@etherea - That's interesting. Pretty much all my savings are in silver, though I'm not expecting the price to rise significantly until after I'm forced to sell it all! But I did hold gold since 2007 (and have held silver since 2012) - and the recent price action is interesting. The West is clearly losing control of pricing.
Bitcoin is a passing fad: When energy gets
really expensive (and it will), Bitcoin will be outlawed, because its huge energy usage and inefficiency (<0.1%) will mandate this. Think about efficiency standards introduced for diesel cars and buses, and consider that these vehicles are orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin. When you can't buy stuff for Bitcoin (because it's illegal, and anyone found accepting Bitcoin will be shut down under financial regulations and environmental protection laws)
or have it exchanged for fiat currency (which is the only thing that supports its value, BTW), Bitcoin will be recognised as the Monopoly money it really is.
Bitcoin's value proposition
was that people could buy stuff without governments interfering. That hasn't materialised: I can't waltz into a corner shop and buy an ice cream with Bitcoin. But that was
never the plan, anyway - and you can't tell me that in 16 years since 2008, not one player has gotten a widely-accepted BTC payment terminal off the ground because of "lack of interest".
Bitcoin was intended to be an inflation sponge, designed to absorb the extra money being injected into the economy by the private banks - and in this regard, Bitcoin and its cryptocurrency peers have been a
resounding success. When the time comes to shut off the internet and introduce its regionally-segmented replacement (see
SCION internet architecture) that won't allow cross-border traffic without a permit, the central bankers will stick the pin in Bitcoin - and
anyone still silly enough to be holding BTC will lose their shirt.
I invested in IOTA some years back, and I was part of their community for a while. They had a really good system. They could have owned the market, and I think they didn't because they weren't
meant to: They were just meant to get peoples' attention, their money and keep the hype machine going - so that the money doesn't end up in the real economy, pushing up the price of food, energy and housing. All they had to do was implement a successful peer-to-peer protocol and a payment terminal. That's it. But they kept fumbling around with introducing "smart contracts", which is another way of saying "programmable money", which allows you to do things like expire money if it hasn't been spent in a certain time. Even now, they still haven't implemented full decentralisation (elimination of the coordinator) - they've been talking about it for years, but somehow they
always prioritised something else.
I left in disgust, sold my tokens when they were still above $1 in value (they're now ~10% of that value, now) and I never looked back. Fortunately I
never got out of precious metals, but cryptocurrency
did interest me - for a while, anyway. However, it raised more hard questions than it answered, and when it comes to hard questions, I do
not like evasive answers. Many crypto currency projects changed plans as often as I change my underwear, and this did
not inspire my confidence.