Why I think bitcoin will continue going up. Bitcoin is analogous to Runescape's discontinued items, but better.

This is a long post, but it is worth reading.

For the purpose of my example, I will use Runescape's history as an analogy to Bitcoin's history first, with its correlation to bitcoin in bolded characters to help you all understand my point.

---BEGIN HISTORIC COMPARISON---

Runescape is one of the oldest MMORPG, and a popular one since its early days that kept going more and more popular as the years went on. In the early days of Runescape, its developpers found funny to implement holiday surprises in their game. Those surprises were key to obtaining a special item type that could no longer be obtainable afterward and became extremely valuable ater many years. Eventually, the community coined the term "discontinued items" (DIs) to describe them.

Discontinued items applies to all in-game items that were dropped in the game only once, or were obtainable in-game until some point in time, and after a game update, were no longer obtainable. However, people who already had them were allowed to keep them.

Bitcoin has a maximum creation cap of 21,000,000, and as of today, it is much harder to mine than it used to be. We can assume bitcoin will at some point become discontinued. It will no longer be possible to reliably create new bitcoins to add to the network, and trading will become the only way to obtain them.

On the first Christmas, Halloween, and Easter day following the creation of Runescape, the developpers made in-game events where Party Hats, Halloween Masks and Easter Eggs would randomly pop around the world. There were so many of them that if you logged in the game on this particular day, you could easily grab over a hundred in mere hours. People would wear them as a joke and give them for free to their friends who would start playing the game a few weeks after the event. They had no use beside giving your character a fancy look. They were completely useless and worthless but people wore them as a joke, as it was meant to be by Runescape's developpers.

When bitcoin first appeared, you could mine hundreds in a few hours, they were kinda useless, as at the time smartphones weren't invented yet making their use pretty inconvenient, darknet markets did not exist, nor did btc exchanges, and no body would accept Bitcoin as a payment for anything, except for some tech savy pizza restaurant. So we can assume bitcoin is a bit like Runescape's DIs as in when they were introduced, no one took their potential seriously.

After about a year, the Runescape game had exploded in popularity, its userbase multiplied tenfold. However, people did not yet realise that the supply of DIs was going down. Players who owned them were regularly dying with them, lost access to their account, got banned from the game, sold them to NPCs, etc. But there were SO MANY of them still in circulation that they didn't have much value. They weren't given for free anymore, but you could certainly trade for one in exchange for about one hour of "grinding" runescape in-game raw materials.

After a while, Bitcoin started receiving some media coverage, but it still traded at 5-10$, and no body believed it would eventually become the huge thing it is today. Brokers in real life were rare, the btc mining process had become significantly harder and the knowledge on how to mine bitcoin was still trivial. People lost bitcoin on a regular basis due to mis-understanding of the technology. Sent to mispelled addresses, got locked out of their key accounts, dumped their hard-drives containing bitcoins, etc. However, it still had value based on the fact that it required real life ressources (hardware and electrical power) to be generated.

Past the five-year point, Technology had completely changed Runescape. A major updated dubbed "Runescape 2.0" changed its look completely. A lot of the original Runescape's userbase stopped playing either due to this or for personal reasons. People move on with their lives and most of the original userbase had abandonned their accounts. The 18 years old kiddies were now adults with jobs, and most of the mature gaming community had moved on to more complex games involving tearmwork, such as World of Warcraft. The supply of DIs was running low, and for the first time in history, you could buy Runescape's DIs on EBAY for REAL currency. At this point, I think Party Hats were going for about $100-200 on Ebay. In the game, many players believed the idea that people paid real money for these items was ridiculous. But people were, as these items sold regularly on EBAY.

We can now assume bitcoin has became more widespread. Smartphones were invented, making bitcoin transactions more convenient. Exchanges were put online, and Silkroad was designed. However, the value of bitcoin was still low, due to the fact that they could still be relatively easily mined, not many people were aware of the dark net markets and exchanges were unstable. Bitcoin was starting to have a reputation of being useful, but solely for illegal activites and is mostly used only as a hot-potato you keep only for the duration of a DNM transaction. There were not many investors at this point, bitcoin was about $70-80.

Past the ten-year point, Runescape had made its anti-cheating measure better, and proceeded to significant ban waves against players. Many of the players who had the means to afford the discontinued items at this point were involved in some cheating activity. A shitload of discontinued items were lost with their users when they were banned. And Ebay had become so full of them that they decided to implement a policy to restrict the sale of virtual items on their website. But since then, websites were created specifically for the sale of Runescape items, mostly discontinued items.

Party hats now go for THOUSANDS of dollars on dedicated websites, and their in-game value is such that there is no way to use gold coins to buy them, as their value exceeds the maximum amount of in-game gold coins a single account can carry.

Mtgox fucks off with a large amount of bitcoins. These bitcoins were most likely not re-introduced in the economy. Criminals with bitcoin get busted on a regular basis with their devices seized, and I assume many of them will never be unlocked. I personally know someone who lost 200k worth of BTC after cops seized his cellphone but were not able to decrypt his wallet, and never returned his phone to him. This drives the supply even lower. In addition, darknet markets have become larger and more diversified. Exchanges are worldwide and localbitcoins is regularly used.

Discontinued Items are now used in Runescape as a symbol of wealth and social status. If you see someone in-game wearing a party hat, as of Runescape 3.0, you know that player is rich as fuck, or has been playing for a VERY long time.

Everybody has heard of bitcoin in some way or another. Darknets exit scams no longer affect bitcoin's value because a lot of people not involved in drug related activites now purchase bitcoin for completely different reasons; move money accross vast distances, as payment methods for legal products, to keep money hidden from IRS, etc etc.. Bitcoin has become SOLID.

