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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#171

Post by elefanten »

tboyd47 wrote: post #156
_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…

If you're looking for more substantive discussion among Bitcoiners, touching on its relation to economics, politics, and society, YouTube and Reddit are not the spots. I'd try Twitter. Start with @saifedean and go from there.

A cursory glance at his feed did not instill confidence. Seemed like a pop business huckster.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#172

Post by bitobserver »

_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…

I get the impression that 99% of those invested in crypto just want their investment to perform well, and could care less about any project specifics.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#173

Post by rodiger »

batmanthehorse wrote: post #126
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…

the energy consumption is my biggest criticism, so the answer is "no" (even though you try to sidestep that). buying a pack of gum with bitcoin could power a whole house for 2 months, that's awful and irresponsible.

How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard

Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/fewer inputs for Bitcoin for sure but that doesn't mean we shouldn't account for the total environmental cost of a behemoth like Mastercard.

Bitcoin can never and should never replace our current payments network as it simply cannot scale in its current form. But, I do think people simply look at the cost to run the technology itself and assume that's the total environmental cost of a system.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#174

Post by three_seagrass »

JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #165
three_seagrass wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ETFs are a hobby? Bitcoin is not a bundle of securities, nor is an ETF a currency. Why would you confuse the two?

I didn't. There are Bitcoin ETFs now and CME Bitcoin Futures now, as examples of institutional money invested that wasn't in 2017. Whales are holding, not trading, net inflow to NA is nothing like 2017. Just based on a hobby currency?

Asset != Currency

Being in an ETF does not make something a real currency. BTC is still hobby money.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#175

Post by TechBro8615 »

alex_young wrote: post #169

I see lots of comments suggesting that BTC is a constant store of value and that it is rising in USD terms because of ‘money printing’. If that was the case, wouldn’t we see inflation in USD prices for a basket of goods? Isn’t inflation very close to zero? Others say they are sick of talking about BTC price and would rather focus on its utility. This makes sense, but for the same reason above it cannot happen since o…

I don’t know what the actual CPI says. But as a person on the street, I definitely see inflation everywhere I go. It’s especially obvious to me as I spent a few years out of the country and came back to much higher prices. Everything is significantly more expensive than it was five years ago.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#176

Post by itsdsmurrell »

carleverett wrote: post #155
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.

This chart shows the amount of BTC that's locked into the Lightning Network over time, one measure of adoption: https://embed.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/bitco... It hasn't grown much in the last year and a half. Personally I don't see Lightning Network winning the battle for high-bandwidth, low-cost transactions against all the other protocols.

When the block size got blocked at 1MB from those looking to profit from moving transactions to layer 2 options... I switched over to Bitcoin Cash. If you try it out, it operates like Bitcoin has operated for years until the fee market started.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#177

Post by louwrentius »

marta_morena_91 wrote: post #20
seibelj wrote: post #5

Bitcoin is a pure computer-science phenomenon. Regardless of whether you personally feel this is a good or bad investment, I think the magnitude of this success over such a short time frame, the impact on the world, and the interest it and the wider crypto ecosystem receives from the non-tech world, is absolutely stunning. HN should accept that Bitcoin is an achievement of massive proportions.

But it's really not. Bitcoin isn't anything special. If there were any real-world use cases for it (which there don't seem to be), this would have been done long ago or would have been done organically. As it stands, interest in bitcoin was largely null, until people realized that it's a great investment opportunity where everybody can get rich (tulips, anyone?)... The rest is history. Now alt coins were popping up l…

I totally agree with you, but too many HN visitors seem to be invested in Bitcoin.

What I notice is that so many of the kind of posts you respond to seem to be self-serving. To generate the kind of hype and demand and awe.

But there is nothing.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#178

Post by joshuakelly »

3pt14159 wrote: post #137
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 th…

There's still time for the course to change, you might prove right in the long run - the average Hacker News reader's parents weren't even alive when EO 6102 happened, which seems wild to us now. The threat of shutdown seems less pertinent than the threat of outright state seizure, similarly to EO 6102.

EDIT: I meant of course our parents, not us - there might be a few 90-year old readers among us though :)

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#179

Post by nikolay »

JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #145
nikolay wrote: post #136

It's always goes how around the end of the year and crashes in the beginning of the next. Where's the news?

"Institutional investment and mining are at an all-time high, indicating this may not be a bubble" is where the news is.

It was a bubble, it is a bubble, and always will be a bubble - as it's not use for commerce. All these years and it's only used for speculation! So, it needs to be rebranded to cryptospeculation, not cryptocurrency!

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#180

Post by echelon »

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…

Is Ethereum going to be worth more than Bitcoin (market cap) when people realize how technologically superior it is?
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