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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you understand Bitcoin/crypto, it will be too late for you to make profit from it. Get in now - lot more smarter people are in there and doing wonders for themselves. Look at your friends. Look at colleagues in your company. A lot of them are in. And here you are trying to make sense of it from your perspective. Even Ray Dalio is opening up and fair to say he knows a lot more things about finance and econ…

This is exactly why there are so many skeptics. Too many people trying to sell it as a "get rich quick" investment without downsides while there are so few concrete use-cases so far.

https://reason.com/video/2021/02/05/bitcoin-is-protecting-hu...

Bitcoin is used by people under authoritarian regimes around the world. IF nothing else, i'm happy to support people protesting in belarus.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you understand Bitcoin/crypto, it will be too late for you to make profit from it. Get in now - lot more smarter people are in there and doing wonders for themselves. Look at your friends. Look at colleagues in your company. A lot of them are in. And here you are trying to make sense of it from your perspective. Even Ray Dalio is opening up and fair to say he knows a lot more things about finance and econ…

Is this sarcasm? Honestly can't tell.

It's either sarcasm or they have money in bitcoin and need people to buy into it so the price goes up. I can't tell either.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet?" I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?

The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee an…

Transaction fees are high regardless of using Segwit or not and the Lightning Network is not widely adopted or user friendly at all.

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

#274

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…

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet?" I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?

Transfer amount does not matter.

In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block.

The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once.

However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Econ 101: the value of ordinary goods are determined both by supply and demand. Bitcoin-fanatic-USD-bears claim that Bitcoin is a good store of value because it has constrained supply. But they miss the demand side of the equation. Similarly, they claim that the USD is a bad source of value because it has "unlimited" supply. That also misses the demand side. The demand for USD is robust because people need USD to pay…

Exactly. Bitcoin proponents tend to tell only half of the story, and pick and choose economic theory that fits the "buy more bitcoin" narrative. In economic terms, Bitcoin is inflating as an asset. Specifically, it's demand-pull inflation. Bitcoin isn't even uniquely positioned to protect against inflation, other than the mistaken public belief on that topic. Inflation is an increase in the price of assets, so invest…

> Bitcoin is inflating as an asset.

I don't think this is precise. Inflation of an asset means that the asset itself drops in value, relative to the value of other goods. For example: when prices rise, the USD itself would be inflating because would then take more USD to buy goods.

Bitcoin is rising in price compared to the USD. So it's not "inflating." If we treat Bitcoin as a currency, it's deflating because right now it takes fewer Bitcoin to buy goods than one year ago.

This is also why "asset inflation" is not precise. The asset itself is not inflating, it is actually deflating wrt. to other goods.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet?" I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?

The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee an…

> One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam!

In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage.

If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.

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

#278
post #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…

If we're just passing money around, why do we need a separate currency at all? Stablecoins already exist, but they're not popular because all of the speculative value has been removed. Bitcoin's real invention was censorship resistance, by incentivizing distributed miners to arrive at consensus about transactions in a way that no single miner could control. Sadly, that same distributed incentive is responsible for Bi…

I think BTC energy consumption is a major issue, as is speed and capacity. I'm actually not sure what real problem BTC is actually solving currently!

Also, I don't quite understand your first question. Care to elaborate?

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

#279
post #219

There are 1.2 trillion US Dollars in circulation right now. Meanwhile, the "market cap" of BTC is more than $900 billion, yet it's still entirely a vehicle for speculation.

Total wealth of the United States is on the order of $100 Trillion USD. Cash gets way too much emphasis in Bitcoin discussions, while ignoring the fact that investors aren't investing in cash anyway.

would it be valid to state that Apple is 1% of United States total wealth? Are the lines blurred because of multinationalism? Am I looking at apples and oranges?

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

#280
post #78
post #26

I just wanted internet money, not a speculative financial instrument. :(

The only cryptocurrency that might one day become real “internet money” is nano , because it has no fees and transactions are almost instant.

This is the only one I'm still interested in, and the only one I hold. When you transfer it around between your wallets and exchange it feels like "Yes, this is what I thought BTC would be". It's significantly more eco-friendly and actually a really interesting concept in how it works: https://docs.nano.org/whitepaper/english/

Needs more adoption from the mainstream crypto payment providers though. Honestly I suspect half the reason support is lacking is because nobody actually understands how it works (because it is quite different).

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