KenKundert / why-invest-in-bitcoin

The case for bitcoin
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bitcoin cryptocurrency economics

Why Invest in Bitcoin

Author: Ken Kundert Version: 0.2.0 Released: 2021-07-11 Please post all questions, suggestions, and bug reports to Github <https://github.com/KenKundert/market-returns/issues>_.

True Market Returns

It is a maxim of investing that the stock market is risky but if you leave your money in over the long run it reliably provides excellent returns. Visual Capitalist <https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/historical-stock-market-returns>_ pegs the rate of return at over 8% when averaged over the last 200 years. Such returns allow investors to beat inflation and build a nest egg if they keep their money in the market for decades. But they leave one question unanswered: what are the expected returns adjusted for inflation? The first part of this document attempts to get a handle on that. Then, from that perspective, an alternate investment that promises much higher returns is considered.

First, lets examine the Dow Jones Industrial Average over time.

.. image:: dow_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

Over the last 200 years the growth rate has averaged about 3.6%, but notice that the slope seems to change right around 1930, the date of the Great Depression.
Before the depression the slope was lower and the after the slope increases.
This occurred because of changes in policy at that time increased the amount of inflation in the money supply.

When most people want to know the amount of inflation, they look up the CPI or Consumer Price Index. However, this is not a suitable measure of inflation when discussing investments. The CPI measures the growth in the prices of essentials that are consumed by the average person in their daily life, things like rent and food. What we are interested in is inflation in the price of assets. After all, one invests in assets like houses or companies, not in consumables. The inflation in assets can be much different than the inflation measured by the CPI.

The best way to compensate for inflation in assets is to normalize the price of the asset to the price of gold. Gold is an asset and it is used primarily as a long term store of value as a hedge against inflation. It holds its value regardless of inflation.

.. image:: gold_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

As you can see the price of gold was relatively constant until the Great Depression, at which point it started to climb as the gold standard began to falter. With the dollar losing its anchor it begins to inflate in a substantial way. Since 1971 when the United States finally repudiated their commitment to the gold standard, the average annual growth in the price of gold is 5%.
I assume that the value of gold has remained relatively constant over time as it has for millennia and instead the increasing price of gold over time is due to the decrease in purchasing power of the dollar due to inflation.

Now, if the Dow is normalized to the price of gold we can see the true return of the Dow over the last 200 years.

.. image:: dow_auoz.svg :width: 100% :align: center

Notice that the change is slope is gone, which supports the idea that it was due to inflation and that the effect of inflation can be removed by normalizing to the price of gold. The true rate of return is determined to be 2%, which seems to be quite modest especially considering the risk and volatility of the market.
Also notice that after the Great Depression the volatility of the market has substantially increased. The increase in volatility is directly due to the increased inflation as it is inflation that creates and aggravates business cycles.

Now it is important to remember that the Dow is not the market, it is just one segment of the market. It is convenient to use because it has been around for a long time. In recent years more of the growth of the market is to be found in other averages, such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

Consider the S&P 500.

.. image:: sp500_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

In this case the apparent return is 6.8%. However, when inflation is removed ...

.. image:: sp500_auoz.svg :width: 100% :align: center

the true return is found to be an even more modest 1.6%.

Finally, consider the Nasdaq.

.. image:: nasdaq_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

The return in terms of dollars is found to be 10.3%.

.. image:: nasdaq_auoz.svg :width: 100% :align: center

With inflation removed, the true return is revealed to be 5%, which is better than the others, but volatility is even greater.

What this shows is that one must carefully consider inflation when looking at long-term expected returns in the market. The true returns are considerably less that what are generally promised, which of course is very important to understand when planning for the long term. These returns also come with substantial volatility, which can be hugely problematic. Imagine investing a substantial amount of money into the S&P 500 in 1927 for a planned retirement in 1980 only to find that after 50 years it only has one fifth the value in real terms of what you originally invested.

