Paid in Bitcoin

Bitcoin just made another all time high, trading currently above $62,000. However, judging from the volumes traded and lack of search interest, this looks suspiciously like churn without any associated increase in popularity. There's no point in jumping into Bitcoin at this point, not even from a technical perspective. There's very little conviction behind this move. Volumes are thin and search interest low. So what lies behind this move, apart from a circle of friends creating churn by trading among themselves?

This looks planned and engineered. There has been a barrage of stories about Bitcoin lately, all very positive about it and correspondingly negative about gold and silver. This has been happening repeatedly in the past, and is now becoming a predictable pattern, possibly to the point of being tradable for brave speculators. Whenever there's a flurry of Bitcoin stories, load up with Bitcoin. Then dump it into the churn that follows.

A news story that we see repeated in multiple variations is the idea that Bitcoin is being accepted as payment. Latest of these is this story about Microstrategy board members now being paid in Bitcoin. However, we don't have to read far before finding that the contract is based on dollars. Their pay will be in Bitcoin, but the nominal value paid to them is in dollars, so not even the board members of Microstrategy trust Bitcoin enough to have their pay denominated in it. That's interesting, because these same people claim that Bitcoin is money, and one determining factor to establish that something is money is that people are willing to write contracts denominated in it.

It appears that Microstrategy board members are fully aware that Bitcoin isn't money, and that it never will be money. They're just promoting the stuff in the hope of making a quick buck.

Reflection in a soap bubble

By Brocken Inaglory. The image was edited by user:Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link