Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 437 posts

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#121

Post by buchanaf »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #106
weddpros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…

It's like a pyramid scheme in that so long as people keep buying in on the hope of a profit you'll keep making more and more. As soon as people say "hang on this is a con" and convert to another currency then this factor of the supposed value of Bitcoin could deflate to zero. It's not formalised like a pyramid or MLM scheme but it has some of the same structure.

A pyramid scheme involves some form of active (fraudulent) recruitment to help increase the price of the asset. Bitcoin doesn't have this.

From what you described above, every single speculative/overinflated asset would be a pyramid scheme. That's not the case.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#123

Post by [deleted] »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #106
weddpros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…

It's like a pyramid scheme in that so long as people keep buying in on the hope of a profit you'll keep making more and more. As soon as people say "hang on this is a con" and convert to another currency then this factor of the supposed value of Bitcoin could deflate to zero. It's not formalised like a pyramid or MLM scheme but it has some of the same structure.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#126

Post by the_stc »

eksemplar wrote: post #96
ForHackernews wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure blockchain tech will be hugely successful in the banking and government sector Are you? Why? So far, no bitcoin/blockchain advocates have been able to explain to me a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database. A single large Postgres instance could handle all the global transaction volume of bitcoin, and it would be faster and orders of magnitude more ener…

Maersk uses it to fight corruption in container ownership claims. It used to be a piece of paper, that cost more than the actual container to transport because whoever held it could pick the container up at the port. These days it's run on block chain making it virtually impossible to claim a container that isn't yours. A similar use case could be used for almost any sort of ownership record in the public sector, lik…

Can not a database or simply digital signatures do the same thing? Why does Maersk need a trustless system?

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#127

Post by acjohnson55 »

joosters wrote: post #73
vazamb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(i am somewhat familiar with the tech but don't follow the business side of bitcoin) what I find weird is the forks. A major selling point of bitcoin is that there will ever be only 21 Mio coins. You know, unless there is a hard fork and now there are suddenly twice as many coins. Presumably one of the resulting coins' value will drop but you are still creating value out of thin air, something that the crypto people…

The forked currencies behave very oddly. When bitcoin forked, the bitcoin price didn't change but the new coins had a non-zero value (something like 10-20% of btc, if I remember). So some extra value was created out of thin air. It makes little sense!

Hypothetically, Bitcoin would have the sum of all these values if there were no fork. But in reality, it's a massive bubble.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#128

Post by weddpros »

130434089 wrote: post #115
weddpros wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of participants in the network. I run a full node, I don't mine, but my voice counts. Of course I don't like the weight of huge mining farms, and I hope there will be viable alternatives to proof of work, to make BTC more democratic. In the meantime, not a single country controls BTC, and even heavy weight miners can't decide unilaterally...

Only miners really matter, if you only have a full node you don't have control over the network, just the ability to verify it. You will have to follow wherever the miners lead you.

The following is just my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong:

People don't connect directly to miners. They connect to nodes (8000+) which forward to miners. Nodes can declare an order is valid or invalid and they can blacklist bad-behaving miners. They can refuse nodes/miners that signal a change they don't agree with.

So I think full nodes are VERY important in the network and their voice counts. That's why I'm running one.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#129

Post by lsmarigo »

the engagement on these posts is insane relative to everything else on here. Seems without heavy moderation Hn would be Crypto-News.

Everyone is afraid to say what they think. The core concept of BTC is fundamentally flawed and unbelievably naive. The value is rising based on hype and speculation alone, no value is being generated in-fact it's being consumed to 'mine' and transact the coins. Those claiming they're spending their BTC on regular purchases are either not being honest or beyond stupid.

Re: Bitcoin Surges Past $7,000 to Extend Record Rally

#130

Post by Casseres »

tom_mellior wrote: post #107
joefourier wrote: post #31

Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more tha…

> (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases I use Bitcoin from time to time to order food and buy other stuff online (sometimes through gift cards bought with Bitcoin). It's tough enough to find sites that accept Bitcoin, but I don't think I've ever seen one that accepted Monero or Ethereum. Maybe Litecoin a few years back. I admit that I haven't searched, but I would have expected a correlation with…

Ideally Monero would replace Bitcoin when buying things. Monero is more like cash than Bitcoin is. Unlike Bitcoin, paying with Monero doesn't immediately give away your balance and transaction history. Monero would also be better suited because it has lower fees that will get even lower as the dynamic block size increases. And because of the dynamic blocksize, you won't have to wait forever to confirm that you sent payment for a cup of coffee or whatever.

If you're interested in adopting Monero, but still need to be able to pay in Bitcoin occasionally, you can use a service like www.XMR.to

Post reply on HN