Bitcoin breaks above $20k • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#201

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

three_seagrass wrote: post #174

JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is why I never made either statement.

GBTC has a $14B market cap. Do any Dogecoin ETFs? No?

Then maybe BTC is more than a hobby. It's a serious long-term store of value people are increasingly using as a hedge. A serious currency with commercial and institutional investors.

When you understand why Dogecoin doesn't have these things, you'll understand what a "hobby" actually is.

> BTC is still hobby money.

Can you post a single reason to believe that?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#202

Post by hiq » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

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.

How do you distinguish a proper currency from a hobby currency?

I can think of these criteria on the top of my head: * trading volume * number of shops where it's accepted * whether you can pay taxes with it

Did you have something like that in mind? Or something else? What would lead you to say "this is not just a hobby currency anymore"?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#203

Post by silentsea90 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #41

silentsea90 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does the "game of musical chairs" have to go on before you consider the possibility that this isn't one? It has been a decade since BTC was launched.

Sooner or later bitcoin must stabilize. Either because it goes to zero or because it starts tracking inflation with volatility way down. That's when we will know.

Yep, when the market cap balloons to be much larger, we should expect lower volatility. Still room to grow

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#204

Post by jpsalm » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

rodiger wrote: post #173

batmanthehorse wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/few…

Significantly less energy per transaction, which is the only metric that matters.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#205

Post by wjdp » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

deweller wrote: post #161

JoshTko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Majority seems to be two accounts consolidating into one 2. Not a lot of interconnection

for (1), what you are seeing is a payment and a the "change" going back to a new address owned by the sender. This is a very common pattern of bitcoin use.

Why would there be "change" in a Bitcoin transaction?

Is this: send me £10 in BTC but actually send me £15 in case the price changes and I'll send you back the difference.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#206

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #149

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…

Gold is something that exists IRL. It has value even in the absence of a market to buy/sell it. It can be melted down and formed into jewelry, as a simple example. The reason I won't buy into crypto is it's impossible to make informed investment decisions because, as an investment, the price is driven too highly by unknown market forces (at least unknown to me...). Perhaps it's a good investment if you truly feel you…

I've never really understood the argument around gold being better because you can melt it down into jewelry. If there isn't a market for gold anymore, then the jewelry wouldn't be worth more than costume pieces, right?

I guess the argument is that you can still make pennies on the dollar if there isn't a market for it anymore?

Your other arguments I can understand, although I do think the use of cryptocurrencies will keep growing whether I like it or not.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#207

Post by spurgu » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

phoinix wrote: post #144

Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled it. The put a cap in it's block size, and they removed instructions of the Bitcoin Script language. Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transac…

Easier and more effective to just store the hash of the video on a blockchain.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#208

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

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…

The price of Eggs is up 50% in my neck of the woods over the past 6 months.

House prices are up 20-30% over the same time frame.

The stock market is up close to 50% over the same time frame...

This is not happening because the economy is booming.

It is happening because the limits on printing money have been completely erased.

>In light of the shift to an ample reserves regime, the Board has reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26, the beginning of the next reserve maintenance period. This action eliminates reserve requirements for thousands of depository institutions and will help to support lending to households and businesses.

Any American Bank can lend any amount of money without holding anything in reserve. Let that sink in for a minute.

The reserve requirements used to be 10%... for decades... and money was still being created very fast due to lending from fractional reserve banks...

Now fractional reserve banking is not even a thing... it's just no reserve banking.

I am seriously concerned that north america will experience hyper inflation over the next few years as a result of that meeting back in March.

Pens are powerful.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#209

Post by capnorange » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

_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…

The higher the price, the more useful Bitcoin is.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#210

Post by phoinix » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

wait_a_minute wrote: post #159

phoinix wrote: post #144

Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled it. The put a cap in it's block size, and they removed instructions of the Bitcoin Script language. Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transac…

I don't understand how "uploading the information right away to the blockchain" changes anything in this situation. Arrest information is already logged somewhere, and even if it was logged in an immutable public ledger that doesn't mean that people wouldn't immediately distrust arrests depending on the circumstances regardless of a blockchain being involved. It really seems like this post is just another example of…

If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest after 10 hours, then something fishy might going on, the video might be edited. People around usually witness the arrest, and they know around what time it took place. If the data is uploaded 10 minutes after the arrest, then we are more sure of the legitimace, than after 10 hours. That's all.