> the financial past is littered with the corpses of BTC shorts.
It's also littered with the corpses of "very good investments" that will "make you rich quick".
Without any securities standing behind Bitcoin but the promise that it will go higher, it comes down to gambling. Everybody hopes that another fool will come around and pay more than they did before. Bitcoin represents nothing but a currently 150GB large database of transactions. There are no machines (that are useful outside of Bitcoin), no IP, just a few million hashsums on a lot of computers.
It takes some understanding of how the pieces fit together as a whole but Bitcoin is really the first distributed system of trust. Its a new idea but there it is the first digital thing that is unable to be forged and therefore it creates a system where you don't have to trust a counter party.
It combines the following to achieve this [ hashing algorithms as proof of work, public key cryptography, solution for byzantine generals, game theory incentives to secure network and transactions ]
The result is something that is both digital and scarce so it is a novel way to store value digitally.
It's also littered with the corpses of "very good investments" that will "make you rich quick".
Without any securities standing behind Bitcoin but the promise that it will go higher, it comes down to gambling. Everybody hopes that another fool will come around and pay more than they did before. Bitcoin represents nothing but a currently 150GB large database of transactions. There are no machines (that are useful outside of Bitcoin), no IP, just a few million hashsums on a lot of computers.