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Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

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Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#231

Post by alwillis »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #193
alwillis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not exactly the same, but Bitcoin is essentially fiat money as its only value is what people say it is (somewhat similar to the stock market). So I think it’s an apt comparison. Absolutely not. There's nothing "fiat" about Bitcoin. Fiat means by decree—there's no Bitcoin nation or organization that decreed that Bitcoin is valuable. There's no authority that says what a Bitcoin is worth; the market decides. Bitco…

Nowhere did I say Bitcoin was fiat. I said it’s like fiat in that there’s no store of physical value behind it like the gold standard had. Bitcoin has a value of $x because the market says it has a value of $x. And the USD has a value of $y because the government says it has a value of $y. But on the gold standard, a $20 bill corresponded to a literal $20 of gold - a backing currency. Despite what Bitcoin proponents…

The fact that Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value and that it’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally is valuable.

It can't be inflated and it can't be counterfeited. It's not subject to political pressure or the whims of a government.

To the extent that anything has intrinsic value, since value is subjective at the end of the day, Bitcoin certainly does, especially now as we have Great Depression levels of unemployment during a global pandemic. The more the global reserve currency is inflated—that would be the trillions and trillions of dollars that have been printed in the past year—the more valuable Bitcoin becomes.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#232

Post by dlubarov »

tomp wrote: post #101
str33t_punk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would love Eth 2.0 then! The idea of proof of stake is to remove waste from the equation

Isn't the basic idea of ETH still "distributed computer" a.k.a. "pointless redoing every computation over and over" albeit with 2.0 it's sharded (i.e. only a subset of verification nodes redoing each computation)? Still sounds wasteful, except slightly less massively so.

That's accurate, although Eth 2 is planning to use fairly small shards (128 nodes according to the current spec). So there should be ~128 nodes redoing each computation, vs several thousand in Eth 1.

Some newer projects (including the one I work on, mirprotocol.org) are using cryptographic proofs to verify each computation, to avoid re-execution entirely.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#233

Post by dlubarov »

centimeter wrote: post #53
str33t_punk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would love Eth 2.0 then! The idea of proof of stake is to remove waste from the equation

Proof of stake does not have the same security properties as proof of work. The arguments are too complicated for me to usefully communicate them in a short HN post, but as a heuristic just keep in mind that most cryptocurrencies haven't adopted PoS despite it facially seeming better/"less wasteful".

> most cryptocurrencies haven't adopted PoS despite it facially seeming better/"less wasteful"

Most post-launch cryptocurrencies were designed a long time ago, though. If you look at recent credible projects, most involve proof of stake: NEAR, Solana, Coda (Mina), Cosmos, Celo, Polkadot, etc.

I can only think of a couple recent blockchain designs based on proof of work: Grin and Iron Fish.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#234

Post by moistly »

milkytron wrote: post #114
disown wrote: post #40

Seems like everything is hitting all-time highs. Housing prices, stock market, bitcoin. If you have a lot of assets, it's honestly the best time. Especially if you owned a lot of tech stocks the past decade. If covid and the worldwide economic disruption can't put a dent in asset prices, then what will happen when the pandemic passes and the economy recovers in the next few years? I used to laugh when people said bez…

> If covid and the worldwide economic disruption can't put a dent in asset prices, then what will happen when the pandemic passes and the economy recovers in the next few years? Pure speculation, and I am not an economist, but I'd imagine that those with wealth will acquire more wealth. And those without wealth will encounter more difficult means to acquiring wealth. The last time the housing market crashed, investor…

> Housing shortages are high, and growing in the US.

“Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.”

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homel...

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#235

Post by lawn »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #141
lawn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I know of. The real use-case is transferring to and from places that you cannot normally do. Smartphones are prevalent in Venezuela for example, but it's basically impossible to send money in or out unless you use cryptocurrencies. The charity eatBCH uses this to give food to Venezuelans for example: https://eatbch.org/ . I think that's a pretty unique use case.

