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by aphextron 3106 days ago
>Bitcoin absolutely could go full bust. It is not a physical commodity, there is no utility outside of its perceived value. It is not a company, so it doesn't even have book value as its floor. And the technology is open source and well known, so there is nothing special or scarce about Bitcoin technology at this point. Even the companies that have capital investments in Bitcoin hardware could just repurpose that for a forked coin or possibly some other purpose altogether

Disclaimer: I own zero cryptocurrencies, but have a decent knowledge of the space

Here's why I think Bitcoin will never go bust entirely, regardless of the day to day price: it's the area under the curve of POW energy expenditure. At this point, so much energy has been expended mining bitcoin that that in itself creates value. Even if the price crashes 100x it will always be worth something. And whatever that "something" is, no one can say yet. But I would wager that it's much higher than whatever the initial players bought in for (in terms of cash or energy spent mining). Sure plenty of other altcoins can come along in the future, but catching up with the level of work that has been done on the Bitcoin blockchain at this point seems impossible to ever do. It's simply a matter of compute power that is physically available.

2 comments

Fair enough, maybe it depends on your definition of "full bust".

But consider this... if the price were to go back to where it was just a year ago before the current mania (which is a common thing to happen when a financial bubble pops, after overcompensating to the downside) then it would be a 95% retracement from the highs (where, almost self-evidently, many people were buyers). And BTW a 95% retracement requires 20,000% gains to break even.

If you gave me a $1000 and I gave you $50 back, I think most people would say that I took all their money, even though technically they could still buy a couple pizzas or something.

So, again, it just depends on your definition of "full bust"

>At this point, so much energy has been expended mining bitcoin that that in itself creates value.

Bitcoins security relies on current hashing power and is completely indepent from past computations. If bitcoin falls to let's say $100 then major mining pools can do a 51% attack and make all the expended energy worthless.