With the current transfers fees, it is difficult to do much apart from rarely moving large payments. For old-school currencies, that would be called speculation.
If you now consider that both the mining difficulty grows over time and the mining reward drops, then you clearly have a system with a built-in advantage for early adopters.
So people buy in, wait a bit, then exit at a higher price. But that only works as long as you have a large enough stream of newcomers.
I'd be willing to consider it an investment if there was some sort of inherent value on the other side, so if buying cryptocurrency gave you a claim of ownership on something real. But the critical fundament of cryptocurrency is that it's unrelated to the real world and only controlled by its members. In other words, the value of a cryptocurrency is determined exclusively by what people believe it should be.
fxtentacle|5 years ago
If you now consider that both the mining difficulty grows over time and the mining reward drops, then you clearly have a system with a built-in advantage for early adopters.
So people buy in, wait a bit, then exit at a higher price. But that only works as long as you have a large enough stream of newcomers.
I'd be willing to consider it an investment if there was some sort of inherent value on the other side, so if buying cryptocurrency gave you a claim of ownership on something real. But the critical fundament of cryptocurrency is that it's unrelated to the real world and only controlled by its members. In other words, the value of a cryptocurrency is determined exclusively by what people believe it should be.