You can already send money from US to Venezuela using Moneygram and several other services cheaply. There are relatively few countries where sanctions prohibit Americans from sending money, and cryptocurrency would not make this legal.

You cannot send USD to Venezuela, only Bolivars, which isn't so good as hyperinflation will kill most of the value instantly.

One of the point of cryptocurrencies is that some countries may think certain things are illegal, but that doesn't make them wrong. To me helping to feed starving Venezuelans by sending them help directly is morally right, even if it was illegal.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#236

Post by headmelted »

arcticbull wrote: post #179
jcfrei wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These accusations against Tether are very outdated. Read Matt Levine's take from 2019 on an ongoing lawsuit: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-26/things... The quintessential part is this: The New York attorney general’s filing refutes the extreme version of those doubts — Tether mostly had the dollars — but it is nonetheless a wild ride that alleges that Tether’s backing might not be as good as it c…

That article was written $16 billion imaginary dollars ago. Things move fast in the BVI.

This. I’d like to see evidence that Tether have an additional $16B USD in guaranteed cash to cover their commitments.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#237

Post by headmelted »

seibelj wrote: post #60
headmelted wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Tether has never been redeemed, and even if it could be redeemed, there is no possible way that they could cover the balance of issued tethers. It’s the mother of all Ponzi schemes, clearly, and is definitely going to implode in the next big pullback.

You have no idea what you are talking about and are just spreading more FUD. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir... I worked with Dan, I worked at Circle, we redeemed / minted billions and billions with Tether.

Respectfully this is a difficult claim to believe.

If your claim is that you redeemed billions of dollars in tethers for fiat USD then that’s newsworthy.

Even if that were the case though, it does nothing to prove that Tether is able to cover its commitments. Especially not with the additional $16B USD on the books.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#238

Post by atomi »

arcticbull wrote: post #200
atomi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, society already has prevalent deflationary capital - real estate.

To date since the 1970s, on average, on an inflation adjusted dollars per square foot basis, the price of real estate in the US has not changed. It’s not really deflationary since you can always build up (except where city councils tip the scales and prevent construction like SF). Any deflationary nature is a council level imposition on an otherwise pretty neutral asset class.

By that definition Bitcoin is a neutral asset class as well since it's deflationary nature is also artificially imposed.

> the price of real estate in the US has not changed.

That's just ludicrous.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#239

Post by tromp »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #72
centimeter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake does not have the same security properties as proof of work. The arguments are too complicated for me to usefully communicate them in a short HN post, but as a heuristic just keep in mind that most cryptocurrencies haven't adopted PoS despite it facially seeming better/"less wasteful".

Given that ETH is the second biggest cryptocurrency it will be a great stress test of the security properties of proof of stake. Honestly if it runs successfully for multiple staking periods I don't think there will be much of an argument for PoW cryptocurrencies that aren't the dominate coin in their respective type of work. Essentially all coins that share a proof of work with a larger coin are constantly at risk o…

> Proof of work's security properties are broken for everything that isn't BTC, ETH (although this will change soon) and whatever the dominate CPU coin is

PoW secures any coin that dominates the daily issuance of all coins (efficiently) using the same hardware. So the different hardware classes are

CPUs

GPUs

SHA256 ASICs

scrypt ASICs

Equihash ASICs

X11 ASICs

etc...

and each one can secure one dominant coin.

Re: Bitcoin Price Hits All-Time High of $19,786, Topping 2017 Record

#240

Post by tromp »

noxer wrote: post #130
anotheraccount9 wrote: post #13

Cryptocurrency is still a misunderstood concept for many ppl in the financial world. As use and integration increases, btc will likely stabilise. Meanwhile, we get interesting volatility.

It can not stabilize the block reward pays for the mining the fees are almost irrelevant. block reward halves every 4 year so the price has to double at least every 4 year. if it does not it will become lucrative to do double spends at some point. Its designed to crash some day because there is no endless doubling at constant time.

"Almost relevant" is more like it [1]. We can expect fees to dominate the block reward in about 3-4 halvings. Which will unfortunately lead to some instability [2].

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...

[2] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...

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