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

Bitcoin breaks above $20k

nasdaq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 473 posts

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#131

Post by rgifford »

arithma wrote: post #87

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in. First-world country citizens kind o…

> Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Gold has limited value as a commodity and widespread usage in central bank reserves. People I know who value Bitcoin highly do it on the expectation that either high net worth individuals will start to hold some small part of their net worth in BTC OR central banks will adopt it as a reserve currency.

How viable those two outcomes are determines whether you view BTC and gold similarly.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#132

Post by hnuser847 »

gruez wrote: post #69
syntaxing wrote: post #50

The appreciation and depreciation of Bitcoin is one of the things I don’t really understand. I get currency, capital flow, and asset to capital conversions. But for Bitcoin, where exactly is the value? Why is holding one Bitcoin appreciating so much faster compared to the USD? Is it because us as a society is perceiving the value of Bitcoin to appreciate (even though it’s illogical IMO to think so)?

>Why is holding one Bitcoin appreciating so much faster compared to the USD? Is it because us as a society is perceiving the value of Bitcoin to appreciate (even though it’s illogical IMO to think so)? Same reason why asset (stocks, housing) prices have skyrocketed even though there's a pandemic going on: money printing.

I absolutely agree with you that money printing causes the price of assets like real estate, stocks, and bonds to go up, but the correlation between money printing and the price of Bitcoin seems pretty weak. Back in 2017, when Bitcoin shot up from 900 to 18k[1], the Fed's balance sheet had been flat for the past two years[2]. The Fed was also in the process of gradually unwinding their balance sheet by increasing the Federal Funds Rate target. Over the course of 2017, they raised the upper bound of the Federal Funds Rate from 0.75% to 2.5%.

The narrative that people are flocking to Bitcoin as an inflation hedge has some plausibility currently, but it doesn't explain what happened in 2017.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#133

Post by mam2 »

_sm6n wrote: post #94

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon an…

Bitcoin is useless for any legal activity.

change my mind with an actual existing application that's not done by anything else.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#134

Post by slg »

gruez wrote: post #61
slg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bernie Madoff operated his "game of musical chairs" for over twice that period of time. If age is the only argument you have to justify Bitcoin's value, we still have a while to go.

It's much easier to pull off a scam if have total control over it. Is there some mastermind behind the bitcoin scam?

Calling Bitcoin a "game of musical chairs" doesn't necessarily imply it is a scam. It simply implies that the music will eventually stop and leave someone with huge loses. There doesn't need to be a mastermind behind that. The length of time the music has been playing shouldn't be any solace to anyone participating if they can't come up with other legitimate reasons why a $20k value is valid.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#135

Post by slewis »

nwah1 wrote: post #30
albntomat0 wrote: post #3

What's the current thoughts on Tether, and how its speculated potential collapse will affect the rest of the ecosystem? Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.

Tether is still a scam, and the music is still playing. Don't be the last guy. As for lightning, it adds a layer of trust into a system whose reason for existence is trustlessness. If you don't care about trustlessness, you can already have fast and scalable transactions through normal banking.

"you can already have fast and scalable transactions through normal banking."

I see this repeated a lot. I think you're saying bitcoin is no better than normal banking for moving value.

Do you really believe this? Yes, in the US I can immediately wire money somewhere as long as:

1) I do it within east coast business hours. Weekend? Sorry, wait til Monday 2) I have the correct information for the receiving institution, some of which require a small transfer up front to confirm the setup. 3) My bank actually supports wiring (Wealthfront, for example, only supports ACH transfers which take a few days) 4) I'm sending within the US, otherwise there are a bunch of other complications and requirements

I also need to trust that the bank actually has my money.

With cryptocurrency you can confirm that your stored value exists and is stilled owned by you, and transfer it to anywhere else within 30 minutes, in a provably secure and verifiable way.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#137

Post by 3pt14159 »

joshuakelly wrote: post #105

Let's pay tribute to the very first Hacker News thread about Bitcoin back in May, 2009 with this classic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 > Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

I mean, as soon as I read through the whitepaper I knew it was going to be valuable at least for a time. My primary reason for selling most of my Bitcoins at $200 a coin was that I thought it was obvious that the US would ban it. I made out like a bandit, don't get me wrong, but the fact that it's an accepted investment still boggles my mind. They shutdown eGold but not Bitcoin?! Crazypants.

In retrospect, I think the primary reason they haven't is a real politik appraisal of the good crypto does to our cybersecurity. Finally attackers have a way to extract money from the entities they hack, rather than selling access or information to third parties. Even so, it still boggles the mind. It's so lawless and anarchistic.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#138

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

three_seagrass wrote: post #123
joshuakelly wrote: post #105

Let's pay tribute to the very first Hacker News thread about Bitcoin back in May, 2009 with this classic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852 > Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

A decade latter and it's still a hobby currency. Price is not a sole indicator of faith in a currency.

ETFs are a hobby?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#139

Post by addaon »

latchkey wrote: post #28
robert_foss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not with Bitcoin. Etherium is currently moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/

Ethereum [sic] is moving to PoS from PoW, but ETH doesn't suffer the same growth issue that BTC does because its hash algo is effectively tied to its hardware. It can run on PoW indefinitely and will likely do so for several more years until PoS is fully ready. There are a few asic's for ETH, but the hash algo is fundamentally executed through memory. Even if you build an asic for ETH, you are always tied to the spee…

> asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU

Why would this be true? The R&D costs of a commodity GPU can be amortized across more customers than an ASIC, and the same is somewhat true for capital costs (masks, etc) -- but the manufacturing cost of an ASIC should be at worst the same as a GPU (with one fewer middleman adding a margin on top of those costs), and in general cheaper (since die size can be reduced, or an older process can be used).

Post reply on HN