Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

Post by vmception » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:50 AM UTC

bobbygoodlatte wrote: post #535

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…

I know you don't control who upvotes your comment, but I find it funny this is the top rated comment. It has become a total HN cliché that the top comment is a negative takedown of the tech or startup in question. From Dropbox, to Coinbase, to Ethereum, and now to Bitcoin at 50k. Not refuting anything you're saying here. Just find it amusing to have seen this pattern play out so many times here on HN.

Post by ben_w » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

ahnick wrote: post #652

evilos wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is deflation and is intentionally avoided by central banks because you don't want people to hoard their money. Hoarded money sits there and does nothing while money that is in banks can be lent out, invested, and be useful.

It's only avoided b/c in traditional economies there is no way to subdivide units of a denomination. (e.g. There is no way to split a penny into thousandths) Cryptocurrencies are purely digital and do not have this limitation. The only limitations are self-imposed by the algorithms themselves. If Bitcoins were the dominate and only currency, people would continue to buy food, clothing, luxury goods etc. b/c they need…

Post by arbol » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:37 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #253

osrec wrote: 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…

Post by rax0m » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:51 AM UTC

_7fvc wrote: post #646

osrec wrote: 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…

I think the way to discourage hoarding behavior is inflation. Cryptocurrency follows similar models of scarcity like Bitcoin. Some cryptos have tail emission. None of them has any meaningful inflation. I designed Bitflate. It's a cryptocurrency with 7% inflation. The rate is moderately high to make it the opposite of Bitcoin. But it's not too high to cause hyperinflation. Bitflate is a Bitcoin software fork. So there…

Post by imtringued » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

whoanow wrote: post #624

tsimionescu wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin consumes more electricity than entire countries - more than the Czech Republic for example. It consumes a third (or was it a fifth?) of all the electricity of all data centers in the world. It is by no means insignificant.

If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs. I hope this leads to innovation in clean power tech, especially in developing nations.