I think people put too much importance on past charts. The supply of Bitcoin is What works underneath is fundamentals. One that has been quietly affecting the price is merchant adoption, and more recently adoption as legal tender. These forms of adoption takes a way the spread cost associated with holding bitcoins. Early on, what gave Bitcoin value was curiosity and then it was people wanting to stop using the U.S. dollar in the United States (ethical concerns), but it really didn't shine in demand until people exploited the characteristics of bitcoin.
- proper bitcoin use allows remote payments without sending identity information over the internet.
- bitcoin transactions could be mined by any pool so censoring transactions is quite impractical.
- proper bitcoin storage removes confiscation (legalized theft) from out of the bank accounts.
All of these benefits are basically drawbacks of digital dollars and digital money in general (a part from most cryptos):
Information Drawback Nearly all money payments over the internet exposes you to leaving your identity in some database somewhere.
Transaction Denial Drawback. Your transactions can be censored by your bank.
Theft Drawback. Your money can be stolen from the government (and the courts do nothing for redress)
Memoranda Drawback. Anything you buy or sell could be used against you in a court of law.
Arbitrary Inflation Drawback. Any quantity of dollars can be created at anytime without your consent.
Demand for Bitcoin is really just people wanting to get out of fiat and into something that does not have these drawbacks.
What were big spikes of bitcoin from? There are fiat whales that hate bitcoin, and it is not reasonable to expect them not to use their tremendous wealth to destabilize the price to avoid adoption. Some of these spikes can be from that. Then there are sudden rises that come from people realizing these drawbacks are real. The Silk Road website which wasn't really well known had enough users to drive up the price of bitcoin. They are not using digital dollars because of the Memoranda drawback. This drove the price into the triple digits. The second was Cyprus' "bailins" where suddenly people's money was stolen out of their bank accounts en masse. Most recent was the Canadian censorship of transactions. This was memoranda drawback and the transaction denial drawback together.
KYC laws put the memoranda drawback into crypto. If you get your crypto by buying in an exchange your coins are associated with your identity. Even to go from crypto-to-crypto you have this information drawback added in. So that's two drawbacks added thanks two so called #AML and #KYC laws. No these are memoranda and information drawbacks added laws. Leaving them on an exchange exposes you to the transaction denial and theft drawbacks.
In this article I haven't addressed the arbitrary inflation drawback. Fiat super whales can move the BTC/dollar pair up and down where they want it. Manipulating prices can be costly but they can afford it. I wont argue that the definition of "inflation" is supply of the currency or a rise in prices in the currency because arguing definitions is just asserting cultural agreement rather getting at any useful facts.
To me if we price things in bitcoin we certainly see these prices dropping greatly but not steadily. The supply growth of bitcoin is positive but tiny compared to fiat currencies so overtime we should expect growth of the BTC price in dollars even if demand for both stays the same.
Putting all in bitcoin exposes you to those manipulating the price down or some loss of people's funds which sounds related to bitcoin often seems to cause a drop in demand for bitcoin. The theft via #FTX and the Luna dollar both of which have more to do with the swift network seems to have driven the price of Bitcoin down. Neither of these affected me because I bought into neither of these. Not only did we have a better interest rate but I understand #HBD and the websites on Terra/Luna were like uninformative brochures. Before I buy something I go in balls deep. The media has been talking about bitcoin is dangerous and that has allowed me to get more of it while others are scared but it is good to keep some hbd because of its exposure to manipulation.
Posted with proof of brain