I've pursued alt coins aggressively throughout the past two cycles with pretty good success, but I'm getting a lot busier with my work and family life, and find myself leaning into just DCAing into BTC long-term and ignoring the rest of the market.
A few things I've learned about BTC in the past few months have influenced this change of attitude:
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I think everybody knows that the last BTC will be minted in 2140 or some distant year like that. But I only recently learned that about 99.8% of all BTC will be mined by 2032. That's not so far away at all, and that year also coincides with a halving event. I can see the headlines flashing this news at that time, that there is virtually no BTC left to mine and it'll take a hundred years to do it, and I am making the wild assumption that the markets will react strongly to this.
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All of these massive institutional buyers of BTC don't care that its tech is ancient and that it's insufferably inefficient. That's because they just plan to hold it. BTC is wealth-storage in their eyes, a safety net from USD and other fiat currencies. They hold it and they don't sell.
These facts make me want to pay way more attention to BTC than I ever have in my investment career. But then I learned a few other things that worry me about BTC, and I don't know enough about the tech to know if these concerns are warranted:
- The network cost will increase exponentially over the years. Another redditor (whose username is now deleted) put it this way:
This is the part of bitcoin I really don't understand. What happens when the mining reward drops to zero? What is a miner's motivation to continue participating in the verification of the network aside from transaction fees? If they leave en mass for other more profitable crypto, does that make the bitcoin network vulnerable to a 51% attack? I just don't understand how the bitcoin network still functions when the economic incentive for one of its participants is zeroed out.
Is it the case that at some point in the future the network could be so expensive to run that it collapses? Is this the biggest threat to the value of BTC?
Anyway, I didn't write this post to cause a fight between BTC maxis and their haters. I'm genuinely curious what other, more informed people think about these things.