---END HISTORIC COMPARISON---

Bitcoin has significant advantages over runescape's discontinued items. It is actually useful and even NECESSARY for some transactions. Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) remain to this day the SOLE way to achieve a perfect tax haven, to move large sums of money securely accross vast distances, or performing transaction in a perfectly pseudonymous way.

As of today, Runescape discontinued items keep going up, up up, because the supply keeps going down but the userbase does not. People lose their party hats, stop playing, get banned. Just like some people lose their bitcoin private keys, money remains locked in a 2 of 3 multisig transaction when the market goes away (Hansa), send bitcoin by mistake to an address no body has a key for, etc. This has not stopped for a few years now. I regularly go on Runescape's forums to check the value of discontinued items, and they never go down, they only go up exponantially. And this has been going on for years.

As such, the supply of Bitcoin keeps going DOWN, and its popularity and uses keeps going UP. The market capitalisation keeps rising and rising, but the amount of bitcoins in circulation is limited. However, they are better than Runescape's DIs, because you can actually SPLIT your bitcoins. You are not forced to buy a whole bitcoin, you can split it to a cent if you wish. And they also have some REAL-LIFE uses, and are not just some fancy tech-savy shit you can brag about owning.

History has shown us MMORPG's communities are micro-societies, and as such, their userbase can be used as test subjects for experiences. Scientists use MMORPGs to conduct analysis and experiments to understand how a community would react if faced with some event, as was the case in WoW's Corrupted Blood incident, where players instaured ragtag hospitals and city quarantines to control an in-game epidemy bug that eventually caused a server crash, stopped by developpers in a "Divine Intervention" style update. This provided scientist with data they spent years analysing and that they could never obtain by computer-generated simulations. For the first time in history, scientists had access to data on how a community of over 10,000 unsuspecting users would react if confronted to a pandemic problem, analogous to what would happen if the real life world was struck with a similar event.

Please upvote if you think this was worth reading.

TL;DR: Bitcoin value will keep going up because its supply is limited, while its user demand will keep going higher. Unless a fatal flaw is found in bitcoin, it can reach astronomical value as more and more people decide to either buy them to keep them as an investment, thus temporarily removing them from the economy, or buy them as hot-potatoes meant to be used only as a wire-transfer or a transaction mean, and then quickly retraded for fiat currency.


Comments


[43 Points] SupportingAbortion:

Buying gf .1btc


[24 Points] RedditAccount28:

I cant pull runescape bitches by wearing a blue bitcoin on my head though


[11 Points] Faladorable:

you cant sell fractions of a blue partyhat


[12 Points] JasperBuds:

The flaw has been around for awhile BTC isn't anonymous anymore might as well buy drugs via PayPal now


[10 Points] _PrinterPam_:

Reasons why I think it won't: Eventually something else will come along (several promising technologies are vying even as we speak) that is better, wiping-out demand. Then we'll have a glut of supply (though finite) with little to no demand...tanking the value.

EDIT: And I didn't even have to write a thesis-length argument. Though I actually do appreciate you putting some thought into your argument. ;)


[4 Points] niggerannihilator175:

How much meth have you smoked dawg?


[5 Points] aavoqdl:

Trimming bitcoins


[3 Points] throwawayforsec:

Very well writen my friend.


[3 Points] niquetapute:

Very interesting and well written read, thank you. Based on that, what would your advice be to people who want to get bitcoins and hold them until they can sell them for a lot of money? I'm thinking of buying like 50€ worth of btc every month for example. What would your opinion be on that matter? Instead of buying an expensive rig to mine bitcoins, I would just mine them little by little with real money and repeat until rich. What do you think and how would you improve this idea? Maybe 25 in btc and 25 in ethereum or something? I would very much like your feedback and opinion on this. Thank you


[2 Points] dookiedonkey:

5000 by end of Auggie, guar!


[2 Points] bobbiggs69:

Well, that was a lot of thinking to figure out that both bitcoin and whatever runescape is are both subject to the law of supply and demand.


[1 Points] feeekit44:

Bitcoin will go up because a chinese cartel of exchanges and whale miners controll the price


[1 Points] louthecokedealer:

Do you think the price will fall/stabilise anytime soon?


[1 Points] SukkDissDick:

You should of compared bitcoin to gta5


[1 Points] Tugboats420:

Free armour trimming

Buying GF

Old School RS all day though. And for those who are out of the loop, they are releasing OSRS Mobile this year :-)


[1 Points] Diapolo10:

Panic sell wands dogecoins!


[1 Points] cryptolavdalasun:

also this

https://np.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6tk22m/daily_discussion_monday_august_14_2017/dlldm53/

tldr - bitcoin goona go up to $25k-60k soon


[1 Points] C_Lana_Zepamo:

Hey Boss, I don't know if you've ever see this yet, but this happened recently on a live stream. He did it with monkey nuts, with extreme sucess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8gBEfCZiDI

https://i.redd.it/ipsy8rwutx4z.png

He did this in a day rofl. Question is, how do we replicate this IRL with bitcoin, for profit?


[1 Points] lisiecki:

A bit like the card conversion limit on Greed Island...


[1 Points] YarrIBeAPirate:

It will no longer be possible to reliably create new bitcoins to add to the network, and trading will become the only way to obtain them.

You do realize that when you mine, you also collect mining fees, not just the current mining reward.

So, as more people use BTC, their will be more fees to collect.


[1 Points] dlcmuskrat:

TL;DR:

Supply and demand