[youreincorrect]

When people talk about Bitcoin's potential demise, they are referring to its price and perceived value, not whether it will cease to exist necessarily.

Madoff also was not ultimately caught and his scheme ended because of the accounting fraud being revealed (i.e. the fraud was not that important). That happened later. He was caught because a market downturn resulted in him being unable to acquire new victims for the Ponzi scheme, which would have otherwise perpetuated it by taking new money in and using that to pay out existing investors.

[cs702]

The longer Bitcoin's network continues to function, more and more people will become aware of its resiliency. Governments may topple; banks may fail; exchanges may go bust; Bitcoin keeps on ticking. As long as the network continues to function, Bitcoin will have a price.

[eli]

It's possible that more people are aware of Bitcoin than 18 months ago, but I doubt many think it's more resilient.

Since Bitcoin depends on a functioning network it seems more likely than something physical like Beanie Babies or baseball cards to one day become effectively worthless.

[juve1996]

The US government has been around for quite some time. The British pound, longer. It will take hundreds of years to compare to that level of resiliency.

[XorNot]

The British government has completed repayments on historically held debt which dates back to the 18th century[1] as recently as 2015 (they were related to the South Sea Bubble).

That's a 162 contiguous years of financial records.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...

[2devnull]

Well, I think what you’re talking about is perception of risk. The perception of the risk that it goes to 0 is probably decreasing over time. But the expectation of future gains based on past performance is also decreasing over time. Most of the investors I feel are worth listening to see this and conclude two things: it’s here to stay but probably can’t go much higher without the broad market also going higher.

[hattmall]

Doesn't the Bitcoin network continually require increasing power, storage, and bandwidth?

Isn't there a value of Bitcoin that if it falls below all mining is unprofitable?

Are these incorrect assumptions?

[ac29]

Bitcoin doesnt use much storage or bandwidth.

Power is more complicated. By design, Bitcoin has one block created by one miner every 10 minutes on average. All other work by all other miners is discarded and unused. So no, only a single miner is required to sustain the network. But, there is a economic incentive to add miners to the network when the price goes up, because even though only one miner gets rewarded per block, that reward is worth quite a bit. Currently approximately $1M of bitcoin are mined per hour.

There is no specific value at which all mining is unprofitable because mining difficulty is dynamically adjusted to maintain a 10 minute block generation rate regardless of the number of miners.

[joebob42]

I mean, maybe, but if you pick an arbitrary currency, weighted by "market cap", btc has an extremely long way to go before being an unusually long lived one.

[steveBK123]

I could understand the allure of the (ahem) "stability" of BTC if you lived in say, Argentina.

If you live in America with this viewpoint, its pure doomerism.

[anonporridge]

Someone with your mindset was probably saying something similar while living in Argentina in the 1920s, when it was among the top 10 wealthiest countries on the planet.

[HWR_14]

Hopefully there is no military overthrow of the US government concurrent with the largest economic slowdown in world history.

[steveBK123]

When did Argentina have the worlds reserve currency and nearly a century of economic dominance?

[JumpCrisscross]

> When people talk about Bitcoin's potential demise, they are referring to its price and perceived value

And arguably, Madoff-style Ponzi schemes are more prevalent than ever.