1 out of 6 or 1 out of 7 Americans have BTC
I don't believe it.
I guess it depends on the definition: I'd say owning Bitcoin means owning owning your keys. Considering there are only 53,218,057 funded Bitcoin addresses (based on yesterday's data), and considering many Bitcoin owners have more than one funded address, there are far less than 50 million Bitcoin owners worldwide.
On the other hand, if I use a broker to buy shares of a certain company, I can say I own shares of that company. So I guess (by now) it's okay to say you own Bitcoin when you "have" some on an exchange or ETF. By that definition, 1 in 6 or 7 sounds plausible.
Well if we go back to the article that was cited by Phil.. River does pretty good research.. but still I was not really seeing how they break down the supposed 14.3% bitcoin ownership in the USA, which is the highest percent of the population world-wide, which they are also saying 50 million Americans own bitcoin, but yeah, they are not saying how many bitcoin it takes to be considered a bitcoin owner, and yeah, they are not distinguishing between owners of wallet addresses and those who have claims of bitcoin ownership through their exchange accounts - and/or other ways that they hold coins. I suppose they are getting most of the owners through looking at third-party custodian claims regarding accounts, even though there would likely be some overlap in the owners of various accounts. Coinbase claims to have more than 100 million users world wide with many in the USA.. yet they don't really break it down... So maybe plausible, and maybe they would suggest anything more than $10 in value would be ownership. Regarding hunch, I am still going to take it with a grain of salt, even though it is nice that more and more of these kinds of studies come out trying to figure out adoption rate based on whatever data that is available that the researcher can figure out and attempt to make reasonable inferences based on such data.
The disclaimer from the River Report is interesting - especially the second paragraph.
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IMO, if the paper Bitcoin are backed by real Bitcoin, either ETF or Echange, they count.
If you follow the "NYKNYC" principle, they don't count.
It's a matter of perspective, but also paper Bitcoin holders are Bitcoin holders,
so far.
*insert Homer Simpson "so far" meme here*I did not want to send you an smerit to ruin your merit record, then I just said to lil selfie: "Fuck it... .. who gives a shit about numerology?"
Why would you want to get a loan in paper bitcoin, though?
I don't
But I can imagine bankers coming up with this scenario
for profit.
Why not take a loan in paper dollars, and use them to buy bitcoin? This way, you don't have counterparty risk (bank going bankrupt, or practicing fractional reserve with no reserves), while you do borrow the bitcoin. You're also increasing the supply of dollars, while decreasing the market supply of bitcoin, driving the price up.
I wouldn't invest borrowed money, but I'm risk-averse when it comes to debt.
I wouldn't have the balls, but got a friend who took on a huge loan (about 3x his annual income) and bought BTC @60k.
he is able pay back the full loan + interest with his income over the years while his BTC stash gains value against the fiat he borrowed.
If he looses his job... too bad, his BTC are already on some addresses nobody has access to apart from him.
I really consider it a smart move without too much risk...
Even though you provided some provocative details, I am still feeling that I am missing some important details.
I am presuming that your "friend" took the $60k loan some time in 2024 rather than in 2021?
3x annual income is a lot, so then his payments might have had partially depended on the length of the loan and the interest rate, and some loan require incremental payoff during the loan (such as a car payment or a house payment) and others only require minimal payment and a balloon payment at the end (such as credit card promotional loan dealios).
When the guy is in profits, such as right now with the BTC price being right around double the price at the time of the loan, it is looking like a quite great front loading situation, again presuming the loan originated in 2024 and so presuming that the loan had not yet been paid off, so the payoff might still be running until the loan is completely paid off.
If the loan originated in 2021 and if it was like 5 -6 years or more (like the kinds of loans that Saylor negotiated), then even that loan would have worked out o.k... even though there were better times to buy bitcoin both before and after 2021.
By the way, some consumer loans, such as new auto loans can be ridiculously low at the time of origin, and maybe have a 2% loan that has a 5 years duration or something like that.. but yeah, you have a depreciating car that likely is worth 1/2 as much as the purchase price after a couple of years, but yeah if you are getting cash maybe the next best one would be a home equity line of credit, but still those could be 5% or more, but they could be intended for home improvements, yet they might have liberal requirements if the person has a lot of equity in their home. Personal loans might not be able to get under 6% or even under 5 years.. yet i know that there will be regional variance with these kinds of matters.
I really consider it a smart move without too much risk...
The fall into the 400s lasted a loooong time. If you held, you eventually made out but I think there were a lot of people lost heart and sold. Remember, everything looks easy in retrospect.
