Bitcoin [BTC] - A longtime fundamental thought

Maybe not suitable for this forum but IMO crypto still being separated from the regular financial sector is the reason for us not going up, up and away anytime soon. Cryptos are not a traditional currency, they are not 'shares' or derivatives, at best they are a new, yet undefinable, commodity asset class. The current dominating 'reference currency' (although it is not a currency) is BTC, but the ROI is still measured in fiat. You could (!) argue that BTC's ONLY role is to give other cryptos value. Sort of the Higgs Boson of crypto, if you will. There is a lot of artificial value stored in BTC that is solely determined by the BTC exchange rate to fiat but that value is not immediately convertible (as a whole) by those who hold it. It is a catch-22. If the BTC billionaires wanted to convert to fiat, they would become millionaires at best. Even transactional conversion has its limits. At best they can expect 30 cents on the dollar right now.

There are some initiatives to trade more and more cryptos (i.e. alts) against fiat. Unfortunately that is such a big regulatory issue that they had to invent 'artificial fiat' to make that happen. The tether story. Independent of what you think about tether and Bitfinex, they are trying to make alts less dependent on BTC by offering more and more trades against 'artificial fiat'. As long as the Tethers are secure, this could solve the problem of alts having no independent value, despite sometimes having more real world use cases than BTC. Preferably we trade against real fiat, but that will mean incorporation in the Financial Sector and letting them get control.

It is not in the interest of large BTC holders for this initiative to succeed, as BTC's only CURRENT purpose is to buy and sell alts or store 'value'. If the alts could be traded directly against fiat in a regulated system, lots of people would feel more comfortable investing in a 'token' with a use case or intrinsic value, no matter how vague. This is the biggest threat for BTC in the long term. I am sure that many BTC multi-millionaires or billionaires will have that worry. I would. You'd be a fool not to. Maybe they invest in all the rumours around tether to prevent it from succeeding.

So, bit of a problem. For the idea behind crypto to succeed, we might need to incorporate it into the financial sector, link it to fiat and that MIGHT kill BTC or - best case scenario - stabilise the value of BTC in an acceptable range so we can actually start using it for anything else than trade. The reason I think we will be in limbo for a few years (not the same as BTC crashing, limbo could be around 15K or 10K, 3K, 7K or 20K, that doesn't matter) is that this system now needs direction.

This is the very much condensed version of my take on the challenges that face this new phenomenon. I am sure there are many other views and nobody can predict the future.