It's weird that some people are still having the same arguments which were thoroughly discussed on bitcointalk.org 16 years ago. The discussion about its value were interesting when the price was $0 and people were speculating if it's possible that it gains any value at all. It was known that any value would kick off the bitcoin's inbuilt incentive mechanisms which would keep it running forever. A software that pays humans to run it; that was the genius behind it.
When the price history is already established, the theoretical basis of value is irrelevant. People value things based on their valuation history; that's how it goes. It can be broken down somewhat, but the price history should already contain all the relevant information for investors.
Bitcoin has now made it's way to the portfolios of the most boring financial institutions [0], which means that it is now firmly established itself as a part of the global financial system, and it's not going away.
> People value things based on their valuation history; that's how it goes. It can be broken down somewhat, but the price history should already contain all the relevant information for investors.
No, people value things based on their expected return, which is entirely future-looking. Which is why news -- facts that change our understanding of the future -- changes prices.
Nobody values anything based on its history -- its price history is utterly irrelevant. I mean, some people might think they can get all the info from a price history, but those are the people who end up losing all their money.
Yet, the price history is what convinces people to buy it. The longer it goes, the more convincing it becomes. Gold has been valuable for thousands of years, which is why everyone knows it will keep being valuable.
Valuations of collectibles and monetary assets, which don't change, are based on their historical price performance. The price history tells the story of how people buy and sell an asset with certain fundamental properties, and that's all the information needed to make an investment decision.
I don't know what to tell you, except that you're simply wrong about how pricing works. I don't know where you got this idea that pricing history gives you all the information you need to invest, but it's not what a single professional investor, economist, or financial executive would tell you. Not one.
If you want to learn how pricing works, you might want to start here:
In fact, it's precisely to try to correct misconceptions such as yours that a lot of financial instruments put the disclaimer "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Because it's so easy for people who don't know any better to imagine otherwise.
As I said, this does not apply to monetary assets, which don't have returns or expected future returns, like gold or bitcoin. In addition, these assets do not change. There are no news. All we know is how the price has behaved in different market conditions, and investors try to create models based on that alone.
I didn't say that the future price could be predicted or that it is guaranteed. I just said that the historical price information should contain all the relevant information about the asset.
There is obviously fascinating history about why gold has become valuable and what fundamental properties caused it to become valuable, but it's not really relevant to investors. Same applies to Bitcoin.
> There are no news... I just said that the historical price information should contain all the relevant information about the asset.
No, the news is changes in supply and demand, and the factors behind those changes, and how we expect those to change in the future. Those determine the current and future prices.
And those are not contained in historical price data. Historical price data is irrelevant to those.
There's information about the market, like interest rates and whatever is happening in politics and how the economy is doing. Then there is information about assets, which might change or not change. Gold and bitcoin react to information about the market, because these assets don't really change.
When the price history is already established, the theoretical basis of value is irrelevant. People value things based on their valuation history; that's how it goes. It can be broken down somewhat, but the price history should already contain all the relevant information for investors.
Bitcoin has now made it's way to the portfolios of the most boring financial institutions [0], which means that it is now firmly established itself as a part of the global financial system, and it's not going away.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/over-600-financial-institutio...