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

Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 377 posts

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#111

Post by _8j50 »

ISL wrote: post #97
_8j50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like cash, i frankly don't care about value either but a form of payment that is not tied to me specifically where I can exchange the money for goods and services is crucial to me. Not much different from a cash giftcard i can use to pay for things online

Cryptocurrencies store everyone's transaction records in a public ledger. It is, in general, less anonymous than cash.

You're not wrong but I and some others use brand new wallets for meaningful transactions.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#112

Post by mrep »

the_gastropod wrote: post #79
kobasa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully your circle of acquaintances isn't even remotely close to representing the wider world out there and the plethora of legitimate use cases that it presents for all sorts of people in this world. Just last week a friend of mine from another country was suppose to send me a few hundred bucks. He could have sent it 'traditionally' but he would have been harassed about why he was sending money abroad and wasted…

> He could have sent it 'traditionally' but he would have been harassed about why he was sending money abroad and wasted considerable time and effort going to a physical bank branch. Instead in under a minute he sent me some Ethereum and we both were able to confirm the transaction near immediately Have you heard of options like TransferWise or OFX? They offer immediate transfers, lower transaction fees than ETH or B…

> BTC/ETH are 0-sum games, so on average nobody earns a dime of interest

I would argue it is actually negative sum as billions of dollars worth is newly minted every year and a lot of that inevitability has to be sold to pay the miners electricity bills. I'm honestly shocked they haven't collapsed due to the never ending supply side pressure requiring billions of dollars worth of capital inflow every year.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#113

Post by DagAgren »

askmike wrote: post #106
DagAgren wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin as designed is technically incapable of being in widespread use for payment, due to a severe lack of network capacity, and a complete lack of interest in ever changing this. Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare.

The idea here is that the blockchain model where everyone checks everything that happens doesn't scale to billions of users. Fortunately for people who disagree, there are hundreds of crypto projects that think this is possible. Including straight up copies of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

It doesn't even scale to millions of users.

And basically every project that tries to claim different is just ignoring the problem and trying to pump their own price.

Everything in cryptocurrencies is a scam.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#114

Post by shadowgovt »

marcosdumay wrote: post #77
iagovar wrote: post #2

The more I know about cryptos, the more I remain skeptical. The only people I know that uses cryptos seriously are acquaintancies from latin america, and none of them for storing value, with the exception of Venezuelans. Not even argentinians, that just buy as many dollars they can. IMO this is a thread worth reading on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dj2jro/the_large...

> none of them for storing value That one is a plus. Money is a transactional tool, speculation and storing value do not add to its main value. As an aside, everybody that I know that ever brought some crypto coin did it for speculation. The more likely explanation is that I'm looking at the wrong country, but if speculation suddenly stoped being a main use of BTC, I would start to seriously look at it.

Storing value is considered to be one of the three functions of money [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions]. And the fact that BTC's value fluctuates so wildly (in an era where fiat currencies like the dollar tend to remain a lot more stable) is one of the obstacles to mass adoption.

It turns out that making a currency behave "gold-like" carried with it the disadvantages to the gold standard that induced so many countries to move away from it.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#115

Post by buboard »

empath75 wrote: post #107
chrischattin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin would be the ~20th largest company in the S&P by market cap. Hardly a penny stock.

Market cap is an absurd metric for cryptocurrencies. If print a billion tokens and sell you one for a dollar, it’s a billion dollar market cap.

so are stocks

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#116

Post by shadowgovt »

_8j50 wrote: post #111
ISL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrencies store everyone's transaction records in a public ledger. It is, in general, less anonymous than cash.

You're not wrong but I and some others use brand new wallets for meaningful transactions.

Using one-off wallets increases the complexity of a financial forensics problem, but doesn't make it unsolvable. For one thing, you can't force everyone you do business with in the network to follow the same practice.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#117

Post by clarkmoody »

marcosdumay wrote: post #77
iagovar wrote: post #2

The more I know about cryptos, the more I remain skeptical. The only people I know that uses cryptos seriously are acquaintancies from latin america, and none of them for storing value, with the exception of Venezuelans. Not even argentinians, that just buy as many dollars they can. IMO this is a thread worth reading on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dj2jro/the_large...

> none of them for storing value That one is a plus. Money is a transactional tool, speculation and storing value do not add to its main value. As an aside, everybody that I know that ever brought some crypto coin did it for speculation. The more likely explanation is that I'm looking at the wrong country, but if speculation suddenly stoped being a main use of BTC, I would start to seriously look at it.

All money has value because people demand to hold it. In a hyperinflation scenario, people are dumping the currency for goods as fast as they can. They are using the money as a transactional medium only: get paid -> rush to buy goods to capture the value of your labor in something that won't be worthless tomorrow.

Dumping worthless paper currency is a form of speculation that the value won't unexpectedly rise before the goods purchased with it are consumed.

When people have confidence that the money they receive in exchange for their time will be able to transport that labor into the future, then they will demand to hold a balance in that money. That is why the money has value.

The "store of value" proposition of Bitcoin is that it can't be printed by a central bank, so you can be sure that your holdings relative to the size of the money supply cannot be diluted.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#118

Post by _8j50 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #116
_8j50 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong but I and some others use brand new wallets for meaningful transactions.

Using one-off wallets increases the complexity of a financial forensics problem, but doesn't make it unsolvable. For one thing, you can't force everyone you do business with in the network to follow the same practice.

As a businessperson,yes. As a consumer it works quite well. When you offer services you become tracable. But alas XMR is not so traceable,one can always launder btc through XMR (and maybe profit?) Or zcash.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#119

Post by icelancer »

DagAgren wrote: post #113
askmike wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is that the blockchain model where everyone checks everything that happens doesn't scale to billions of users. Fortunately for people who disagree, there are hundreds of crypto projects that think this is possible. Including straight up copies of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

It doesn't even scale to millions of users. And basically every project that tries to claim different is just ignoring the problem and trying to pump their own price. Everything in cryptocurrencies is a scam.

This is absurd hyperbole. There are people working on legitimate answers to your concerns, such as the Lightning Network and other initiatives.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#120

Post by andreygrehov »

It could be possible, but I doubt it. Here is the growth of Bitcoin before Tether was created [0]. Within 3 years, the price went from $0.05 to $1177 and then settled at $220. I remember there was an article claiming that even this growth was caused by a single whale [1], but again, was it really? In comparison, here is the price of Gold within the last 40 years [2]. Looking at this chart, one could say that the price was also artificially inflated during those years. And if someone chimes in claiming that of course it was, then, well, is it the nature of markets?

[0] https://imgur.com/a/D5NrGok

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/researchers-finds-that-one...

[2] https://imgur.com/a/JPOVkSk

Post reply on HN