Thursday, August 24, 2017 by Ethan Huff
http://www.risk.news/2017-08-24-how-bitcoin-just-proved-it-is-not-a-store-of-value-or-a-reliable-strategy-for-savings.html
The recent “hard fork” that took place on August 1, splitting the digital cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin into a second form of new digital cryptocurrency known as “Bitcoin Cash,” is just more evidence that Bitcoin isn’t a reliable store of value, claims Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. In his latest Health Ranger Report, Adams explains why he thinks Bitcoin isn’t the stable alternative to the dollar that many people think it is, and warns that the public should beware of this before jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon.
The biggest problem Adams sees is the ease with which the Bitcoin blockchain can be changed or altered in the event that programmers or miners decide to do so. In the beginning, it was said that Bitcoin had a limited number of “coins” that could be mined, which meant that it couldn’t be endlessly printed like Federal Reserve Notes and other similar fiat currencies. But these recent changes to the Bitcoin platform suggest otherwise.
Unlike gold, which is a real, tangible material with fixed scarcity – there’s only so much of it in the ground, after all – Bitcoin is just a bunch of numbers on a computer screen. Its value is based on little more than what the people who use it or simply believe in it are willing to pay, which all depends on things like its mathematical certainty and availability – both things that apparently can change over time, as evidenced by the recent hard fork.
Even though its value in relation to the dollar appears to be going up – and rather quickly, at that – Adams is convinced that Bitcoin’s days are numbered. He sees an eventual crash on the horizon, the result of Bitcoin embodying a type of Ponzi scheme in which millions of people have been conned into converting their wealth into this questionably speculative concept.
Learn more about the Bitcoin crash that Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, says is coming soon by reading BitcoinCrash.news.
This isn’t to say that cryptocurrencies in general are a bad thing. Adams sees them as having merits that fiat currencies like the dollar don’t – perhaps the most obvious being that there’s no central bank in charge of Bitcoin. It’s a currency owned by the people, and for the people, or so goes the narrative in terms of its purpose.
“I love the idea of decentralized money,” says Adams. “But Bitcoin is not where it’s going to end up. It’s a great proof of concept, but it can’t survive itself.”
Adams sees serious problems with the mining aspects of Bitcoin, for instance, which he says aren’t scalable. Mining Bitcoin requires an incredible amount of energy, and as more and more people buy into the system it’s going to become increasingly more energy-dependent. Another problem is the Bitcoin transaction process, which simply takes far too long to accommodate hundreds, let alone thousands or tens of thousands, of transactions per second like credit card companies, for instance, are able to accommodate.
For all of these reasons and more, Adams has lost faith in Bitcoin and believes it to be a “giant con.” While the future of cryptocurrencies in general looks bright, the future of Bitcoin specifically is rather dim, believes Adams.
“Bitcoin can never become the currency of the world because it uses as much electricity as an entire nation just to run the infrastructure,” Adams adds. “It would be slow, and the transaction would be high, and to solve that problem we create these hard forks that prove that Bitcoin isn’t permanent.”
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Tagged Under: Tags: bitcoin, Bubble, Collapse, crypto-currency, Health Ranger, market crash, value