Of course....there's no guarantees, so I also don't advise to put in whatever you can't afford to lose.
I do think it's funny after a decade plus, there's still people thinking Bitcoin is a scam and that it will crash to nothing....the same thing they said when it hit $1K a coin....then $5K a coin, then $20K a coin (which was the all time high only a few months ago), now it's hovering around $60K a coin and we hear the same arguments.
When will it be considered not a scam by people? You can buy a Tesla with Bitcoin, you can buy a lot more goods and services with it. People are comparing it to gold as being a stable investment and that it could reach the same estimated price of gold, which would equate to about $500K per coin.
For the record, I hardly own any bitcoin myself other than some day trading as I'm looking at faster ROI's currently, but I might get .01 Bitcoin and hold it long term
I do know there's been concerns about the power used to mine bitcoin but that's also being improved constantly. I think I saw where 70% of bitcoin mining is now from renewable energy sources and they're soon possibly going to change what is required to do transactions so there's less impact.
For me, I get the concept of bitcoin as a way to assign a value to something. Like you said, it's like any monetary system, it's an arbitrary "this much of this abstraction is worth this much value". What I don't get is the mining. I'm reasonably technical, and nobody has ever explained to me why that's worth a goddamn thing.
Well, computers cost money and the electricity those computers use cost money.
My (very limited) understanding is that each bitcoin is somehow tied to an individual prime number. Since prime numbers are technically/theoretically infinite, but also increasingly/exponentially harder to find as the number already found increases, and they have some kind of mathematical importance (what, I don't know), then each individual one has some kind of intrinsic value. So if by "mining" you are able to discover a new prime number, then you have also created a bitcoin for yourself, but they are created in such small volumes that it doesn't saturate and devalue the market/currency.
Get that weak shit off my track
the basics as far as I understand them is that the bitcoin algorithm being on the blockchain means that it's backed up by math and a ledger that cannot ever be overwritten, as it is also verified by lots (thousands?) of other ledgers at the same exact time.
Now this doesn't mean that when you own a bitcoin that it's secure, because just like the difference between holding your cash in a bank vs your own wallet...your digital "wallet" if it's connected online could also be hacked which is what happens sometimes and why there's off the grid usb storage options.
The blockchain kinda just sounds like the way the git revision control software handles things. The change itself is what defines the hash that represents it, so you can't go make another change without affecting that hash and git is also similarly decentralized. I can see how you can apply that to transactions and all that, and I know that prime numbers are really important in cryptography, but I feel like every explanation I've gotten about crypto and mining like that bit from South Park. It's always "Step 1: here's this immutable point that's defined by some type of hashing algorithm. Step 2: Buy all the nvidia GPUs. Step 3: ...... Step 4: Profit!"
If mining isn't just used to generate a new "free" bitcoin, then I don't understand any of it
Get that weak shit off my track
Plus having BTC apparently mined under 70% renewable energy is great.
However, it still raises the overall energy use of the world, which needs to be catered for through the burning of fossil fuel.
All I know is I wish I could go back in time to 2016 when Bitcoin was $300-400. I had heard of it then, after watching some documentary about the Silk Road, but thought it was the dumbest shit ever.