Well the end of 2014 hit sub $400 levels, and then pretty much the whole of 2015 was in the mid to lower $200s, and even at the end of 2015 there was a recovery to $500 and then a drop back down to the lower $400s for the first 5 months of 2016. I agree that 2014, 2015 and even more than half of 2016 seemed like a long haul, especially when the middle of 2016, we might have had thought that we were recovering, and then there was the Bitfinex "hack" of 119k BTC.. which caused some additional concerns about the recovery right before the pre block-size wars kicked in more heavily in early 2017..... even though aspects of the block-size wars were sort of already going in late 2016..
I really consider it a smart move without too much risk...
The fall into the 400s lasted a loooong time. If you held, you eventually made out but I think there were a lot of people lost heart and sold. Remember, everything looks easy in retrospect.
He knows my history with Bitcoin and the pain that comes with long bear markets.
He prepared himself to hold BTC for decades.
But yeah people get weak easily. See mindrust
Any of us can end up having moments of insecurity.. and we will feel good and be acting in the right direction, and then all of a sudden, poof, like you said, mindrust is a great example, and part of the reason that mindrust is such a great example is because he publicly disclosed a lot of his mind-process details, and I bet that there are a bunch of guys who have gone through similar kinds of selling at the bottom and thinking that they were right.. and then becoming bitter and resentful and even somewhat loonie.. I think that there have been a lot of guys in here that had ended up selling way too many coins too soon and bragging about it and then constantly talking their bear talking points and failing refusing to buy back in and continuing to argue that the BTC price is going down...
There were guys selling a lot of coins in the $600s in 2013, 2014 and 2016.. There were a lot of guys selling a lot of coins around $3k to $5k on the way up in 2017 and then in 2018 and 2019 (and even in 2020 for that quickie March mindrust dump).. there were even a lot of guys selling in the lower $20ks in 2022.. .. There were even a lot of guys selling and a lot of their bitcoin in the lower $30ks in late 2023.. and I suppose that the latest is the guys selling a lot of coin in the $50ks and $60ks in 2024. None of those prices are not coming back ever. I am even willing to bet no more sub $75k.. and I might even be willing to bet no more sub $80k, ever.
Some of these guys who bought coins in those ranges that other were selling, and they might sell their coins at higher prices, yet they are never going to be able to buy back their sold coins if they had the fortune of buying coins in those various earlier watershed price points.
New folks should be building their bitcoin stacks.. and soon our current price ranges are no longer going to be available... ever... but for now, as I type this post, there are still possibilities from time to time to buy right around 840 satoshis for each dollar... That amount of satoshis that you receive per dollar keeps going down.
People will do loans more and more, but when i look, the terms are still horrendous, so I still stick to cash and don't do anything fancy for now.
I think 8% or lower is acceptable, and perhaps with terms of a couple of years with options to roll it over...
Some guys ended up being more correct than others by investing into bitcoin, but even the ones who ended up being more correct (and even as more importantly reflected in their actions) still did necessarily know or understand the then future beyond merely assessing of some probabilities regarding various scenarios and some scenarios more correct than others..and even with the passage of time, their believes could be confirmed or denied by subsequent folding out of events..
The correct way to proceed with Bitcoin is to just keep accumulating and don't look for long time what you have accumulated. We have so much data available that tells us how beneficial it is to hodl bitcoin for long time. Even if still someone is not convinced, it's his own choice.
Well that is part of the justification to get involved in something in which there is asymmetric nature and asymmetric upside that is providing something like a Pascal's Wager.
In other words, as long as you don't fuck around with leverage, then the most that you can lose is 100% that you put in, and there are a whole hell of a lot of variety of scenarios with relatively decent odds in regards to a whole bunch of upside scenarios.
of course, none of the upside scenarios are guaranteed, yet there are still ways that we can decide what to do and then do it.
So in the earliest stages, we are buying as much bitcoin as we can reasonably do without over doing it, which might take 1, 2, 3 or even more cycles depending on how much discretionary income a guy has and how much he is able to front load his investment into bitcoin.
Then in the next stage, we might have to wait and to maintain our holdings for about a cycle.. if we consider that we might need to maintain for more than a whole cycle, then we likely don't have enough BTC and we should just keep buying... yet by the time we reach this stage we have likely mostly accumulated enough.. even though we still might be inclined to buy the dip.
The third stage is sustainable withdrawal. .which can be price based and/or time based.. which still is selling only as much BTC so not to knock us out of overaccumulation status.. .or we don't want to get knocked back down to the second stage.
We should be attempting to match our behavior to which stage we are in.. .and each of us has to determine both the identification of the stage and the conduct to fit the stage. From my perspective, it is not random in the sense that anything can happen, yet we still have to protect ourselves in various ways.. protect our coins and don't screw things up and perhaps even figuring out some legacy matters, such as passing our coins down to heirs or however else we might feel that we want to deal with legacy matters.
You can even disagree with me about the stages that each of us has to go through in our bitcoin investment journey or what we might need to do for each of the stages. .. since especially each of us has to figure out our path in connection with our own financial and psychological circumstances
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