Sure. They'll sell at the peak and buy at the bottom because it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol. If the price is expected to appreciate 5-10x from any other asset in the market every 4 years that's a bet you should make, even if the timing of the peak and trough is hard to see. But the price floor increases over time as the trade becomes better known globally and the lottery odds expand. Eventually there is so much noise it all evens out and becomes a generally smooth slide into a stable store of value. It's network science and game theory that I personally consider much smarter than anything I could create (having deployed technology built on network science in exchange for money in the financial sector). And much more democratic than is possible in the traditional financial world. Frankly, the longer I study this the more impressed I am.
Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.
Right, there's lots of interest in Bitcoin as a speculative investment, but no longer as a payment network. That's the part that people are talking about in the past tense. The idea that bitcoins themselves have utility beyond being something valuable that can be owned.
It'd be like if the number of Facebook accounts kept rising, but hardly anyone posts content anymore. If I were a Facebook investor, that would worry me.
Right, but supply inflation moving from 1.76% per annum to 0.88% per annum is roughly speaking utterly meaningless. People just latched onto this idea because they're using too few data points.
And the idea that miners have a god-given right to make $100 per transaction, $40m per day, and therefore if the mining reward halves, the price of BTC must inevitably double, is obviously preposterous.
Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.