Monetary Inflation and Wealth Inequality

What is the cause of this inflation? According to Milton Friedman, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output". To be succinct, he says inflation is always due to the quantity of money increasing faster than output. Over time we as a society becomes more productive, and so our output increases. Thus, if the money supply did not expand we would expect deflation, or a lowering of prices over time. It is through deflation that the population benefits from the increase in productivity of society as a whole. In effect, your money becomes more valuable over time, even if all you do with it is hide it under your mattress. However, the central banks, or in the case of the United States, the Federal Reserve, have the mandate to maintain prices. The only way to maintain prices in a deflationary economy is to increase the supply of money. Increase it enough, and you can convert deflation into inflation. Inflation is what the Fed craves. It is all they talk about these days. We all know from the '70s that too much inflation is bad, but according to the Fed too little is also bad, and they will save us from both through their wise leadership. However, it is important to recognize how increasing the supply of money results in inflation. If you think of price as the yardstick by which we measure value, then under inflation our yardstick shrinks. Yes, that's right. I said it. The dollar has a shrinkage problem <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DoARSlv-HU>_.

Inflation is bad for the population as a whole. It robs the population of the reward that should come from increased productivity. Now that money in your bank account, or under your mattress, is losing value over time and your salary is no longer worth what it used to be. So who gains from inflation, the banks and the wealthy. To understand this, it is worth taking a look at how the money supply is increased.

It it time to forget every thing you thought you knew about how banks work.
A common believe is that a bank takes in savings and then lend out that money.
But banks lend much more than they have in savings. This is because almost all banks in the US are licensed by the Fed to practice fractional reserve banking, which means they can lend more than they have in savings. Much more. How is it that they can lend more than they have? Their license to practice fractional reserve banking gives them the right to create money. So, someone comes in and asks to borrow a million dollars, if the bank agrees they simply put a million dollars into the borrower's account. The million dollars did not exist before it was placed in the account, and as the loan is paid off it disappears again.
This is the meaning of the phrase 'monetizing debt'. Debt literally becomes money. A large portion of our money supply is created by people taking out loans. Since the banks are creating the money they lend, there is little to constrain how much they lend. Nominally there is a reserve requirement; typically 10%, which means they can loan out 10 times as much as they have. But even this rule does not really limit them in practice, as the Fed will simply loan them the needed reserves. They only thing that stops them from giving out a loan is the fear it might not be paid back. While the money they loan out is created without cost, they do get to keep the interest paid on the loan. In making loans they are creating our money supply and then we pay them for it through interest. They make roughly 50% over the life of the loan if the interest rate is 3%. What have they done for this money? They are not risking their own funds like anyone else does when they make a loan. Essentially the borrower is paying the bank for the trouble of billing them. In a very real sense, it is as if the banks are renting our money supply to us, and the right to do so was simply given to them by the Fed without them having to make any investments or take any risk. It is a sweet deal. In the end, the banks are incentivized to loan out more and more money, which creates a larger and larger money supply. This money flows into assets such as real estate, which has the effect of making them more expensive. Who benefits from this other than the banks? Why the wealthy of course, as they are the one holding the assets.
Meanwhile, the assets become more and more out of reach for those who are not wealthy.

There is another way the Fed creates money: quantitative easing. In this case the Fed itself creates money and uses it to buy financial instruments from the banks. In the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Fed also bought corporate bonds. This explains why the stock market peaked in the middle of a global pandemic where the economic collapse was second only to the Great Depression.
The Fed bought corporate bonds and the banks loaned money to corporations, and the corporations used the money from both to buy their stock back, causing the stock price to dramatically rise, making the shareholders and corporate executives, who generally hold large stock options, a lot of money. The banks also lent money to people and corporations buying assets, causing the price of all assets to rise. For example, interest rates went down and it became easier for the wealthy to get loans to buy more real estate, causing the price of real estate to go up. Of course, if you were not wealthy, you were unlikely to qualify for such loans.

It is estimated that the initial response to the Covid crisis resulted in expanding the money supply by over 20%. For those that are not wealthy, this is devastating. Imagine you are a young person new to the workforce. You have some savings but no assets. On a good day those assets are receding at a rate of 5-8% a year, making it extremely difficult for you to gain any wealth. But this year, the situation is much worse. Furthermore, even being in their prime salary growth years, they are unlikely to get 5-8% raises every year, yet alone a 20% raise during an economic collapse, so they continue to fall and further behind.

