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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just FYI and very anecdotal, I know a guy who was confronted in the parking lot after a bitcoin meetup by 2 guys demanding that he send some coins to their wallet. Be careful at those meetups.
Well, what did he do?
The hash rate may drop or at least stop growing, wasting tons of electricity.
Mining operations currently consume more electricity than 159 COUNTRIES
https://e27.co/alarming-environmental-impact-bitcoin-mining-...
PS: why is this getting downvoted? Is the bitcoin mania so high now even in HN that people care more about short term financial gains than the environment?
I bet if you ask 100 people why they bought and if they use bitcoin for anything in particular, 99 will say no. That's why none of this is a real surprise.
On the other hand, apart from appreciation of gold as jewellery (partially because it's expensive) and some industrial use (fraction of the gold industry), in large part gold too exhibits price growth sustained by nothing but a simple cultural notion that it's scarce and valuable. Countries, banks, pension funds etc aren't putting hundreds of billions of dollars worth into stacks of gold bars locked in vaults because of their industrial or jewellery usage, after all. Bitcoin, as little the growth of real-life usecases has been in 2017, may have established itself as an alternative store of value. I don't agree with that myself (just as like I think it's utterly useless to invest in gold as a store of value), but who cares about me.
So it remains to be seen what'll happen the next ten years, maybe it'll still remain as a store of value. I'm no longer buying though. The 'using bitcoin' vs 'bitcoin as store of value' became completely lopsided in favour of the latter, which was the point I cashed out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean, like the US dollar ?
Like all dollars, yen, pounds, euros, silver, metal and gold? None of these things, paper or earth metals, really have any intrinsic value. You can't eat gold. You can't put euros in your car. I guess you can burn money to keep warm, which is what happened to German Marks once people lost confidence in their currency prior to WW2. The value of money is based off belief systems. When a very large scale economic or sta…
But isn't that one of the hopes of cryptocurrency -- that it can survive a state collapse, because the relatively normal currency manipulation leading up to said collapse would be less (or not at all) viable? I feel like that was the spirit of OP's tongue in cheek remark and it's going over everyone's heads.
Also (this is pedantic) but many metals _do_ have intrinsic value (ex copper wiring or gold plated connections). It's slightly meaningful because (among other things, like its relative scarcity) has helped those metals be used as relatively stable currency in the past.
You can call it a crash but bitcoin still up 1000% this year...
As someone who owns and believes in cryptocurrency, I'm actually glad this happened. I was getting sick of all the get rich quick people who've been driving the price lately, even for the coins that shouldn't be pumping. It was almost as if the entire cryptocurrency space had turned into a huge unregulated casino. I was at a couple of Bitcoin meetups recently and was surprised to find that most attendees were proudly…
Why is anyone surprised? The only shocking thing about this bubble is that it took 3 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin itself is rare, but cryptocurrency as a whole is not because it's easy to create another blockchain.
This right there is exactly why long term it's doomed and cannot be a reliable store of value. You don't see banks and random geeks inventing new precious metals out of thin air. So you have gold, silver, platinum and palladium and that's about it as far as store of values are concerned.