People call bitcoin gold 2.0 or digital gold. They do this because bitcoin is now viewed as a store of value. But why is this so? Most people that are in the cryptocurrency world would say Bitcoin is a store of value because it is rare. I agree with this, bitcoin is rare. There after all will only ever be 21 million bitcoin and the speculating supply is currently just about 16.8 million. When you consider that the population of the planet is about 7.6 billion it can only stand to reason that if bitcoin were to be adopted by the masses that its current price of about $14,000 would pale in comparison to what it could be. I have heard people forecast prices of $100,000 up to $1,000,000.
My opinion is that bitcoin does have the potential to go up a lot more but it will not have the ability to maintain its price. I say this because I don’t think that it will ever be adopted by the masses. This will not be because the masses do not want cryptocurrencies, I actually think they will. I think that in 2 to 3 years from now cryptocurrencies will have made fiat currencies irrelevant. The reason bitcoin won’t be adopted by the masses is because it can’t scale and therefore can’t be adopted by the masses.
As a matter of fact bitcoin can barely support its current “digital gold” “gold 2.0” use case with its current level of usage. It costs about $20 to transfer bitcoin and it can sometimes take days for a transaction to be confirmed. That doesn’t sound like digital gold to me, that sounds like gold gold; it’s inconvenient and expensive to transact with. So when people refer to bitcoin as digital gold as if it’s a good thing, I get confused. As far as I know civilization moved on from gold and silver to fiat currencies in an effort to improve on how we trade. Shouldn’t we be trying to now move on from fiat to something better? Going back to gold or something that acts like gold is a move in the wrong direction and since bitcoin is “digital gold” it is also a move in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, for most people bitcoin is synonymous with cryptocurrency. This is such a shame since there are currently cryptocurrencies that far surpass bitcoin in every way. Cryptocurrencies such as Dash, Monero, Etheruem and even Litecoin are far superior. I think that another crypto will usurp bitcoin in the near future (in six months or so). The problems with bitcoin are just too large.