Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

crypto.robinhood.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 317 posts

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#181

Post by Retric »

m-i-l wrote: post #175
Retric wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What separates investing from gambling is the expected return for everyone is greater than zero. AKA buy stock at 100$ and sell it at 100$ does not mean you broke even. You could have gotten 10$ in dividends. Now that positive may be small and some people may lose money, but that's allowed as long as the expected returns end up positive. Bitcoin's can't have a net positive return because they only way to add money in…

Some cryptocurrencies generate the equivalent of "dividends", especially those based on Proof of Stake systems. For example, holding Neo generates Gas equivalent to a 3-6% annual return[0], and Stellar (given free to HN readers a few years back[1]) has "inflation" equivalent to around 1% annual return[2], to name two that Robinhood will be listing. [0] https://www.neotogas.com/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…

As I said in another comment. If you have 1 coin and in 1 year you have 2 coins, you still need to sell those coins to end up with money.

The only way money enters the system is for someone to buy a coin, so having more tokens in no way makes something an investment.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#182

Post by Retric »

darawk wrote: post #174
Retric wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is a store of value. Buy 1 lb of gold and in 100 years you have 1 lb of gold minus storage fees. However, over a long enough timeframe storage fees eat up the entire value of gold stored thus it's not a long term investment.

So is bitcoin. Except that it doesn't have storage costs. Buy 1 bitcoin today, and you will retain it in perpetuity, in its exact same quantity.

Which would change nothing as gold is not an investment.

Also, if you 1 one bitcoin you can only sell less than 1 bitcoin from transaction fees. Remember, someone needs to spend real money maintain servers and that money is constantly being removed from the coin ecosystem.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#183

Post by Nursie »

darawk wrote: post #150
brokensegue wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stocks give you ownership in productive companies. those companies on average go up in value and produce profits which they throw off as dividends (or re-invest to increase their market-cap). so one difference then is that stocks have a justification for their returns given the variance you experience.

So, by your logic, gold is not an investment?

I would tend to subscribe to a similar view and think that no, gold is not really an investment. A hedge, a gamble perhaps. An investment is something that (hopefully) enables useful work and productive endeavour.

Putting money into a company in return for a share of ownership is an investment. A lot of stock market shenanigans are little more than gambling. Gold and crypto-currencies for the most part are speculation.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#184

Post by United857 »

dawhizkid wrote: post #123

Something about Robinhood just makes me uneasy - clearly their main target market is the small retail investor who is sensitive to a $7/trade fee, but the low friction, mobile-first no fee stock trading experience they've created mostly serves to encourage bad investor behavior i.e. emotional, irrational day trading among people who can least afford it. Now they are "democratizing" margin trading (Robinhood Gold), op…

Learning to invest well is like learning to drive. You can read up on it or try it out in a simulated environment but there's ultimately no substitute for doing it for real.

Developing a investor mindset free of emotional responses is fundamental and hard to do if there's not real money at stake. If Robinhood gives young people easy access to learn by doing then all the better to then.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#185

Post by darawk »

Retric wrote: post #182
darawk wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is bitcoin. Except that it doesn't have storage costs. Buy 1 bitcoin today, and you will retain it in perpetuity, in its exact same quantity.

Which would change nothing as gold is not an investment. Also, if you 1 one bitcoin you can only sell less than 1 bitcoin from transaction fees. Remember, someone needs to spend real money maintain servers and that money is constantly being removed from the coin ecosystem.

Untrue. You can sell someone the private key to your wallet. That's free. If you're not going to classify commodities or real estate as investments, then sure, I guess bitcoin isn't an investment. But it's as much an investment as any commodity or real estate is.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#186

Post by darawk »

Nursie wrote: post #183
darawk wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, by your logic, gold is not an investment?

I would tend to subscribe to a similar view and think that no, gold is not really an investment. A hedge, a gamble perhaps. An investment is something that (hopefully) enables useful work and productive endeavour. Putting money into a company in return for a share of ownership is an investment. A lot of stock market shenanigans are little more than gambling. Gold and crypto-currencies for the most part are speculatio…

That's fair. By your logic then, though, ICO tokens would be an investment?

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#187

Post by lightbyte »

willart4food wrote: post #161
dawhizkid wrote: post #123

Something about Robinhood just makes me uneasy - clearly their main target market is the small retail investor who is sensitive to a $7/trade fee, but the low friction, mobile-first no fee stock trading experience they've created mostly serves to encourage bad investor behavior i.e. emotional, irrational day trading among people who can least afford it. Now they are "democratizing" margin trading (Robinhood Gold), op…

Bad behavior? RH's market is the Millennials who see it as a fancy gambling, check out Reddit's r/RobinHood or - even better - r/wallstreetbets. I can see RH becoming a dominant player in the Tech Fin Millennials space.

>or - even better - r/wallstreetbets.

This is not a serious sub, it is satire/trolling/shitposting.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#188

Post by aphextron »

blueline wrote: post #153
aphextron wrote: post #91

This is it. Margin trading on Bitcoin for unsophisticated retail investors. Here we go...

..doesn't bitfenix already facilitate margin trading for cryptocurrencies, which (even worse) uses Tether?

My point is that things like Bitfinex are far, far from being mainstream consumer iPhone apps. Combined with the massive credit bubble we are in (any warm body with a 600+ credit score can easily get tens of thousands of dollars in credit cards within an hour right now), this is precisely how speculative bubbles run out of control and crash the economy.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#189

Post by Retric »

darawk wrote: post #180
Retric wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about this really carefully. Smart contracts can pay out coins but not money. If every year your coin splits so now you have 2 coins then 4 etc no money was added. I can have 10^1000 in a database, but that's not new value.

You don't actually know much about cryptos, do you? Here, read this: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ Staking doesn't produce new coins. It pays dividends from transaction fees. I.e. actual economic activity.

I said pay out coins not create new coins.

Lets say I Buy '1,000' tokens including a 10 token payment for a transaction fee for 1$. Now A had 1,000 tokens and now has 1$, I have 990 tokens and another group get's 10 tokens. But, notice that other person(s) got tokens not money.

If I got to keep 1,000 tokens or someone else get's those 10 tokens nothing changes because nobody who has tokens got any money. The only way people with tokens get money is if they sell some number of tokens minus a fee to someone else. It does not matter of all 10 tokens go to a miner, or miners get 5 tokens an 5 go to 'investors' or what not.

It's still a (edit: negative sum game) and contracts don't change anything about this.

Re: Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#190

Post by Nursie »

darawk wrote: post #186
Nursie wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would tend to subscribe to a similar view and think that no, gold is not really an investment. A hedge, a gamble perhaps. An investment is something that (hopefully) enables useful work and productive endeavour. Putting money into a company in return for a share of ownership is an investment. A lot of stock market shenanigans are little more than gambling. Gold and crypto-currencies for the most part are speculatio…

That's fair. By your logic then, though, ICO tokens would be an investment?

The honest ones, potentially yes.

Although it's not always clear with ICOs if any form of ownership is conferred or what the relationship might be between future profits and token gains.

But yes, in principle.

--edit-- to be clear, I'm not trying to say one class of thing is better than the others, just that to me the words have different meanings.

Post reply on HN