The Fed is a private entity that was created and has always been controlled by the banks. This brings us back to their mandate. The United States did not have a central bank for more than 100 years. It was created through intense lobbying by the banks in 1913. At that time it was given the mandate to maintain price stability. Why? With a fixed monetary supply like we had under the gold standard, we end up with modest deflation. When you have deflation, interest rates tend to go to zero or perhaps even negative. And when that happens, the banks can no longer make money through loans. Banks like inflation. Ever since it was created the Fed has overseen and orchestrated a huge debasement of the dollar, with the dollar now only being worth 1% of what it was worth when the Fed was created. It could not do this while we were on the gold standard, so shortly after the Fed was created we began an exit from the gold standard that started with Roosevelt confiscating Americans' gold in 1933 and ended with Nixon repudiating the commitments the US made to the world under the Bretton Woods agreement by unilaterally canceling the direct international convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971. This graph shows what happened to our money supply <https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE>_ since 1959. It was the increases that occurred before 1971 that forced the US to give up on the last vestiges of the gold standard.

.. image:: monetary_base_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

It shows that 80% of the money supply has been created since 2008. All of that money went to the wealthy. The progressives want to address wealth inequality by taxing the rich. Perhaps it would be better to just not give them the money in the first place. Elizabeth Warren, are you listening?

One more thing. You might have noticed that in the discussion of how the Fed inflates the money supply that none of the new money went to fund the government itself. It all went to the banks, and from there to the large corporations and wealthy individuals. So how does the government benefit from the inflating money supply? Much of the money created by the banks goes to buy government bonds. In addition, the creation of large amount of new money by the banks tends to drive down the interest rates, and the government gets the best rates.
This, along with the dollar being the world's reserve currency, allows the federal government to fund much of its operations by selling bonds. When the bonds come due, they simply sell more bonds. Thus, the government debt is ever increasing. This ability to borrow as much as it wants without worrying about paying it back allows the government to spend almost without limits. This explains how the US can afford such a large military. Other countries are giving us the money when they buy our bonds. It also explains how we can give trillion dollar tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Milton Friedman said "inflation is taxation without legislation". This is a very important observation. What he means is that it is through inflation that government can get money without legislating tax increases. Raising money through legislated tax increases is very difficult to do because it is very visible and is generally resisted by those being taxed. Raising money through inflation is largely invisible and so can be done without creating open resistance. To politicians in Washington, taxation via inflation is free money.
It allows them to spend the government's money to buy votes without without paying the price that comes from raising taxes to pay the bill for their largess. However, inflation is a terribly regressive tax as it is those that hold most of their wealth in cash that are hit the hardest. It is the poor that hold their wealth in cash; the wealthy hold hard assets such stock and real estate, whose price goes up as a result of inflation, insulating them from this tax.

You might be thinking, this is terrible, but the financial industry and the Fed are very powerful and well connected. How could we ever dismantle such an unfair system? The answer is, through competition in the market place. Imagine introducing an alternate form of money; one that cannot be inflated. If that were to happen people would slowly move to it because it would maintain its value. Currently the dollar is losing something like 5-8% of its value every year. Who wants to hold that; and who wants to get paid in that. If you get paid in dollars, you salary has to increase by 5-8% a year just to keep up.
A currency that cannot be inflated is referred to as a hard currency, and those that can be inflated are soft currencies. Hard currencies always dominate over soft currencies if there is a choice. Just like gold dominated glass beads in Africa and wampum shells in America, this new currency will dominate the dollar. Fiat currencies generally do not face competition as governments fiercely defend their monetary monopolies. However, bitcoin is a new hard currency alternative that cannot be stopped by fiat. If history repeats itself, the dollar will simply fade away, and the tremendous wealth inequality it creates will fade away with it.

Bitcoin

Now, consider bitcoin, an asset that promises to be more rewarding and, if widely adopted, solves the inflation problem and addresses the wealth inequality issue by simply eliminating inflation.

To understand bitcoin it important to understand that today bitcoin is more of an asset than a currency, and the value of almost all assets is based on their scarcity. This did not used to be true with equities in the stock market. Many years ago the holders of equities were rewarded with dividends, meaning that it was worthwhile to hold the stocks even if the price of the stock did not change.
But over time things changed and now the rewards from holding stock usually come from price appreciation rather than from dividends. For the price of stock to appreciate, the shares must be in demand and they must be scarce. The fewer the shares, the larger the fraction of ownership of the company that each share represents. Indeed, the current run up of the stock market is due at least in part to stock buy backs. Buy backs increase the scarcity of the shares, increasing their value. Conversely, companies can issue new shares, which tends to reduce the value of all shares.

