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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

#491

Post by mbesto »

tylerhou wrote: post #275
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Inflation of an asset means that the asset itself drops in value, relative to the value of other goods.

That assumes an asset can be used as a medium of exchange. In its current form, BTC is not a medium of exchange, it's a store of value.

In other words - the word inflation has to do with purchasing power. If the asset isn't used as a way to purchase then comparing the characteristic of inflation is basically pointless. It' be like saying "trees are inflating as an asset". No one makes purchases using trees so the concept is irrelevant.

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

#492

Post by BrissyCoder »

IgorPartola wrote: post #65
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?

Remember that pizza you bought in 2013? You could have invested that money into TSLA and it would be worth a heck of a lot more now. Opportunities like that exist today also. Does that make you not want to eat pizza? I bought BTC at $20. I sold at $1000. When I sold I had something like 1.95 BTC (had a bit of it stolen from poorly secured exchanges, lost some trying my hand at bot trading). Still happy with it becaus…

What's your thinking w.r.t XLM?

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

#493

Post by CerealFounder »

Lorin wrote: post #435
lph wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

I'm afraid it makes sense if they are hedging bets against a major global economy...

God this point doesnt make sense. Bitcoin exists in lands that are governed by men. The governments could make it valueless at the first sign of threat to political currency. BTC is not a hedge, it's just an asset class that is growing fast and gaining attention faster than adoption.

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

#495

Post by [deleted] »

4a3f35b5a wrote: post #395
gge wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time could end up being a bubble, but it is very different for many reasons. The first is that Bitcoin is thriving as a store of value. It hasn't seen much adoption as a payments system and is unlikely to do so in the future, but 2020 saw many notable people using adopting Bitcoin as a store of value. See MassMutual, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, Tesla, among many other examples. The second reason is tha…

> These defi protocols are generating huge cash flows. This is real people using decentralized technologies built on blockchains like Ethereum. I'm fairly new to Crypto so I don't understand this: it's looking like all cool new things are built on Ethereum (which, itself has grown quite a lot) so why is Bitcoin rising? How are Bitcoin & advances in Ethereum-based techonologies correlated?

[deleted]

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

#496

Post by AshWolfy »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #433
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…

When "the market" does something that somebody considers to be irrational, the explanation is almost certainly that they either simply don't understand it, or that they do understand it and they're just being judgemental about the motives at play. The reason it has value is because people have demand for it. People have demand for it for a variety of reasons. I think it's reasonable to presume that a non-trivial port…

Or maybe just markets are stupid and bitcoin is mostly driven by hype based speculators

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

#497

Post by unnouinceput »

toyg wrote: post #434
lph wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

Well, it’s not completely unrelated: bitcoin drives energy consumption, which in turn drives demand for batteries of all shapes, which are a massive part of Tesla’s business plan.

Again with the energy point. The energy is insignificant compared with almost anything else. Wasn't some article that the sum of all standby electronics uses more energy than bitcoin and that's only in US?

What are you, Apple? That gives no charger for "environmental reasons" while packaging its wireless headphones in a crapload of unnecessary plastics.

If you are so energy consciousness then go bark at US military, those are the biggest polluters and energy hungry of the world.

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

#498

Post by RapidFire »

tyre wrote: post #465
lph wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

Tesla's stock has never been a car manufacturer stock. That's why it has so much short-selling against it. If you value it as a car manufacturer and compare it's (underlying business numbers):(stock price) to anything else, it's insane. "at any company that made sense" is true, to a point. But the point of tesla has been, for a not-insignificant number of people, not meant to make sense. It's faith based. It's cult b…

>Elon Musk has strong parallels to Trump's appeal.

Isn't that the strangest thing? If you watch videos of Elon he is no where near as charismatic as trump.

I think it mostly stems from his success with SpaceX and earning accolades for being, "The Guy who does Impossible things". His having a car manufacturing company with an impossible share price just make sense.

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

#499

Post by will4274 »

sytelus wrote: post #314
ur-whale wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your feeling is IMO the norm for lots of folks. I have had this conversation with many a friend, who actually view Bitcoin as a Ponzi, and therefore decide not to play the game (a ponzi ca be lucrative if : a) you know it's a ponzi b) you're smart in your timing and not too greedy but it's still a crapshoot). The real questions are: - what if it isn't a Ponzi ? - how much will your "won't touch it with a 10 feet pole…

It is a ponzi scheme. I think eventually majority of investors will participate in it. At present, total stock + gold market is $100T. If you expect 5% of this diverted to BTC then upper bound on BTC market cap is $5T. This means upper bound on BTC price is $250K. When that price arrives, suddenly things will become stagnant. People will wait for few years in the hope something will happen and then sell out for more…

> This means upper bound on BTC price is $250K.

Dividing the total market cap by the total number of BTC relies on an incorrect assumption that BTC are never destroyed. But, in fact, we know that plenty of people have lost BTC keys. It's totally possible that the practical supply of BTC is far lower (e.g. 10%) than the supply of BTC on paper. In an extreme case (e.g. if less than 1% of BTC are actually usable), the paper market cap of BTC could exceed the size of the US economy, even while the true market cap is less than 5% (using your number).

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

#500

Post by lawn »

vbezhenar wrote: post #264
sphix0r wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's what bitcoin should have been. Too bad it also consumes an insane amount of energy and isn't able to process a lot of transactions per second. Hope that a good cryptocurrency gets more traction and will be the next decentralized "paypal / digital currency".

What about Lightning network? AFAIK it works right now, it's instant and scalable.

You still need one slow and/or expensive Bitcoin transaction to start using it, while having enough funds for a justice transaction. You can't use it trustlessly on your phone and it's also not scalable (no decentralized route finding that scales exists and is an intractable problem).

Just use another crypto if you want to pay for things. 0-conf are just as instant as credit card payments are.

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