First a couple disclaimers: I'm not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I own bitcoin as my second largest crypto position behind Ethereum. I'm not a crypto expert however I am a software development expert with over 30 years experience and I've been watching the crypto space for a long time.
The good news about bitcoin is it's the OG crypto, the largest, and it started everything. It has incredible branding with a name and logo that everyone knows. It's a good store of value with an expectation of further price upside as supply cuts continue from halvenings. Recently it's getting traction in countries like El Salvador as an official currency. Businesses like MicroStrategy and Tesla have added bitcoin to their balance sheets as a reserve asset. I think it could easily hit $100k by early next year.
I'm not selling any of my bitcoin but I'm not buying more bitcoin either. Despite the above I'm generally neutral on bitcoin and here's why.
The bitcoin community and developers decided early on, at the cost of much angst and chain forks, to not make many changes to bitcoin but to focus on being a store of value rather than being a medium of exchange, a platform, or any of the other paths crypto is now taking. The result of that is other cryptos and the entire crypto space are moving forward in an ever expanding number of directions while bitcoin remains what it was a decade ago. (As an aside, why El Salvador chose bitcoin to be a currency when bitcoin has been public about not being designed to be a medium of exchange is a mystery me).
Crypto is bleeding edge technology and in my opinion it will change the world. However bitcoin decided not to participate in that future beyond being a static "digital gold." As a result other projects with more generalized and forward-looking goals are now bearing the fruit of their work and seeing their technologies expand in multiple directions. Ethereum for example has been a platform for an entire economy of new cryptos, recently created new markets with a boom in DeFi, NFTs, and is going green by changing its mining strategy to the newer and much more energy efficient staking. IMO everything exciting in crypto is now happening in smart contract platforms like Ethereum. The final proof of what has happened is nobody is even trying to be bitcoin anymore, all the new projects are trying to be the next Ethereum.
So for myself, I'm not excited about the future of a digital gold... gold doesn't do anything without a financial system and economy built to use it. Instead I'm excited about the future of the entirely new financial system being built on projects like Ethereum, with its own currency (ETH), stablecoins, and thousands of other cryptos working together in an complex and expanding ecosystem and economy. Bitcoin purposefully decided not to be part of that, so it's difficult to be interested in bitcoin today IMO. As bitcoin is no longer leading the crypto space, I don't see why it would hold the position as the largest crypto for much longer. But we'll have to see how things develop. However based on what projects actually ARE developing and have a culture to bring about a new future, and which have a culture to simply stand still, I don't have much hope for bitcoin as the crypto space marches forward.
The good news about bitcoin is it's the OG crypto, the largest, and it started everything. It has incredible branding with a name and logo that everyone knows. It's a good store of value with an expectation of further price upside as supply cuts continue from halvenings. Recently it's getting traction in countries like El Salvador as an official currency. Businesses like MicroStrategy and Tesla have added bitcoin to their balance sheets as a reserve asset. I think it could easily hit $100k by early next year.
I'm not selling any of my bitcoin but I'm not buying more bitcoin either. Despite the above I'm generally neutral on bitcoin and here's why.
The bitcoin community and developers decided early on, at the cost of much angst and chain forks, to not make many changes to bitcoin but to focus on being a store of value rather than being a medium of exchange, a platform, or any of the other paths crypto is now taking. The result of that is other cryptos and the entire crypto space are moving forward in an ever expanding number of directions while bitcoin remains what it was a decade ago. (As an aside, why El Salvador chose bitcoin to be a currency when bitcoin has been public about not being designed to be a medium of exchange is a mystery me).
Crypto is bleeding edge technology and in my opinion it will change the world. However bitcoin decided not to participate in that future beyond being a static "digital gold." As a result other projects with more generalized and forward-looking goals are now bearing the fruit of their work and seeing their technologies expand in multiple directions. Ethereum for example has been a platform for an entire economy of new cryptos, recently created new markets with a boom in DeFi, NFTs, and is going green by changing its mining strategy to the newer and much more energy efficient staking. IMO everything exciting in crypto is now happening in smart contract platforms like Ethereum. The final proof of what has happened is nobody is even trying to be bitcoin anymore, all the new projects are trying to be the next Ethereum.
So for myself, I'm not excited about the future of a digital gold... gold doesn't do anything without a financial system and economy built to use it. Instead I'm excited about the future of the entirely new financial system being built on projects like Ethereum, with its own currency (ETH), stablecoins, and thousands of other cryptos working together in an complex and expanding ecosystem and economy. Bitcoin purposefully decided not to be part of that, so it's difficult to be interested in bitcoin today IMO. As bitcoin is no longer leading the crypto space, I don't see why it would hold the position as the largest crypto for much longer. But we'll have to see how things develop. However based on what projects actually ARE developing and have a culture to bring about a new future, and which have a culture to simply stand still, I don't have much hope for bitcoin as the crypto space marches forward.