All desirable assets combine demand with scarcity. I mention this because many people question bitcoin's validity as an asset. But bitcoin provides tremendous value, which drives demand, and is the only asset available whose supply cannot be intentionally inflated, as such its scarcity is guaranteed. At this point the importance of its value is not widely recognized. As such, it represents an investment opportunity. As the importance of bitcoin becomes more widely understood, its price will increase.

Briefly, the value that bitcoin offers is as an efficient means of transferring money over the internet. It is controlled by a decentralized network with a transparent set of rules, thus presents an alternative to central bank controlled fiat money. The decentralized nature of bitcoin is its most unique and important feature. It makes it difficult if not impossible for governments and banks to stop it or to interfere with individuals use of their money. In addition, bitcoin has guaranteed scarcity. No one can decide to issue more bitcoin in the future. Unlike fiat currencies, bitcoin is not subject to devaluation due to an inflating supply. For these reasons, bitcoin is superior money and is now competing on the open market with government mandated currencies that lose value over time. In the last 50 years the US dollar has been losing roughly 5-8% of its value every year. Once people begin to recognize that bitcoin is superior money and is available to them, they will begin to switch. Since bitcoin is scarce, the increasing demand causes bitcoin to increase in value, which encourages more to switch. This positive feedback suggests that once a threshold is reached, the transition to bitcoin will be swift, which will result in a rapid and dramatic increase in the value of each bitcoin. This positive feedback is part of the network effect that is common to many of the hugely valuable monopolies that currently exist, such as Google, Facebook, etc. Those that own bitcoin and hold it through the transition can expect to benefit handsomely, just like the insiders that were able to get into Google and Facebook early.

To understand the potential of bitcoin, realize that 21M is the maximum number of bitcoin that will ever exist. Currently (July 2021) there are 18.75M.
I will approximate both of these numbers as 20M. The current price is $30k, meaning that the total value of all bitcoin is roughly $600G. Estimates for the total amount of dollars in the world economy is very roughly $200T <https://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/lqp/liquidity_pyramid.html>_.
Thus, for bitcoin to replace the dollar the total number of bitcoin must represent that $200T, meaning that in doing so each bitcoin eventually becomes worth $10M. This represents a 300× increase. To get the same return by investing in the 5% growth rate of the Nasdaq would require 120 years.

If you look at the investment alternatives to bitcoin, you find things like stock, real estate, and gold. However, all the alternatives that you know about today have already run up in value. For example, consider Apple. The total value of Apple stock is $2T. A great company, but just how much greater can it become?
To exhibit a 300× increase, it would have to become substantially larger than the entire world's economy. Apple has been a great stock to own in the past, but now its growth is limited; it is near the end of its range. What is unusual about bitcoin is that it is at the beginning of its range. In its 10 years of life it has proven itself by remaining completely reliable while producing a tremendous run up in value. However, at 0.3% of its $200T total available market, it is still quite small. It also benefits from the network effect, which causes it both to grow quickly and repel competitors. Bitcoin currently represents an unprecedented opportunity for those that see it and seize it.

.. image:: btc_usd.svg :width: 100% :align: center

Displace the Dollar? Really?

The dollar will not go quietly. Owning the worlds reserve currency is an 'exorbitant privilege' that allows the US to push its expenses off on to the entire world. The US has aggressively defended the dollar against gold for a long time. However, this battle with gold has depleted the US resources.
Specifically, the US has secretly sold off much of its gold reserves in order to undermine gold, keeping its price artificially low. It has not been completely successful. While there are no countries still on the gold standard, other countries hold assets other than the dollar to make up their reserves; including gold and the currencies of other countries.

However, the tactics that the US used to undermine gold will not work nearly as well against Bitcoin.

When gold started to increase in value the US would dump gold on to the market to damp its rise and discourage its use. This reduced the US gold reserves, which also acts to undercut the rationale for using the dollar as a reserve currency. The US is currently trying to hide this situation by refusing to allow its gold reserves to be audited.

This strategy cannot be used against bitcoin because the US does not hold a significant amount of bitcoin, and if they tried to acquire a substantial amount of bitcoin, it would increase the value of bitcoin, making it stronger.

The US put significant political and financial pressure on Switzerland in order to force it to give up the gold standard, which was a huge symbolic victory.

This strategy will be less effective against bitcoin. There are currently no countries that use bitcoin as its official currency, so there are no countries to target. These tactics could be applied against corporations, but corporations likely have enough political influence in Washington to undercut those tactics.

Bitcoin itself is impervious to political pressure because it is decentralized.
There is nobody to pressure.

