Subject: Re: OT: Bitcoin FOMO
It may have happened with gold already. Gold's inflation adjusted price is still below the 1980 peak (around $3100 in today's prices).

It may have. Also, maybe not. Forty years in the history of gold and humans is not a lot. If I pick a start date more convenient to my argument and less convenient to yours, say, the early 1970s, today's price would be well ahead of the inflation-adjusted cost, if still not much of a return next to stocks. CNBC had a throwback bit today claiming SPDR Gold (GLD) shares are up 442% over the past 20 years. I haven't checked the math. My point was not that gold is a great investment, only that demand may not be sated.

If we were in 1890 discussing which artist would have enduring value, we certainly would not have picked van Gogh.

It is true that picking long-term winners in the fine arts is difficult. I was responding to an argument that all capital assets reach a point of demand saturation buttressed by reference to the works of a single artist. So I mentioned a different artist whose works continue to see increasing demand 100 years after his death. Again, this was not investment advice, just a response to a theoretical claim.

We could be early in Bitcoin's demand curve. Could be at the peak too. We might be dead before we find out which.

Anything is possible, although the fact that Bitcoin is 15 years old, has increased in price from less than a penny to roughly $90,000 in that relatively brief span, and has only recently been made available to investors through traditional market vehicles, seems to me to make the peak demand case require some sort of evidence. As I mentioned, the fact that prominent Republicans are talking about a substantial U.S. federal Bitcoin reserve would suggest the opposite, as would non-U.S. entities eager to escape U.S. dominion (sanctions regimes) tied to the dollar.

In any case, I was responding to a rant suggesting Michael Saylor of Microstrategy was a swindler of some kind. I probably shouldn't have; this board is an unreceptive audience and Bitcoin is off-topic here anyway. My bet on MSTR has worked out so far, the price jumping again today on news Mr. Saylor added more BTC to its balance sheet. For geopolitical and other reasons, a new digital currency (or currencies) makes sense to me, but, as Dennis Miller used to say, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. :)