No one knows the future - where've I heard that before?
However, the future - eventually - does involve the collapse of fiat money. What will take it's place? bitcoin? Maybe, but I doubt it. Fiat ones and zeros...
The history of retained stored wealth for 3000 years has been with gold, silver, copper.
Redo 10-12 year plot at different scales and you'll see periods of increase and consolidation. The 2004 number doesn't look like much, when the scale is 0-55, but replot 2000-2005 on a scale of 0-9 and it will pop at you. Same with 2006. And 2008-9. We're arguably in yet another period of this which seems to happen every 2-3 years. Now TPTB are working it - yes indeed. But it is also a natural part of a long-term bull market. And the bull market isn't over until you see exponential rise (we've seen steep rises, but nothing exponential), and wide-spread activity with the "common" investor getting into it (too late).
The next phase of the run-up will happen out of control of TPTB and, while I don't know precisely what the stimulus will be (failure of banks, of countries, war, etc) we will see it run from 30 to 100+ within a 6-12 month period. You want to be in it now - not after the next phase starts. Could it drop back to 20 before the run-up starts? Sure. When it's 120, will it matter much whether you started at 20 or 30? No, not much at all. Is 10% extra worth missing the entire run? No.
In the game of Woke, the goal posts can be moved at any moment, the penalties will apply retroactively and claims of fairness will always lose out to the perpetual right to claim offense.... Bret Stephens
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it. George Orwell.
We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. Ayn Rand.