Did you guys see this thread on Twitter a couple of days ago?
https://twitter.com/TedOnPrivacy/status/940588631709896704
Have you had similar problems selling bitcoin?
EDIT: saw -> see
Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
71–80 of 238 posts
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#72In the end Bitcoin is so similar to Gold. It is a means of storing wealth and is valued on a shared belief of finite quantities and that it is an effective/secure means of storing wealth. It is hard for me to call a shared belief a bubble, because there is a clear understanding I think now that there is no underlying fundamental asset value.
Bitcoin is like gold, except we have alchemy, and an infinite series of new elements between 78 and 80.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#73If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong (Trump being president, Brexit). They seem to be good at predicting things with known variables, but not with unknown unknowns. I'm making a contrarian bet that experts are wrong this time as well (at least in the near term). People are jumping the gun, trying to look smart and predict the right outcome. The same people that ne…
>If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong (Trump being president, Brexit). Be very careful with those conclusions. In both cases the predictions were that the elections were very close. Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all.
> Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all.
How accurate the "best models" were isn't really relevant to the accuracy of the predictions of experts as a whole. The media was running that Clinton had a 98% chance of winning the morning of the race.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#74In a related noted, 4% of economists are bitcoin holders.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#75The one thing they aren't accounting for is that there really hasn't been anything like bitcoin. In most bubbles, eventually the whales start selling which triggers an avalanche, however bitcoin is distributed enough that this might not happen. Too many different people are interested in it doing well now. E.g. rich people in 3rd world countries, boy are they pumped for bitcoin. I've mentioned it before, and I was ki…
Every crash is preceded by people saying "It's different this time". Edit: Fixed autocorrect goofery
But then that one time is actually different.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#76I really don't think cryptocurrency in general is a going anywhere; I don't think this is even the tip of the iceberg in terms of where this is going to lead. There are reason however, why bitcoin specifically might bubble and collapse. The main issue being the fact that at the moment its not reasonable to use bitcoin as if it were money, with the prime cause (in my eyes) being the cost of transactions. I do think bi…
We need to give up on the idea of bitcoin being used as money. It wasn't designed in a way that would encourage holder to spend it like money until a stable valuation is found when everyone in the world is holding it. As Yellen said, it's a highly speculative asset. Small chance of massive yield, large chance of small failure.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#77It's completely possible for Bitcoin to be in a speculative bubble but also not overvalued.
I'm somewhat bullish on Bitcoin, but there's no doubt that there's a speculative bubble -- people with no knowledge of Bitcoin other than its price history are getting more and more eager to invest to ride the wave. This is the definition of a speculative bubble.
The main question is what side of the bubble we're on -- where are we relative to the point where Bitcoin has passed its fundamentals.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#78Doesn't this headline actually violate Betteridge's law?
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#79Gotta love how the negative crypto articles rise to the top on HN immediately. What's not understood is that crypto is a way for the un-banked (1/3 of the people on earth who barely have clean water, toilets or telephones, yes telephones and that make $1/day) now have access and participation in a global trading platform. Disruption for the first time is happening to both VCs and traditional investment bankers and th…
Except that bitcoin transaction cost is what, $10 or $15 now? There's no way "unbanked" people will benefit from that, at all.
Yes. For right now, the demand for transactions is greatly outstripping the fixed supply of transactions that the network can provide. Nobody has convincingly solved the problem (IOTA, I'm looking at you...). Altcoins don't have this problem yet either because they are not as widely used and those that can do more transactions per second have blockchains that would be growing very quickly in size if the blocks were close to full.
None of the current globally distributed trustless ledgers cannot support a huge number of transactions per second. We will need new technologies, possibly on top of bitcoin, or through new technology.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#80Bitcoin is certainly in a speculative bubble. I think Ray Dalio (the hedgefund manager who runs Bridgewater) explained this very well in this clip:
https://www.facebook.com/raydalio/videos/401164293638585/
The gist of it is, is that if you look at the nature of the investor today, it is clear that this has become a giant speculative bubble. Investors do not understand what they are investing in. They are not sophisticated. They are not analyzing their investments. They are investing on the 'greater fool' theory.
All of the above does not preclude the possibility that Bitcoin survives, is useful, and perhaps is even still long-term undervalued despite the current bubble-aspects. But the nature of the investor today means that the dynamics of the price today are currently being driven by bubble-like factors, and are almost certain to have a large (50-90+%) drop at some point.
If you read crypto twitter, you will see that even the devs like Vitalik [0] and Vlad [1] are extremely wary of how much the price has risen given the level of development of the technology thus far.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/94085013791...
[1] https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/941220330294644736