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Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

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Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#201

Does anyone else feel like: - they've missed an opportunity to get rich with minimal effort from crypto - still have absolutely no interest in jumping in at this point?

That's exactly how I feel. But is there a way to actually cash out? I mean, suppose you had 2 BTC for years. Can you literally get $100K right now in your bank account and can you actually exchange them easily for the fiat currency?

Lol yes

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

73% of mining is renewable energy https://pd.coinshares.com/EN-Mining-Whitepaper-December-2019

Still we could have used the same energy for other things that are currently running on non-renewable energy.

That would require transferring the renewable energy to the areas where non-renewable energy is consumed.

Energy transmission is expensive, and this would only be economically feasible within certain geographic limits. Otherwise they are both independent economies; a rural hydroelectric dam that serves miners isn't taking anything away from population centers, given the appropriate distance.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#203
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forefront of the Bitcoin frenzy isn't even on the blockchain, it's at the exchanges. Hardcore tech people and those who don't (or can't) trust institutions with their Bitcoin will pay the transaction fees to get their money out of exchanges and into their own wallet. The average retail investor, however, doesn't want to be their own bank. They just want in on the price action, while letting the exchange manage th…

> Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy. I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's p…

Did people really disappear from the market, or did they temporarily refuse to buy above a certain price?

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#204
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: “Stability in value is presumed to be the decisive factor for acceptance. Hayek makes the assumption that competition will favor currencies with the greatest stability in value since a devalued currency hurts creditors, and an upward-revalued currency hurts debtors.” Stability is not the observed behaviour in BTC.

if you use BTC as unit of account then Bitcoin is the only thing that IS stable!

When people tell me they're cold, I remind them that 1 degree celsius = 1 degree celsius.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#205
post #122
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long long time ago, I mined 3650 coins on a single cpu in a month. Bitcoin was worthless at the time, and I thought the idea was interesting. After a month, I went back to folding at home. A little over a year later bitcoin hit a dollar and I sold it all. On one hand I made a few thousand from nothing. However if I held it I would have been a pretty rich right now. I truly believe that bitcoin is something that can…

Do you ever think that you losing out on tens of millions of dollars might have affected your desire to challenge your believes that "bitcoin is something that cannot work"? I know I'd probably cope in a similar manner

Sorta it does make me slight more bitter about bitcoin in general, and if I made millions of dollars off of it I would likely thing it's the best thing in the world.

However, I do try to self adjust for that bias. When I mined the coins it was a neat concept, but bitcoin wasn't at all practical then and it isn't at all practical now.

I sold it all back then for a few reasons.

- I believed other tech nerds would come to the same conclusion.

- It would never reach main stream adoption because of how utterly impractical it actually is.

- I thought that governments would crack down on it pretty hard, pushing it further into the fringe communities.

I was definitely wrong about governments cracking down and the novelty of bitcoin has definitely caught the interest of many and that has caused many chain reactions of the price going up.

I still think bitcoin is basically useless, but I severely didn't properly estimate that just it being interesting would make it so valuable.

Bitcoin truly is extremely interesting, and the vast majority don't try to understand it at all. So while it may in fact be useless, that does not actually matter for the price to go up.

In the end the only thing I kick myself for was looking at it objectively. Bitcoin wasting untold amount of energy, low transaction rate, high wait times for confirmation, high transaction fees, ever growing public transaction history, long cryptographic identifiers for receiving and sending, and so on do not actually matter.

Not rebuying is because I still have hope that people will come to their senses. But my stubbornness has not made me rich.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#206

Pretty hard to take "green" companies seriously when they're promoting the environmental disaster that is Bitcoin. At some point, someone needs to step in and say "no more mining".

73% of mining is renewable energy https://pd.coinshares.com/EN-Mining-Whitepaper-December-2019

39% of mining is renewable energy

https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati...

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#207
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: “Stability in value is presumed to be the decisive factor for acceptance. Hayek makes the assumption that competition will favor currencies with the greatest stability in value since a devalued currency hurts creditors, and an upward-revalued currency hurts debtors.” Stability is not the observed behaviour in BTC.

if you use BTC as unit of account then Bitcoin is the only thing that IS stable!

May I introduce the concepts of the Consumer Price Index and of wanting to use money to buy things other than units of itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_basket

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#208
I believe Bitcoin is the experimental precursor to proper distributed money.

For some reason, even though BTC was meant to be "money", it is now being treated as an asset (at a basic level, an asset is something you hold onto, as it produces additional value, unlike money, which tends to devalue if not put to work).

It's almost as if the next big idea in distributed money will be around disincentivising "asset" like behaviour.

Assets are terrible things to use for everyday transactions, which is why I don't quite consider Bitcoin "money" just yet.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#209

So does it make sense to put in some money that I’m okay with losing now or have I missed it?

I am not an investor myself but in the long run you would probably still win. In the short run people expect it to pull back a bit from the current (~$50K) value.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#210
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forefront of the Bitcoin frenzy isn't even on the blockchain, it's at the exchanges. Hardcore tech people and those who don't (or can't) trust institutions with their Bitcoin will pay the transaction fees to get their money out of exchanges and into their own wallet. The average retail investor, however, doesn't want to be their own bank. They just want in on the price action, while letting the exchange manage th…

> Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy. I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's p…

> People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down are now gone from the market

That's a part of the crowd. Another part is in for speculation and sold on negative message then bought in the dip. We don't know the proportions. The first part could be close to 0.

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