The dollar was established as the world's reserve currency in the aftermath of World War II, when the US was at the peak of its financial power. That primacy has eroded considerably since, which weakens the currency. Furthermore, other financial powers are souring on the US use of its exorbitant privilege. The US is increasingly aggressive at using its control of the worlds financial system to punish other countries. Even its European allies are being increasingly threatened with sanctions. China is currently building up its gold reserves and may be thinking of taking a run at knocking the dollar off its perch. It has tremendous incentive to do so. If the dollar can be displaced as the world's reserve currency, then the US loses the exorbitant privilege that it uses to finance its out-sized military, giving China a clear path to becoming the dominant world power.

While the dollar is losing favor as the world's reserve currency, there is no obvious replacement available. Without a dominant currency, world trade becomes harder and more expensive. There will be a strong desire to find a mutually acceptable replacement. No country likes the idea of that replacement being bitcoin. Authoritarian countries especially do not like the loss of control that accompanies the widespread adoption of bitcoin. However, moving to bitcoin is probably still more palatable than staying on the dollar or moving to the currency of an economic or political adversary. At least bitcoin is neutral and does not advantage their competitors.

Currently bitcoin is too small to be of much use to nation states. Rather, it is largely used by individuals. However, there is increasing evidence that it is now being adopted by corporations. For example, MicroStrategy <https://news.bitcoin.com/nasdaq-microstrategy-bitcoin-425-million/>_ just moved $425M, the bulk of its financial reserves, into bitcoin. The increased adoption reduces volatility and increases price. There is a strong advantage to those like MicroStrategy that move early, so the transition is likely to be rapid. There is currently $5T in the reserves of publicly traded companies. If half of that moves into bitcoin its price will rise by at least an order of magnitude. Once the price increases by that much, bitcoin becomes large enough to be interesting and useful to nation states. At that point the first-mover advantage comes into play again, but this time for countries, driving adoption by nation states.

The decentralized nature of bitcoin makes it an uncomfortable opponent for governments. Governments create laws and then obtain compliance by threatening to punish individuals or corporations that violate their laws. Their favored targets are the leaders or owners, but with bitcoin there is often no leaders or owners to target. You can see the nervousness with which governments view cryptocurrency by their reaction to Libre. They would like cryptocurrencies to go away, but with bitcoin they don't know how to make that happen. However with Libre they had a centralized opponent and they were seemingly quite effective at knocking it back.

At this point it is hard to see how any one country could stop bitcoin. India has tried to outlaw bitcoin and has been largely ineffective. The bitcoin network communicates using encrypted connections that are virtually impossible to block, so as long as one has an internet connection, one can access it.
Outlawing bitcoin discourages local bitcoin businesses from developing, but does not stop individuals from transacting with bitcoin. If a country does somehow succeed in outlawing bitcoin, the bitcoin network still survives in other countries and the likelihood of the adoption of bitcoin by the rest of the world would be largely unaffected.

The adoption by the financial industry and by corporations further reduces the risk of countries trying to outlaw bitcoin. It makes bitcoin look less like a threat and more like just another asset. It also means that countries will harm their economies if they make it harder to use bitcoin.

The fundamental issue for the fiat currencies is their ever increasing supply.
If you hold an investment in a fiat currency it loses value over time.
Specifically, an investment in dollars loses %5 per year, which is huge. How do you avoid this loss? You have to move your money into an asset. That asset could be stock, but stock is volatile and can involve significant risk. It could be gold; many do this. Soon it will be bitcoin. Currently bitcoin is hard for most people to buy. You need accounts at special exchanges. Also, bitcoin shares the volatility of stock. But over time the ease of use for bitcoin will increase dramatically and the volatility will drop. Finally, the growth potential of bitcoin dwarfs that of gold or stocks, which is what will drive its adoption.

