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Yup. Bitcoin transactions have stagnated for the last year or so. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...
Might be due to the fact that the amount of transactions is capped.
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Gold only requires worldwide network of traders and physically secure holding places and general sense of security so it can change hands.
All that's required to to exchange gold is one person that has gold and another person who wants gold and has something the first wants to trade for it.
Or: for the majority of people, holding hold, recognizing gold, and exchanging gold is not possible. You need experts for that, and they all take commissions. And sometimes scam you.
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also the fact that 99% of bitcoin's value is tied up in financial speculation rather than real world use cases, and the remaining 1% is drug dealing.
Gold has close to no use cases (80%+ is store of wealth) and seems to be doing fine at an $8tn global market cap. Of the potential 21m Bitcoin in existence, 4m are assumed to have been permanently lose. 16m have been mined. That leaves 1m coins left to be acquired in the future.
You can't suggest with a straight face that all the speculation in bitcoin is because of its potential and not because people see the price going up and decide they're going to buy with intent to sell too.
This is probably one of the only the downside of crowd moderation. This would be an interesting phenomenon to investigate if someone have access to HN logs.
Bitcoin could hit $10.000 any moment now. Who is buying and why?
If you go to bitcoinity and check the price of bitcoin, the first exchange they list is bitfinex. The price they list is in USD. That’s actually wrong. There are no dollars on bitfinex. They use a currency called tethers which they claim is backed 1-1 by dollars but almost certainly isn’t. They’ve created close to a billion dollars worth of that token during this run up. Rumor has it that they’re using those tethers…
Didn't they just recently say they're not backed 1-1 by USD?
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>> It is only worth something because other people say it is worth something That is actually the very definition of most currencies currently in use [1]. Money is actually just a promise that someone will provide you goods or services in exchange for it sometime in the future, it has no intrinsic worth. Also, paper money isn't tied to anything [2] either, let alone the "digital" money we have in the banks. [1] https…
Money is traditionally backed by something though right? Isn't a currency a bunch of tokens with an army? Where's the Bitcoin army when I need them to enforce my contacts?
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Bitcoin on the main chain has scarcity. Anyone can fork the codebase, or even the blockchain, or one of the many other blockchains out there. There is absolutely nothing provable about BTC as a store of wealth. The amount of leaves produced by the cherry tree in my back garden during its expected lifetime is limited too, that doesn't make them a provable store of wealth.
>Anyone can fork the codebase, or even the blockchain, or one of the many other blockchains out there. There is absolutely nothing provable about BTC as a store of wealth. Let's rewrite the above as follows: >Anyone can copy Facebook's model, or even its code, or one of the many other social networks out there. There is absolutely nothing provable about facebook as a good social network.
Facebook is not just a code or just a network. ICQ had a network. MSN Messenger had a network. Heck Google actually has a network.
But without providing value, a network is not worth a thing.
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You remember that there were other social networks before facebook dominated everything, right? Network effect now is no guarantor of the future.
I don't think I claimed that anything is a "guarantor of the future". I am simply pointing out that networks are valued with reference to their size, not on whether their code base is unique. Bitcoin and Facebook are two examples of this principle.
I'm not sure "price discovery" is really what we're doing at the moment.
Was the collapse of the German Deutsche Mark, the Zimbabwean Dollar, the Venezuelan Bollivar a bubble too? Good money drives bad money out, so I’d argue that no, Bitcoin’s price is not a bubble. Clearly there’s no price that bitcoin holders will sell at so they’re clearly exiting the USD ecosystem. I think the logical fallacy that’s occuring right now with critics of bitcoin’s price rise is that all bubbles has drama…
> Was the collapse of the German Deutsche Mark... I think you may have this backwards. Your example currencies all tanked against USD. BTC is appreciating, heavily, against USD. > so they’re clearly exiting the USD ecosystem Sorry, are you suggesting that there's currently a run on USD? Because I'm pretty sure there isn't. What you have here is pretty standard speculation in the price of BTC. I don't think you can re…
You don't understand how Bitcoin and Proof of Work works. The block hash in the following block is a measure of how scarce or rare it was to produce the bitcoins that were minted in this block: https://insight.bitpay.com/block/0000000000000000002c8fe4629... If you don't understand how scarcity works in a blockchain, the rest of your points are pretty suspect.
>Your example currencies all tanked against USD. BTC is appreciating, heavily, against USD.
Yes currencies have tanked against each all throughout history, whichever is the weakest tanks the first. Quantitative easing and other forms of inflation executed by the Federal Reserve.
>are you suggesting that there's currently a run on USD? Because I'm pretty sure there isn't.
Yes literally this is what the BTCUSD price plot is showing you. Wake up. the ZWDUSD looks the same. People dump bad money. They are dumping USD for something that doesn't inflate away their value.