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Bitcoin hits $10,000

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Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#281

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

sowbug wrote: post #158
acchow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ordinary people globally understand why a decentralized asset is the ultimate safe haven." Ordinary people have never heard of bitcoin. I have relatives working in finance who don't understand bitcoin.

Ordinary people (48.3% of them) aren't on the internet, either. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Wait till Africa stops using their local currency mobile payments and switches to crypto. Internet use won’t matter as bitcoin and I’m sure many crypto to follow won’t hinge on an internet connection.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#282

Post by aaron-santos »

mtgx wrote: post #37
wintom wrote: post #17

“Rosenstreich at online trading firm Swissquote said bitcoin’s surge harks to the surprises of the U.K. referendum on European Union membership and President Trump’s election. “We have underestimated the populist movements,” he said. “There is growing unease on how central banks and governments are managing fiat currencies. Ordinary people globally understand why a decentralized asset is the ultimate safe haven.”” Th…

I've seen comments saying "unlike bitcoin, gold has intrinsic value!" on HN for years. It never made sense to me. Like Bitcoin, gold is only valuable because we think it is and we want it to be (and because it's relatively scarce, too, just like Bitcoin is). Same with diamonds. Their functional value is relatively small in comparison to their "beauty" and scarcity values.

I too have been trying to interpret this statement. It reads as a hedge against complete debasement in that it is perceived as a non-zero lower bound on value.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#283

Post by raldi »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92
narrator wrote: post #4

7 years ago: The first bitcoin article on HN with comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 One of the posters says the feds will shut it down. I also thought this too. This remains one of the most enduring mysteries of Bitcoin to me. Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?

You mean the USA government? Because they have no legal basis to take action. Rule of law is weird like that.

Legislatures pass all kinds of new laws to restrain new technologies. (Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.)

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#284

Post by johnhenry »

sp527 wrote: post #237
paulie_a wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently making a personal tshirt based on the this thread.

This whole place has lost its collective mind on the subject of crypto.

"This whole place has lost its collective mind on the subject of crypto!" (tm)

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#285

Post by uncoder0 »

Joeboy wrote: post #229
ad_hominem wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is. Unlike fiat cash or gold, you can't spend it without an internet connection (in order to sync up the public ledger and submit the transaction). You're subject to miners to approve your transactions, which in theory should be democratized, but isn't really since it's based on computing power, which in turn can be bought or centralized in mining pools. You're…

> I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is. I'm trying to cash out some of mine and I've been downloading the blockchain for four days now. I had to buy a new hard drive before I could even start. I've read that it takes over an hour to do a transaction now, although I'm not yet in a position to verify that. If you look on the btc related subreddits nobody recommends using a proper client as Satoshi…

Took me a few hours. Use `-dbcache=n` where n = bytes of memory... will make sync super fast if you have +8GB of RAM. I think default is pretty low.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#286

Post by keymone »

bb88 wrote: post #277
ErikAugust wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say 21M "cryptocoins" but you couldn't, however, create 21M BTC arbitrarily. As long as that number stays the same (it isn't completely immutable) then BTC has real scarcity - making it a store of value, like gold. Throw in some additional properties that BTC has that gold does not, and an argument can be made that BTC is at least a decent value store. Even at $100,000/BTC, Bitcoin would still have a ~1/5th of th…

What exactly is a BTC? BTC is man made, and depends upon computers and software. And the people who control the software can change their minds, if they so choose. So what a BTC is now, may not be what it is later, including its scarcity. See also the ETH and BTC forks. Gold on the other hand exists naturally in nature, and doesn't change based upon someone else's whim. So no, BTC is not like gold.

BTC is what the distributed consensus says BTC is. You can’t fake that without pouring billions into building up mining infrastructure to organize a 51% attack and even then the distributed consensus will simply fork around your amazing achievement of successfully doing a single double spend?

So yeah, BTC is definitely not like gold, it’s way better.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#287

Post by keymone »

empath75 wrote: post #264
ErikAugust wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say 21M "cryptocoins" but you couldn't, however, create 21M BTC arbitrarily. As long as that number stays the same (it isn't completely immutable) then BTC has real scarcity - making it a store of value, like gold. Throw in some additional properties that BTC has that gold does not, and an argument can be made that BTC is at least a decent value store. Even at $100,000/BTC, Bitcoin would still have a ~1/5th of th…

But there have been multiple bitcoin forks— bitcoin cash essentially doubled the amount of bitcoins in circulation.

Good luck buying some BCH and spending them as BTC.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#288

Post by yincrash »

zzxxddere333 wrote: post #146
sytelus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely nothing that would prevent a government outlawing and criminalizing bitcoin at any point in time. With one stroke of a pen government can outlaw owning bitcoins or performing any transactions in bitcoins. I'd say this is bound to happen eventually with certainty because no government would be willing to lose control on currency (especially ability to pull it out of thin air) and thereby the power…

Japan has already embraced cryptos as a legal currency. They won't be the last. As this happens, there will be geopolitical factors at play and it won't be that easy to simply "outlaw cryptocurrencies".

What does this mean? I'm in Japan right now and if anything, Japan is a cash society still and most small stores don't even take credit cards.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#289

Post by keymone »

will_brown wrote: post #216
wintom wrote: post #17

“Rosenstreich at online trading firm Swissquote said bitcoin’s surge harks to the surprises of the U.K. referendum on European Union membership and President Trump’s election. “We have underestimated the populist movements,” he said. “There is growing unease on how central banks and governments are managing fiat currencies. Ordinary people globally understand why a decentralized asset is the ultimate safe haven.”” Th…

>No one likes to talk about that though, they like to demonize bitcoin which actually does something gold could never do. Just playing devils advocate, but you can't replicate/duplicate gold. On the other hand I could create 21M cryptocoins on a blockchain (calling them Bitcoin2 or even just Bitcoin if it pleases). I can make them function identically, similarly or more efficiently than Bitcoin. I can create a new bl…

For all intents and purposes finding a large deposit of gold is the same as duplicating bitcoin. Except the former can happen easily and the latter requires some immense investments to achieve.

Re: Bitcoin hits $10,000

#290

Post by SilasX »

will_brown wrote: post #250
drcross wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand I could create 21M cryptocoins on a blockchain (calling them Bitcoin2 or even just Bitcoin if it pleases). I can make them function identically, similarly or more efficiently than Bitcoin. I can create a new blockchain (network) or put these coins on an existing blockchain (say the Ethereum blockchain). How much would you pay for all 21M Bitcoin? How much would you pay me to create you 21M Bitcoin2…

>Econ 101: The price of a currency is based on people's trust in that currency. That is the beauty of blockchain right? Its trustless! I'll create 21M of Bitcoin2 on the Ethereum blockchain and send you the smart contract address you can verify on etherscan and boom there is no trust needed. Edit: As to Irony, OP could have used anything to justify the value of Bitcoin, it is ironic he would select Gold and say it ha…

The OP meant "trust that it will continue to hold value", not (merely) "trust that transactions happen as intended". The blockchain crypto-magic only ensures the latter.
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