Bitcoin is very much like digital gold, just far more scarce in supply. It was created as a solution to the problems we witnessed in 2007-2008 with the crash.
I think people who have very deep pockets are fueling the fear, because it benefits their BTC holdings when the peasants panic buy.
And they're panic-buying globally, that's the difference between BTC and gold. Gold is for rich men in poor countries, and for banks to manipulate to keep prices down.
The biggest thing to understand is how little BTC is actually being traded globally. The current supply is 18,597,788 BTC out of the total possible amount of 21M.
According to the research I have done, I've found a lot of evidence pointing to a slim margin of the total current supply of BTC actually trading. Think more like 4.2-4.5M BTC, which is currently $35k a pop, rather than the majority of the total supply.
That's one reason the price ran the first 10 days of this year, there's so little being traded that the price is being bid up. Then, the futures traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange pile in on the upside because they're greedy fucks and then the price goes too far too fast, the whales (1000 BTC or more) start selling to lock in their profits
Some of the biggest trading volume is from South Korea and Japan. American traders don't appear to be on the same level of financial wealth as the Asian traders. BTC is acting like a store-of-value, instead of people wasting their money in a savings account earning 0% a year.
BTC is not currently cheap enough to use for P2P payments, unless you're really comfortable. To me, a $10 fee to send $20 is pointless. Not that high necessarily, but that's the biggest problem with the network being used for payments, fees are too high.
The shitcoins are also in the process of selling off after a massive rally yesterday and Saturday. Most of the actual $ is in Ether in general. Current supply of ETH is 114,213,944, and it's ~$1060 USD per ETH. Ether has a similar problem as BTC, it currently cannot scale to handle global commerce, yet.
Ethereum 2.0 is the new phase of development/deployment of the network that has begun being rolled out. What it is ultimately going to do, is change ETH from a Proof-of-Work coin which is mined from solving complex equations/work, to a Proof-of-Stake coin which pays dividends as income for holding ETH in a wallet.
Problem is, there's no telling if ETH 2.0 will even happen, let alone work. But, that hasn't stopped anyone from rampantly speculating ETH up from $350 to $1350
And banks can now use stablecoins (Digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies) which means banks don't have to use the US Dollar to move money among themselves anymore. So banks are buying ETH with fiat and BTC (assuming they've acquired some) and then converting the ETH into an ERC-20 token which is essentially a token that is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain network, and pegged to whatever, USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD, CAD, MXN etc.
The other thing that no one seems to care about is, where the fuck is all the data stored on these Blockchain ledgers going to be kept?
We're gonna need so much more computer hardware and data centers to be able to come anywhere close to meeting the demand for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
BTC is now worth just shy of $650B. Crypto as a whole is worth over $937B!
