I like Rickards in general, he's clearly a smart guy and he knows his financial stuff and history. I agree with some of the things he said, which you have mentioned:
- Bitcoin has never weathered a financial crisis or recession - so we don't know how it will perform.
- Intrinsic value is meaningless - what matters is subjective value, which is true of Bitcoin and Gold
- All markets are open to manipulation, and an unregulated market like Bitcoin, more so
I want to make some comments about the last point though. Firstly, the level of regulation on exchanges varies. Gdax exchange (run by coinbase.com) and Gemini (run by the Winklevoss twins of facebook fame) are both fully above board US based exchanges complying with regulation and with FDIC deposit insurance for dollar deposits, and some crypto insurance too. Concerns that they will run off with your money, or are faking trades etc are pretty far fetched. Of course there are plenty of dodgy exchanges all over the world that you can choose instead, but that's on you if decide to take that risk.
Regardless of trusting the exchanges themselves, he mentions market manipulation and painting the tape. I don't expect the regulated exchanges are doing this as it would be stupid and unnecessary but of course the market has its whales, and they may try to dump the market to get the price down or buy it up to pump it. Ultimately if they trying to push the market against where it's naturally moving they better have deep pockets, as there's only so long you can buy coins for more than they are worth, or sell them for less than they are worth before you lose money. For sure it's a lot of the cause of the short term volatility we see though, so be it.
I just paid my capital gains for the year to-date to November
so count me in as an exception then I guess.
My main gripe though is the mining comments, I fear he doesn't fully understand it. Bitcoin doesn't
require the current amount of power that is being used for mining, that's just the amount that miners are
choosing to use. If the figures are correct (they may not be if they are using old power efficiency numbers that are not applicable to the latest hardware, but I haven't looked into it further) then I expect is is unsustainable, which means the least efficient miners will go broke and stop mining. It is also a commonly made claim that bitcoin requires increasing amounts of power, it doesn't, mining power can go down as well as up, the mining difficulty adjusts in both directions so the production rate of coins, and the confirmation of transactions is unaffected by it.
Having said that, obviously the environmental aspect of any significant bitcoin mining is something we would rather avoid. I hope in future we'll figure out an algorithm that avoids the intense work, maybe proof of stake instead will work. In any case it's more likely bitcoin mining figures out a way to run in an environmentally friendly way than gold mining does.
