211–220 of 426 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same is true about Facebook. Someone could clone the features and create facebook2.com, and everyone would flock to it. That's why Facebook stock is a Ponzi scheme. Anyone who thinks Facebook has a value above $0 is insane.
Worst than black Monday in 1987 when the Dow dropped 22% in a single day
Single stocks tank every day.
I never invested in Bitcoins. I've been asked by many people the past few weeks whether or not they should invest - truthfully, I told people not to and wait to the current "wave" of popularity was over. I genuinely don't know that much about speculation in currency, but is this "burst bubble" really it this time? Is this supposed to be the actual end of actual value for Bitcoins now?
Do keep in mind that people tend to massively overreact to any bitcoin-related movement. It's at 13k now, back where it was like 3 weeks ago.
I mean it's a problem for the gamblers that came in late, but the people who were there at the beginning probably could care less.
Downvote me all you want, but HN really needs to cure this bitcoin-jealousy. Yes, people who invested early became millionares and billionares with a single mouse click. I know it feels unfair when you spend countless hours creating and innovating and not being rewarded. But some of you here needs to stop hating and being bitter. I have been watching HN and bitcoin related threads for months now. Same pattern.
Who is buying coin? Like if you seriously found 3 BTC you had on an old hard drive from years ago, remembered that password, who would pay you the $30k? You'd have to try different exchanges, try small amounts first, pay the insane transaction fees and wait for confirmation. Anyone who truly had a huge stash of like 400k USD in BTC would need to grab a lawyer, an escrow company and enter into a pretty strict legal co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean, like the US dollar ?
Yes, but the dollar also has a very long history of being extremely stable. Said another way, the dollar has never had a 30% shock in a year (BTC did today...)
The dollar certainly has had 30% "shocks" in a year compared to gold, which is the usual standard. Most famously, obviously, 1971, but there have been more normal years with such changes as well.
You could also say that the US dollar is really backed by the US economy. Well, the US economy is S&P500 + a few percentage points. Well that has dropped, and gained more than 30% in a year as well (depending on the foreign currency you use to measure this, or if you're talking in gold price, we've seen 60% drops happen. Of course the S&P 500 is worth more than all the gold in the world, so ... this is a bit of an artificial thing to do. Truth is that if someone started buying the S&P 500 using large quantities of Gold, that wouldn't work, so perhaps that is actually right).
Shocks is between quotes because they weren't really shocks. Everybody in finance was perfectly aware of the "real" price for the US dollar, in 1971, but political hubris and re-election factors did not allow the government and congress to admit to this, until every other avenue was exhausted, including lying, cheating (not charging the same price to everybody despite their own laws demanding they do so), fraud, and so on.
Or to put it another way, one might even make the comment that the dollar lost such amounts against gold for the worst possible reason : a refusal by the US government to settle debt for the agreed price (specifically, as has come out, the refusal of the US government and the congress to honor the agreed-upon exchange rate the French government demanded they pay). Surprisingly when I tell my bank that my loan is now only against half my house, such flexibility is not extended to me, and congress in fact has laws preventing this ... weird, since they clearly see it perfectly moral & valid to do this themselves, and even to do it to pay off (their favored) banks.
30% changes in the value of the dollar have happened before, and in all likelihood, will happen again. Granted, it's been a while.
Serious question: who didn't expect this? Did anybody think that the 19K high of last week was going to be the new normal?
So what is the fair value of Bitcoin? Well, it's a new economic idea [1], so there's not a lot of prior art to gauge here. There's no P/E ratio, no rent/price ratios, nothing of that sort to give you at least a baseline feel for "does this seem frothy?"
Indeed, its value is ultimately based on projection: whatever you think Bitcoin could do, what values it might have, that's the valuation you're going to give to it. And people have given really daft ideas of its value: I've seen someone seriously argue that Bitcoin is useful for people who lack phones or internet. Other people argue that $19k is cheap, if Bitcoin somehow replaced all fiat currency. So there's no shortage of people willing to bid prices higher, and that's not counting speculators hoping to make money on a "free" get-rich-quick scheme.
[1] I say this as someone skeptical of high valuations of Bitcoin. Just because something is new and transformative doesn't mean it's valuable--just ask CDOs.