You can't really compare the P/S ratios between different industries. A lower margin business like retailing should have a lower P/S ratio than a higher margin business like retailing. OTOH, a crazy high margin business like AWS should have a higher P/S than a manufacturer...
The problem with Tesla is that the opportunity for FSD is insane. Either the market is mispricing the risk or the shorts are, but the asymmetric upside if Tesla succeeds makes it a risky short. Asymmetric downside.
At battery day Elon said if they achieve FSD, their competitors will too in a couple years, and it isn't very valuable as a result. Now they said it all rides on batteries/energy storage and that's really their competitive advantage, a $218 million startup and another small one they bought with stock is now supposed to almost entirely undergird their $668 billion marketcap.
"Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?"
What do you think happens to your currency when they print more of it?
One problem with gold though is that we know where plenty of gold is, its just too expensive to mine. Once the price of gold rises, more gold becomes profitable to mine, supply increases, and the price goes back down.
"They" print more every day. In the US, I think the economic stimulus has been a success this year. Trump should have spent his campaign talking about all the efforts to boost unemployment insurance benefits. He might have fared a bit better in the election.
Most of the criticisms in this thread seem to be missing that Bitcoin is only layer 1. Bitcoin isn't Visa or cash - its gold. Rather than shipping gold across the Atlantic, large institutions will settle in a few minutes in Bitcoin. L2/L3/L4 solutions (built into Apple Pay, etc.) will allow for instant payments for coffee, allow for privacy similar to physical cash, etc.
Before this is possible, the price has to stabilize. Just takes time to go from $0.1 to $10M per coin. Once Bitcoin has eaten all the "store of value" value & only appreciates at the rate new wealth is created, L2/L3/L4 solutions will go mainstream.
Except Bitcoin has no way to “stabilize”. Without central banks’ intervention and governance, even regular currencies would fluctuate like crazy. Unless the bitcoin world can come up with a Federal Reserve / ECB equivalent, it will continue to be a wild ride, which will effectively impede further uses. It will always be a speculation vehicle rather than a store of value.
I think the difference is that currencies fluctuate against each other, whereas if everything is priced in Bitcoin, its whatever you're pairing it against that's fluctuating. Goods (ex: loaf of bread for 200 satoshis for example) would stay stable
Humans are creativity machines. We are always expanding the amount of value there is in the world. The only way to have stable prices is to have a currency that inflates to match the amount of new stuff created.
But do we really want stable prices? Today you can buy a device a million times faster than 20 years ago for the same price. Imagine if everything were like that.
> Today you can buy a device a million times faster than 20 years ago for the same price.
And as you can see that massive deflation completely destroyed the computing industry, as everyone sat around waiting for next year's device that was faster and better for a similar price.
Wait, that didn't happen? People still buy things when there is deflation? No, that can't be, how else can I justify the morals of my money printer?
You joke but this is an actual factor that hardware companies have to proactively manage. Apple, for example, grants free replacements to people who bought laptops in the last few months before an upgrade is announced. Precisely because, otherwise, people will sit on their hands waiting for the new model.
But really, you can just look at bitcoin itself: it keeps appreciating on the upward swings, but people continue to not use it for everyday transactions - it's purely a speculation target. That's not what a currency should be for.
When you have a system that can only function if everything and everyone works in the same way at the same time, it will never actually function. The whole world is not going to move to Bitcoin, there will always be competing currencies - hence, there will always be speculation and uncontrollable fluctuations.
Currencies fluctuate against demand in the foreign exchange market, not against each other. Governments then step up to stabilize that demand. Bitcoin doesn't have that support so it fluctuates wildly, exactly like it's been doing since it's inception.
