What makes Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies go up in value

What makes Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies go up in value is it hype or is there real value?

I think it's a bit of everything you mentioned hype which is kind of the news flow in the headline and media coverage it certainly has got a fair amount of that recently what's also happening is it's a supply and demand and essentially we have something that's pretty small but quite potentially the future and then we have a very bloated in digested old man Fiat currency that has to leak out a lot of its Fiat into the new exchange system so I think we're in a transition and as a result there's a wall of money and whenever you have a wall of money in the demand area you get these extremely volatile but generally upward moving markets it doesn't mean the wall of money is always coming in at always the same rate and it doesn't mean that perception of valuation doesn't get overextended so it's quite feasible that we are quite overextended in perception of overvaluation in terms of how far the technology and the proliferation has got but there is still scope for us to become more so in the longer run though we will have to align with practical use proliferation and there will be a balancing off the wall of money you don't want to be out of the game.

So are we experiencing a cryptocurrency rush is this a bit like the dot-com bubble?

It's an interesting analogy I avoid the word bubble so the Tulip mania was a bubble so I differentiate having I think bubble is a bit of an annoying phrase that gets over utilized essentially you away from something that was worth you know very few fraction of a few guilders it went to the moon and went all the way back down to what it was before certain colors of bulb it means a little lower than it was before. So that was just a flash in the pan that returned dot-com slightly interesting essentially there was a lot of businesses that got listed for which there was not a great deal to them in other words you know bridal.com there are business plan an idea about a website and then selling all the wedding dresses of the world didn't happen but out of that era and the Internet we totally changed how we go about doing business it wasn't key pivotal moments I mean Amazon has 42% of US retail now people were telling you to short Amazon throughoutthe.com boom they never made a profit he just took all his money and reinvested reinvested he now owns a massive slice of online retail and is a Unicorn company that traded to $1000 not so long ago sure may sell off in any tech sell-off and my still have quite some way but that company is not going away and it's changed retail then you bought the googles and the Netflix is that all of these elements that was came out Cisco they were slightly on the hardware side these are companies that I've done 10s of hundreds of percents appreciation and there's a whole new way of doing business so I do think there is a parallel to the dot-com that doesn't mean it's all of a bubble as in it will just go back and disappear and go away like nothing ever happened I think this hyper valuation there so you have to acknowledge that money sometimes gets ahead of the delivery aspect for awhile and you will have a reset back but then eventually you know those changes are coming..

Bitcoin, Ethereum, ripple and Litecoin collectively have around a ~$90 billion valuation.

Can they really be worth this much?

Yeah 90 million is a juicy market cap and the case is it's accurate if that's what the market says it is so this is a case of where there isn't easy mannerism for valuation if the amount of money that is moving in bids it up to that level then that's because of that money that is entering into the system so it's a balancing of supply and demand however if a lot of that money is only coming in for the speculative bigger idiot narrative when things go bad a lot of it could exit and would be, and you know be birds in essence and be scared money so it valuation is a bit of a tenuous discussion in such an early industry in the same way how did we value Amazon never made any profit initially but it just kept taking that revenue and reinvesting it and owning industries so it's a bit of a tough one.

Do people use the currency for anything other than speculation?

good question because that's gonna be the sustainability I think initially the bulk of the people in store of appreciation value hopefully for them in other words it's capital appreciation Damon a lot of them are getting in it some people do buy their cannabis maybe all other aspects certain people that have you know when Silk Road used to exist Bitcoin was the the medium of exchange and it was you know supposedly untrackable etc there have been purchases made bitcoin has got a real legitimate you know you take payment, some of the others as yet best case is yet to be made and so people are transacting in bitcoin for items and it is expending in the others i think its's the case is still to be totally made....