Stay humble and stack sats took a major hit this last year. The 4 year CAGR is a measly 10.4%, below the rate of fiat money debasement. Barely any returns, barely any merchant adoption for MoE. What reason is there now for a potential precoiner to make the switch to a Bitcoin standard? Stay humble and stack: Nvidia, Palantir, or Tron gave better returns over the last 4 years.
Every single person in the developed world has heard of Bitcoin, yet it STILL only makes up ~0.17% of total global wealth. I’m tempted to even go so far as to say that the bear market of 2022 never ended. I don’t see a legion of new enthusiastic faces like I did in 2020, it’s still mostly the same people from that era and before.
We probably still underestimate how much damage ICOs then FTX, Celsius, Terra, and Blockfi caused for adoption. A double whammy for normies. I saw a story on Nostr the other day that a Square merchant wouldn’t turn on Bitcoin payments because they didn’t want anything to do with “crypto scams.” Potential precoiners are now probably more interested in stocks and real estate than Bitcoin. Even if they’re just trying to prudently outrun fiat inflation, Bitcoin failed at that the last 4 years. I know, 4 years is a bit of cherry picking, 5 year CAGR is 39% and 10 year is 73%. So yea, lower your time preference, fine.
Something big needs to change for adoption to start up again. NGU has failed as a driving force for adoption recently, which leaves freedom, libertarianism, computer science, etc…which, frankly, only an extremely small percentage of people care about enough to make the switch, most of them probably already switched. I don’t know what the catalyst(s) will be for adoption to pick up again or even if there will be one soon. Without at least one, the next few years will be a slog through the mud.
Replies (19)
Yes, that’s the one.
Someone at a farmer's told me the same thing in 2023.
Bitcoin needs to be reestablisbed as propgrammable money for doing magic internet things instead of being a digital pet rock for speculation.
Once you start interacting with the sovereign web, goods and services bitcoin is creating, all the stupid talks against it go out the window and there's no going back
There's nothing like it and people need to see it and use it to believe it
NGU is just a cherry on top
My suggestion: build better products held to a higher standard. All the below are accurate, if inconvenient, truths. We win on merit, with sovereignty as a side effect.
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Unfortunately, looks like you are right.
At least, as minimum, I hope Bitcoin will track the money printing and long term hold value in the real terms, purchasing power.
Because 21 million on one hand and infinite printing on the other.
So, even if no new capital flows into Bitcoin, even if no increased adoption, unless there is some disaster, Bitcoin should work as digital gold.
And I hope there will be some catalyst for adoption, like you say.
There will be capital controls etc.. That is the moment that people understand the value of Bitcoin.
I think that the analysis, while accurate, misses a huge component of what has been going on. We have seen 3 straight years of a decrease in M2. This is for dollars, not all fiat. However, all fiat has followed a similar contraction or very modest expansion trend. We are down somewhere between 5-10% since the peak of COVID. Bitcoin has STILL 3-4x’d since then depending on what you pick as your starting point. That can almost all be attributed to adoption growth and not excess liquidity. #bitcoin was created to protect us from currency debasement. If they are not debasing the currency, we don’t need an alternative like Bitcoin.
Your analysis only holds for a short blip on the radar of the total money supply, and only will be accurate going forward if you think debasement is stopping or slowing significantly. Otherwise, it’s game on as usual.
yeah no new no coiners this cycle and people from 2020 just sit in the sidelines waiting for profits that were slim. This cicle was about bitcoin treasuries and i think those with more regulation over exchanges after ftx turned the cycle very boring, low volatility, no ftx and alts scams or new hypes, ETFs and companies probably buy most of it in a way that doesn't move the price, Strategy business plan is removing volatility from btc exposure, and a cycle without volatility becomes boring and doesn't cause fear of missing out and crazy gains. I think now it's the time to increase merchant adoption because this cycle is low vol and no ftx like scams so it can work on our favor.
Hard disagree on stacking sats: If you cherry pick your time period bear to bear you can always make Bitcoin's CAGR look bad. I remember in the 2022 bear 4 year CAGR was actually negative at one point. Nobody actually has that CAGR if they DCA though.
For example as a personal anecdote my current CAGR since my first buys early 2021 is now 17%, it was more like 30% before this recent correction. Nothing else can pull these numbers just as a buy and hold strategy.
In theory you could maybe have bought i.e. Palantir at IPO and outperformed this. But realistically with retail availability and without the benefit of hindsight for stock picking there's no way.
Palantir at IPO, also "abc" at IPO, "xyz" at IPO, etc. etc. - to repeat that strategy again and again is the "everyone must become an investor and spend their time following business news" bullshit that dooms most normal fiat debasement victims.
Compared to learning one single thing, (bitcoin), turning it on once (DCA) and checking out.
The value of that is worth multiples over the opportunity cost of not buying Palantir. (not to mention the enormous moral dimension)
Exactly. Picking the one 100x stock early is akin to winning the lottery. And this is the *minimum standard* for outperforming stacking sats! 🤯
We are so lucky. 🤙
I think the argument is that the flow of people has stalled and that's what makes things different looking forward. Like in these countries with low birthrates, without children coming up through the population you start to run out of economic potential.
Yes. Thank you for looking at the totality of the post.
You mean I have another few years to stack cheap sats? Sweet
Yes, that is the upside.
Imo this is the best time to set up trusted p2p networks to buy and sell bitcoin directly or simply networks of trusted bitcoin communities
Would also be a great time to upgrade our own tools that we use to interact with bitcoin
Don't think focusing on onboarding normies can be given much time unless they explicitly ask
I guess the unspoken theme of my post was about Metcalfe’s Law. But yes more p2p networks will help with that too. Huge fan of Bitcoin/Nostr based businesses.
Is Metcalfe trying to quantify value?
