen until we see the failure of a major blockchain. With that said blockchains are a remarkably powerful new tool and if they can be sensibly scaled they will be extremely impactful. Blockchains allow for the creation of self sustaining, trustless, autonomous marketplaces. A lot of intermediaries are about to be automated away by these protocols (think about platforms like Airbnb or Uber). Some useful parallels can be drawn with the dot com bubble. A lot of valuations were totally unjustified, but you would have done very well if you bought and held Amazon stock in 1997 (66,600%). A more interesting question is whether Bitcoin is the Amazon or MySpace of the blockchain revolution. I have found the following resources to be very instructive: - The original Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - Mastering Bitcoin: https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook - The Ethereum wiki: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki - The Bitcoin Core mailing list: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d... |