Earlier quoted context omitted.
recently posted 1000 people who own 40% of the BTC market https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877838
The real question is how active are these people.
Do many gyms accept bitcoin as payment?
Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
101–110 of 238 posts
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#102Sean Snaith from UCF is quoted in the article calling bitcoin a tulip bubble. Back in 2007 I watched his presentation in person where he said the U.S. would experience a "soft landing" and nothing major. A few months later the stock market crashed 60%. Economists are terrible at predictions.
You cherry-picked one poor prediction from a single (shoddy) economist and somehow conclude that economists in aggregate are terrible at predictions.
That statement doesn’t even logically support a conclusion that Sean is terrible at predictions. It’s also entirely possible that Sean errs on the side of optimism given his 2007 prediction, in which case his alarmism over Bitcoin shouldn’t be immediately dismissed.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#103[deleted]
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just reviewing the avg tx fee on major coins. Micropayments aren't possible on any widely accepted coin. BTC has hit 20 USD a tx (albeit without segwit). It's looking a little rough. Might be time for a draw back. EDIT: I was pulling together the avg tx fees from https://bitinfocharts.com/ $BTC: 24.4 USD $ETH: 1.07 USD $BCH: 0.17 USD $LTC: 0.632 USD $DASH: 0.62 USD $XMR: 5.49 USD My other thoughts on the subjec…
Bitcoin doesn’t HAVE to be used for micropayments to be useful.
At this point the transaction costs are making it unusable for most regular payments as well.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong (Trump being president, Brexit). Be very careful with those conclusions. In both cases the predictions were that the elections were very close. Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all.
> Trump winning the presidency when the best models we had gave him a 30% chance is not a failing of prediction at all. How accurate the "best models" were isn't really relevant to the accuracy of the predictions of experts as a whole. The media was running that Clinton had a 98% chance of winning the morning of the race.
>How accurate the "best models" were isn't really relevant to the accuracy of the predictions of experts as a whole.
Only if you include random talking heads as experts. Then you get that 98% chance of Clinton winning result. But you can select actual experts to rely on before the outcome happens. The 538 forecast was extremely accurate the previous election and had the 30% outcome the day before. That's actually comparable to a poll of economists on bitcoin.
And to make it even more useful the polling of economists should ask them to give a probability instead of yes/no. It may be true that 96% say "yes it's in a bubble" and the average probability between them of Bitcoin going to 1M$ is actually 20% or more.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#106Everyone that I've talked to seems to be aware of the (seemingly) inevitable price drop, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them from buying in. Most people just assume they'll be able to sell what they have when the price drops before all the 'dumb' people have a chance to do the same. They just assume they'll be the lucky ones. I don't think everyone can be the lucky ones though. I think after this all calms down…
That's textbook bubble behavior. One caveat with Bitcoin is that the network is so slow (effectively just 3 transactions per second) that a crash would be spread out over time. If a panic starts you won't be able to get a slot to sell your bitcoins unless you pay an enormous transaction fee. It could be an interesting situation where the rich literally pay to get to the head of the line and avoid the crash.
You don't understand how trading bitcoin works. Trading is not done on the chain, its the centralized exchanges which keep the books. Its instantaneous, with people who are involved in arbitrage between the exchanges keeping the prices level across all.
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#107I'm committing the cardinal sin of commenting before I'm done with the article, but whenever this discussion comes up, I feel like asking: why not both? Could it be that Bitcoin is currently overvalued and in a "bubble", but it or something like it still may have huge value and utility in the long run? The idea that the Bitcoin bubble is something more like the Dot Com bubble than Tulipomania seems plausible to me.
Tulipmania lasted 6 months. Bitcoin is now 8 years old. Stop comparing Bitcoin to flowers. It's not even close to the same thing.
The South Seas bubble is a more apt comparison. Many of the ICOs that are springing up are exactly like the fraudulent companies that arose in that era (some of them even sold tokens like ICOs!)
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#108by the same people who broke the economy on 2008... lets just trust them...
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Internet stocks were in a bubble in the late 90's. It burst but the Internet turned out just fine. The question is, when the crypto bubble bursts, will Bitcoin recover, or will it be something else?
I think the contents of that bubble will fill another, more technically useful crypto. Something with 0 cost transaction fees.
Raiblocks [1] offers zero fee transactions. It will be interesting to see if node operators can be motivated by the same decentralization/benevolence that causes people to run bitcoin nodes today.
[1] https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...
Re: Is Bitcoin a Bubble? Economists Say ‘Yes’
#110It’s easy to spot a bubble. It’s much harder to predict when it’s going to burst.