You're looking for an home; some place to come back to every night (assuming that you haven't read my book and started working from home), some place to meet your friends, cook breakfast, lunch, dinner, some place to feel safe when you take a stroll in the park and take your children out to play. These are the things you look for when buying real-estate property. Right?
When you buy a home, you're not supposed to care whether prices would appreciate or depreciate. You want the safety and security of a community and the assurance that no matter what, you would have a home. Right?
Of course, if you're a real-estate investor it's a whole different thing, but most of us aren't sophisticated investors.
OK. So, if you understand that the biggest investment you would make in your life requires to do a-lot of due diligence, and (sometimes) require a loan to finance, you won't consider the price in a year or two.
You look at school districts to make sure your kids are safe. You would look at environmental impact reports to make sure you won't breathe hazardous materials, you would look at crime rate tables to make sure no one breaks into your home and you may also do what did, and look at voter turnouts and demographics to make sure you live near similar minded people.
While on on paper what you did was to purchase a piece of land that is registered you actually bought a piece of a community. Right?
Some of the best places to buy a home are not new, and don't have the latest technology. Right, buildings in old Paris or London may be rotten, with prices which are too high, and with a lot of noise, but they are still better to live at than a suburb that doesn't have an active community, even if the homes are new and based on the latest technology. Right?
So when you buy a home you don't seem to care whether the value would go up and down, right? You care about your own benefit and the sense of community. You don't care whether the home has the latest smart-home system by Amazon or an amazing energy efficiency; you want a place with better education, with more things to do. A place where you feel like you belong.
The same goes for cryptocurrency. Quite a lot of people ask why is Bitcoin the dominant coin where there are better technologies? What makes it better than some shitcoin with faster transaction speeds and bigger blocks, with better energy efficiency? The answer is always: the community.
I'm a bitcoin maximalist because of the community. The reason I think that it is a game changer is because I believe in two imminent truths: (i) the world does not need different currencies for different geographical areas* and (ii) money has to be decentralized.
* please note that I wrote "geographical areas"; I do believe that some communities, regardless of geographic areas, can have their own currency based on local trust and the intrinsic value of their common goals.
There is no reason to have multiple currencies. There is no reason to pay exchange fees whenever I buy something from someone in a different country, which may be even 3% where I live. It is stupid to assume that prices may fluctuate just because of exchange rates, and that as an Israeli my gas prices change just because of a change in exchange rates.
There is also no use for a central bank. Look at what happened in the United States during Covid-19: the bank printed more dollars to "engage" the economy, and now because there are more dollars in circulation, prices increase and inflation arrives (even if temporarly). So, basically, printing more money doesn't solve the problem, it delays it.
Would the global currency be bitcoin? That's a great question. I don't know. I believe that it's not the first mover advantage that has a play here, nor the network-effect, but the question of how builds the safest, most cultural diverse, community. Building a good community, that everyone would want to be a part of, would be the solution to take over any other coin.
This is why I also don't recommend you invest in bitcoin. You shouldn't buy tens of thousands of dollars just to bet that the value would rise. You should be a part of the community: create stuff, receive bitcoin as payment and (when tax laws may allow it) spend it back to create a more engaging economy.
Right, this would not yield a 200% return on investment on a yearly basis. This would create organic growth that would be more beneficial to the community than more algotrading.