RE: 3 Traditional Gold Price Drivers & How Crypto Disrupts Them
I think the bitcoin limited supply / protect against inflation is a myth. Bitcoin is a technology, the nature of technology is that it becomes obsolete as better technologies surpass it. Hashgraph is already a potential improvement over blockchain. Other improved technologies will emerge. We won't even get to 21M bitcoins in my opinion. It will be dead and buried long before then.
Also, while bitcoin might be limited to 21M coins, other cryptocurrencies are not limited. Bitcoin already has a lot of competition from established and ICO cryptocurrencies that are just as good as or better. (Good money drives out bad - so if a better crypto emerges, people will sell bitcoin to buy that).
The future is a gold or asset backed currency that can be tracked and managed by the blockchain. The gold provides true inflation protection while the blockchain provides the transactional capability (medium of exchange).
I need to have a good look at Hashgraph to see if it's a legit alternative to Blockchain, but even if you ignore Proof of Stake or Graphene technology there are better Proof of Work blockchains out there than Bitcoin.
I would love to see a decentralised Gold pegged Crypto. I wrote about STEEM GOLD a while back, but now that STEEM DOLLARS have blown the peg I'm not sure if that would work. The important thing is there should not need to be a centrally managed repository of gold, otherwise we have a big point of failure.
It'd be great to have the best of both worlds with Gold and Crypto effectively merged. It's good to have a dream :)
I also thought Bitcoin would not survive for reasons of technical advancement, but that was years ago.
First, I thought someone would simply copy the concept, replicate it and run with it. Well, I see that has occurred and technical improvements have occurred. Further, some of the initial promises of low transaction fees are out the window with Bitcoin. I don't see how Bitcoin maintains a stranglehold on the crypto universe.
From my memory, I previously thought that the size of the blockchain would be impossible to store because it was already huge (around 4GB at the time, I think). That sounds small today. BUT at that time, the industry was getting limited increase storage space and memory due to rare-earth metals limited out of China. So, basically, at the time we couldn't get new big hard drives or memory sticks and Bitcoin looked like it would need this huge amount of space.
Finally, I thought that increase computing power would eventually lead to manipulation by sheer processing power. And this has also not occurred. I think they continue to increase the complexity of the algorithms to restrict this manipulation idea.
I agree that a crypto currency based on the best technology and backed by precious metals is the best solution for the future.
The concept of buying a cryptocurrency as an investment is similar to buying hundreds of the latest model iPhones and hoping they will go up in value. Investing in a pure technology solution that does not have the capability to evolve is like throwing your money away. Technology companies that can innovate and continually produce new products is a good potential investment. Investing in the actual products of those companies is not a good investment.
If you want to invest in the blockchain, wait for the companies that start to innovate and come up with novel and useful applications of blockchain solutions that they can somehow patent and profit from. If you want to protect from inflation, just buy gold.
When I first looked at Bitcoin in 2015 I saw a lot of issues too. But a lot of them are being overcome by newer coins. It is great to see such rapid innovation.