RE: Do Cryptocurrency Speculators Fear Utility?
I totally agree, people who are into gold, silver, stocks, and traditional investments are generally already invested and already have their minds made up. Like the cell phone, big and clunky with not many users 20 years ago, that market needed time to develope and improve...same will be the case with crypto currency. My only concern is manipulation by the central banks. This kind of goes against the crypto is out side of their forces logic. But when they can print and invest a seemingly infinite amount of dollars they can drive prices up and down for just about anything. If they see crypto as the enemy, wouldn't surprise me to see them start a scare campaign coincided with a mysterious entity selling a ton of bitcoin all at once, driving the price significantly lower.
I'm 60 years old from the Austrian economics way of thinking. Since many decades, I have been a "real" assets man - gold, property and equities. I have never been a fan of new fads. I missed a few profits because of that, but generally did alright. I managed to get through 1999 with a 73% profit despite not owning a single dot-com.
I don't think bitcoin is a fad. Since June this year I have been acquiring bitcoin. I am aiming for 5% to 10%, although I realise many would say 20% in bitcoin is a good number at this moment. I don't disagree. For me 10% gold and 10% bitcoin seems like the right number, gold for insurance - it has stood the test of 20'000 years, and bitcoin for rapid profit.
As for the alt-coins, and tokens, I have been terribly dissappointed by the ones I looked at. Ripple is an example. I think 99.9% of Ripple investors have got the wrong end of the stick. They think it will become valuable when the Ripple global payments system replaces the Swift system.
The same kind of misconception exists with many alt-coins where there is some kind of belief that a successful business will lead to a more valuable alt-coin. I haven't had time to look at many alt-coins, but the ones I studied properly (i.e. read and comprehended the white paper), are all going to be rubbish investments.
For that reason I will stick with bitcoin which has accepted monetary value that will increase as the 99.5% of the population who don't own any, start to look more closely.
When I find an alt-coin that has monetary value, I will add it to my portfolio. So far I am not convinced, although there are three or four or five which merit further study.
Investors are always looking for new asset classes, particularly ones that are not correlated to the existing asset classes.
I agree. But after socializing with many older traditional investors, many are set in their ways are a even scared to touch crypto. But I see that too is starting to change.