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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

#211

Post by _y5hn »

kungito wrote: post #42
superbcarrot wrote: post #28

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?

What helps me sleep at night is that even had I entered all this time ago with BTC I would have exited 100 times by now. There have indeed been many 2x,3x,5x multipliers with BTC but there have been so many instances when it was unclear how everything is going to turn out which would personally prompt me to consider exiting with what I had. As my friend nicely put it: only way we could have gotten rich from BTC is ha…

Or the wallet got cracked. Most online wallets were. Or the HDD died..

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

#212

Post by ur-whale »

matwood wrote: post #16
1996 wrote: post #4

I'm patiently waiting for the dismissals (it's just a fad like tulips or beanie babies), the negative permabulls (it's evil because people can use it to buy drugs / not pay taxes, it can't do as many TPS as Visa, it's bad for the environment...) while laughing all the way to the bank. Crypto is the HN equivalent of what the ipod was to Slashdot: "lame" to the people who think they are the typical user, who declare th…

Personally, I'm neutral to slightly bullish on crypto. It's reached mainstream and it looks like many companies are going to put a portion of their cash in BTC as an inflation hedge. The price will definitely fluctuate, but it does seem like a floor is being put in because of this move to the mainstream. So my advice on owing crypto, is own enough that if it goes parabolic you aren't kicking yourself later, but not s…

Best advice in this entire thread: balanced, rational, apolitical.

But unfortunately fails to take into account the anti-crypto fanaticism that seems to be a common ailment on HN.

Put another away: some folks here would not be able to sleep at night if they followed your advice, because it'd be too much of a blow to either their moral system or to their ego because it'd be admitting they were wrong on 200 past HN posts.

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

#213

Post by PragmaticPulp »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #169
azinman2 wrote: post #120

So it sounds like lemming group think. It seems like someone one should hold “just in case,” but no real valid reason to do so yet (that I’ve heard). We know transactions are slow and expensive, so it’s not a good replacement for ordinary commerce. It can be used to transfer across borders, but there often is asymmetry in capital movement that makes this difficult in the places you need it most (poor countries with r…

> it’s terrible as a wide spread value store because it removes an important tool that governments have to handle the economy (dealt with debt via inflation aka printing money How does a static rather than unconstrained supply make something a LESS good store of value?

Bitcoin's constrained supply is almost a red herring at this point.

The usual fallacy is when proponents claim that Bitcoin is the only asset able to escape inflation due to fiscal policy interventions. This couldn't be more false. The very definition of inflation is an increases in prices, or a decrease in buying power. However, investors have been buying assets and investments to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was even invented.

Bitcoin isn't a particularly good store of value because the price is driven purely by demand, which is currently in a state of market mania. It's not even the first market mania around Bitcoin. Past bubbles were also met with a "this time it's different" attitude before the inevitable sharp losses.

Bitcoin has value not because someone coded a 21 million coin limit in the code somewhere. Bitcoin has value because people want Bitcoin. Why do people want Bitcoin? Because the price goes up up. Why does the price go up? Because people want Bitcoin. As soon as something breaks that cycle, it doesn't matter what the maximum number of coins is. Without demand from the belief of future increases due to increasing demand, the price will go down. The purchasing power decreases.

Everyone likes to demonize fiscal intervention, but the reality is that counter-cyclical fiscal intervention tends to benefit the average person. Running inflation too hot is bad, but swinging to a full deflationary currency (Bitcoin) would also be bad for the economy.

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

#214

Post by boc »

adhoc32 wrote: post #123
akmarinov wrote: post #29

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

There is the hyperbitcoinization scenario. If this holds you'll be an early adopter.

That scenario makes no sense in the real world because the US government would just regulate/ban it before it got to that point. Once BTC even starts to threaten the sovereignty and power of the USD, it's game over for Bitcoin and the laissez-faire environment that helped it grow.

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

#215

Post by dmwallin »

SilverRed wrote: post #185
petercooper wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my attitude towards it too. But this has also given me a strong lesson for the future. If I get in on the ground floor of anything and decide to sell out, always keep a little skin the game that you don't touch.. because you never know if it'll go big. If the GP had sold 99% of his 3650 coins and kept 1% till now, that would still be $1.8m.

When do you sell it though? If you had coins from 2011, is now the time to sell? What if it goes up 100x next year.

Set yourself a threshold amount that you are okay with a 100% loss on, and a periodic schedule based on your risk-appetite. At each interval if you are above your threshold you sell your excess holdings and if you are below you sit tight.

Alternatively you can set yourself a price threshold. For example, sell half your holdings every time the price doubles. Essentially this acts as a log function on your gains in exchange for lowering risk.

There's a ton of room for fine tuning a set of rules to manage risk, as long as you are willing to stick to them.

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

#216

Post by phatfish »

majani wrote: post #128
georgyo wrote: 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…

That's US $178m today for those who are curious

Say one is still sitting on 3650 coins from 2011, and you decide now is the time to sell the lot. How exactly do you "cash out" that amount?

Sell to Elon maybe? ;)

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

#217

Post by PragmaticPulp »

dheera wrote: post #198
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #189

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…

> I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down by panic selling are now gone from the market, and the believers stayed in and made money. That's a good thing, and weeds out gullible people from the system.

So when the price goes down due to influencers, people are dumb for selling.

But when the price goes up due to the very same influencers, people are smart for buying?

> This isn't the stock market where fundamentals matter.

Amen to that.

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

#218

Post by ur-whale »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #41
1996 wrote: post #4

I'm patiently waiting for the dismissals (it's just a fad like tulips or beanie babies), the negative permabulls (it's evil because people can use it to buy drugs / not pay taxes, it can't do as many TPS as Visa, it's bad for the environment...) while laughing all the way to the bank. Crypto is the HN equivalent of what the ipod was to Slashdot: "lame" to the people who think they are the typical user, who declare th…

Whilst I think bitcoin will be around long term, it will be in somewhat of a precarious position once the proof of stake and high TPS blockchains start gathering steam. Sticking with PoW long term is my only concern about Bitcoins ability to remain relevant. I'm more bullish on Ethereum, pending successful transition to V2. Also bullish on some of the emerging competitors to Ethereum; heterogeneity provides a healthi…

>Sticking with PoW long term is my only concern about Bitcoins ability to remain relevant.

I share your concerns, and if the whole segwit debacle is any indication, getting Bitcoin to switch away from PoW will be a political nightmare.

The only thing that might get such a hard-fork deployed on Bitcoin is an extinction-level threat from a sizable competitor (e.g. ETH).

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

#220

Post by PragmaticPulp »

RestlessMind wrote: post #179
ben_w wrote: 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.

It is rather a promise of an "eventual stability". Thinking through that lens, I think USD (and other Fiat currencies) are the ones exhibiting instability.

There is no objective measure by which Bitcoin is more stable than USD.

The idea that USD is becoming worthless due to recent monetary policy, however ill-advised, is greatly exaggerated.

The idea that Bitcoin is the only way to protect oneself against inflation is also greatly exaggerated. Investors have been buying assets and investments for a long time before Bitcoin was invented to avoid inflation. Bitcoin didn't magically change that.

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