| 1) Buying 2) Russian language Magic: The Gathering Cards 3) Bitcoin 4) $100 5) 2014 6) Coinbase, iirc. Maybe some Russian bitcoin to ruble website intermediate. 7) Laggy and so I did the transaction twice and wound up with $100 leftover of 2014 bitcoin that I forgot about then sold in 2021. 8) I wouldn't hold crypto for any significant amount of time, but I would use it if it made sense, say, to move money in or out of a country with financial regulations I don't care about, like Sri Lanka. 9) Any crypto that gains widespread adoption will inevitably meet its doom as a result of that very adoption, and the plain reason is that at the end of the year, income in the form of that crypto will need taxes to be paid on it, which will necessitate selling off of that asset for whatever currency the taxes are paid in. For this reason, demand for fiat currency will always exceed demand for crypto. Crypto with a conserved amount is by definition a greater fool asset, and cannot be regarded as a store of value. In spite of the above, it is useful insofar as it's capable of moving money from one location to another. That is utility that people pay for on the order of half a percent. Crypto's value relative to its useful work in this capacity is therefore on the order of (0.5% * {$,£,¥})/fee. A complication of the common claim of bitcoin's limited supply is that bitcoin doesn't have a monopoly on this utility, which means it doesn't have a monopoly on it's sole source of value, which means it's not effectively scarce. This doesn't take into account the value of information work performed for a fee in the form of, say, smart contracts. When we can write and have the cloud execute something like a webserver, then the cryptocurrency has a value equal to (value of information work performance)/(gas fee). This is what I'm most optimistic about, as I would love to have a decentralized, anonymous webserver I can run by feeding quarters into the slot. It'll be the immediate downfall of crypto again, though, because the literal first use for it will be to host objectionable material. For the most part, though, use crypto to move money from A to B, and quit caring what a given token is worth. If bitcoin is $1M, you shouldn't care, because if you want to move $20,000, then you're buying and selling 0.02 of a bitcoin instead of 0.8 of a bitcoin as quickly as possible. The only reason you care about the token's value is the product of value * transaction fee. |