The only way for governments to stop the rise of bitcoin is to stop inflating the supply of their fiat currencies. That inflation is the fuel that pushes people to bitcoin. The people that control the fiat currencies have learned that by printing money they can get something for nothing, so it is highly unlikely that this behavior will change on its own. In fact, the only thing that will change this behavior is competition from bitcoin itself. Given a choice, governments do not allow competition with their currency. However, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin makes it impossible for governments to stop.
Thus bitcoin provides, whether governments like it or not, a free market in currency. Once bitcoin is established, people can freely choose between bitcoin and the fiat currency. Once people start choosing the bitcoin, those that control the fiat currencies, the central banks, are forced to change their ways, otherwise their currencies quickly become irrelevant. Thus, the competition forces fiat currencies to become more like bitcoin, which might stop bitcoin from completely replacing the fiat currency. However, the competition only becomes effective when bitcoin becomes much larger. Bitcoin is simply too small at the moment to change the behavior of central banks, but if it becomes 20-40× larger it starts to threaten fiat currencies and so the central bankers must react to bitcoin. They start to compete with bitcoin by lowering the inflation in their currencies to negligible levels. That slows the growth of bitcoin, but at that point bitcoin has already grown substantially. Thus, even if bitcoin does not completely replace the dollar, its price should grow to at least 3× and more likely 20× its current value before central banks react. Investing in bitcoin will be tremendously rewarding even it never completely displaces the dollar.

Bitcoin Is Unique

Many people wonder why it is that bitcoin will be the winner. After all there are many cryptocurrencies, many claiming to be faster and smarter. However, the first thing to recognize is that of all the available cryptographic tokens, only a few aspire to be assets, and of those, bitcoin is the obvious winner. The remaining tokens are utility tokens that are focused on solving some problem other than being a store of value.

Bitcoin is unique and will win because it is the most decentralized. Unlike all other cryptocurrencies, the creator of bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, disappeared after bitcoin started gaining momentum. Nobody that remains involved in bitcoin development has the political clout to control development.
Instead everything is done by consensus. The result is that while it is possible to make enhancements that are widely recognized as upgrades, it is virtually impossible to make substantial changes that are at all controversial. A change in the issuance schedule would be hugely controversial, and so it is simply not possible to change. As such, the hard-money aspects of bitcoin are unassailable. It is the only currency that you can count on to hold the value of your investment. With all other currencies the creator has enough control to step in make changes that result in loss of value, as central banks do with fiat currencies today. Even if such a competing hard-currency were to be created, bitcoin has a staggering lead. It owns most of the market share, it has by far the largest market capitalization, and it owns the lion's share of the miners.
The network effect virtually guarantees bitcoin will remain the dominant cryptocurrency.

How Is This Going to Work?

Currently most Americans are unaware of the problem of asset inflation. The Federal Reserve have trained people to believe that inflation is measured with the CPI. As such, most people are simply unaware that each good has its own rate of inflation and most are not included in the CPI. Most important of those is the inflation in assets which has averaged 5% per year for 50 years and now appears to have grown to around 8%. This explains why more and more people find that long-term financial security slipping farther and farther away. Those people will look for investments to help them keep up. Those that move to bitcoin will do well, those that do not will not do as well. That will not go unnoticed. People may not understand why bitcoin keeps going up, but they recognize that it does and decide they should own some. Adoption by those people drives up the price, which causes others to move to bitcoin.

As people slowly recognize that bitcoin is a good investment and acquire some the price goes up and so they acquire more. Those holdings increase in value until soon they, and others, have significant amounts of bitcoin. Vendors recognize that their customers are holding a lot of bitcoin, so they make it easy for people to pay in bitcoin. Other companies recognize an opportunity in making it easier to acquire and spend bitcoin. Credit card companies recognize that transferring money using bitcoin is faster and cheaper than using dollars, and is not subject to the rules and restrictions of various jurisdictions.
Thus, once people begin to hold bitcoin as a store of value, the bitcoin ecosystem naturally develops, which causes bitcoin to take on more of the attributes of currency. Once bitcoin can do everything the dollar can do, but better, it sets about displacing the dollar altogether.

Those waiting for bitcoin to develop a fantastic payment system before adopting it are making a mistake. Instead they should invest in bitcoin, and in doing so they will help bitcoin develop a fantastic payment system. And they will make a bunch of money while they are waiting.

Recommendation

My advice to everyone is to get at least one bitcoin and hold on. A single bitcoin currently represents a modest investment of $30k. But if bitcoin does replace the dollar, that small investment could provide enough money to secure your future. Get one for you, one for your spouse, and one for each of your kids to secure all their futures.

In addition I recommend shifting excessive cash holdings into Bitcoin. Don't believe the CPI myth, cash is losing value at a rate of 8% per year.

Finally, feel good about what you have done. Your investing in bitcoin is an important step towards making economy more fair. It is perhaps the most impactful thing you can do to help bring peace, stability, and prosperity to the world.