Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#31

Post by jron » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #26

jron wrote: post #22

It is somewhat disturbing to watch the confusion around bitcoin's price swings when the formula is baked into the code. We're basically talking about two constants here; human nature and the halving of the reward subsidy every four years. Once again, the market has failed to price it in. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454827

But it all depends on the demand. Which is not baked in. So your insight is not very insightful.

If you want a third data point, add the trend. Obviously demand is greater than supply and it has been for over 10 years now.

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#32

Post by avalys » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #19

paulpauper wrote: post #13

It will probably fall. Unlick stocks, Bitcoin is purely a function of supply an demand, with no intrinsic value. It is not like Amazon stock gains, which hold. Commodities always have a tendency of giving up gains and lagging stocks, because no shareholder equity can be generated and the supply is always increasing.

Someone has been licking stocks again. If I had a staoshi for each person that said it would go down! It will probably go down. It will probably go back up. It will always go back up, as long as there is a general belief in the population that the tech is worth the cost of running it. Bitcoin is valuable because it represents an immutable data store which is difficult to change - much like "stocks". The value an immu…

What’s a business model backed by ML?

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#33

Post by aent » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

monoideism wrote: post #28

aent wrote: post #24

15000 usdT not usd, as most exchanges trade in tether, not actual dollars. Such price increase is probably related to Tether printing almost 7 billion dollars of (almost definitely) unbacked "USDT" in less than 3 months https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

No, it's over $15,000 in USD (not USDT) on highly liquid exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken.

Which all compose only a small percentage of the overall volume. You can't deny there's almost 17 billion "totally fully backed 1:1 by US dollars" tether floating around and almost all crypto trading happens against USDT, not USD

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#34

Post by aent » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #29

aent wrote: post #24

15000 usdT not usd, as most exchanges trade in tether, not actual dollars. Such price increase is probably related to Tether printing almost 7 billion dollars of (almost definitely) unbacked "USDT" in less than 3 months https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

That doesn't matter as long as USDT is pegged to the dollar. Which it is. Currently trading at exactly $1.000 (all digits significant).

>Which it is.

Until it isn't. There is zero proof those guys are actually holding their claimed $16,866,411,506 USD in cash somewhere, considering they were kicked out of all the banks years ago

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#35

Post by monoideism » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

aent wrote: post #33

monoideism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's over $15,000 in USD (not USDT) on highly liquid exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken.

Which all compose only a small percentage of the overall volume. You can't deny there's almost 17 billion "totally fully backed 1:1 by US dollars" tether floating around and almost all crypto trading happens against USDT, not USD

I haven't really been following Bitcoin much recently, but I don't disagree that Tether can have a huge effect.

But that's not what you said. You said $15,000 usdT, which is incorrect.

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#36

Post by chubot » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

The funny thing to me is that BTC crashed to $5K from $10K when the pandemic hit. And then it recovered like the stock market.

So it's basically an asset class correlated with stocks?

Gold had a bit of dip too even, but not as severe ...

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#37

Post by aent » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

monoideism wrote: post #35

aent wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which all compose only a small percentage of the overall volume. You can't deny there's almost 17 billion "totally fully backed 1:1 by US dollars" tether floating around and almost all crypto trading happens against USDT, not USD

I haven't really been following Bitcoin much recently, but I don't disagree that Tether can have a huge effect. But that's not what you said. You said $15,000 usdT, which is incorrect.

It's 90%+ correct. Almost all trading volume is in Tether, which is erroneously assumed to be 1:1 with usd. Once the "bank run" on tether happens it'll be revealed that most of their billions are not backed by anything and the actual btc:usd price will become clear

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#38

Post by pavlov » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

Any article about Bitcoin price should mention Tether and how $7B worth of these supposedly USD-backed tokens have been printed recently. There's no evidence that Tether is backed by anything, yet these newly minted cryptodollars are used to buy Bitcoin and thus pump up the price.

It's not that different from Fed stimulus creating money that ends up being used to buy stocks and inflating prices across the market. Fed does it in the open, Tether is doing it surreptitiously. Caveat emptor.

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#39

Post by aent » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #38

Any article about Bitcoin price should mention Tether and how $7B worth of these supposedly USD-backed tokens have been printed recently. There's no evidence that Tether is backed by anything, yet these newly minted cryptodollars are used to buy Bitcoin and thus pump up the price. It's not that different from Fed stimulus creating money that ends up being used to buy stocks and inflating prices across the market. Fed…

It's mind boggling, few guys in some offshore company claim to be holding almost 17 billion dollars in cash somewhere when it was revealed they were kicked out of all the banks they attempted to use, and they keep printing money in the billions with no consequences

Re: Bitcoin has surpassed $15k for the first time since January 2018

#40

Post by lawn » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #30

jamoes wrote: post #27

And likewise, BTC fees are also at a local maximum[1]. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to actually scale the BTC blockchain since the last bull run. Onchain transactional capacity is the same as it was 2 years ago (limited to ~400k tx/day globally). Major n^2 transaction validation bottlenecks still remain within the Bitcoin Core software. With no plans to address these bottlenecks and increase onchain capacity,…

Plenty of criticisms to be had about bitcoin's scalability but what you said isn't true. Quite a bit has changed with the prevalance of Segwit transactions, some-to-many Lightning transactions, a lot of Liquid transactions, and transaction bundling. Specifically in reaction to how the network convulsed last bull market and correction. Yeah it still sucks and is hardly competitive especially on the layer-2 front, but…

Yes things have been done, but nothing that's effective.

Any layer-2 solution is just a dead end as you still have to pay the high fees to enter and exit. And it's funny, and sad, that you bring up Liquid as a potential solution because it's a centralized solution and we might as well be content with PayPal if we're going that route.