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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

#761

Post by chillacy »

choward wrote: post #195
akvadrako wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just buy a small amount of bitcoins now, something you won't mind losing? If they increase 100 fold you won't feel like you're missing out. And if they don't just think of it as insurance. I personally hate the idea of bitcoin and avoided it for a long time, but I feel better having a little just to avoid the thought I let my personal feelings get in the way of an opportunity with a good risk/reward ratio.

> Why not just buy a small amount of bitcoins now, something you won't mind losing? Once people stop having this mindset the price will stop rising.

Yea but that’s what people thought at 100, 1000, and 10000 too.

A lot of people dismiss the possibility of a 10x rise in price and fixate on the 2x reduction. That kind of pessimism is hardwired in: humans have stronger loss aversion.

But if something has a 20% chance at 10x and 80% chance of 1/2x, that’s still positive EV.

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

#762

Post by nfin »

nfin wrote: post #632
peteretep wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I'm aware of the 21 million maximum BTC cap” Better thought of as a configuration value set by people with most of the mining power, which last time I checked was PRC

no, the miners are simply said just timestamping machines (once they got lucky to find a fitting nonce). If they don't follow the rules as set by the users of the system, their blocks will be automatically ignored by the users software [1] (while users receive blocks from miners following their rules). [1]: there is one CONDITION to that, and that is that an economic majority of users either do run real bitcoin nodes…

just a little bit more detail:

miners are timestamping machines, which main function is to order (!) the transactions. That's it!

The is the whole point, everyone/every node verifies the rules, but the network has to agree on some ordering, as they could be many possibilities to order the transaction, and the network wouldn't know who to listen (everyone has his own opinion about the best ordering). So the "lucky miner" extends the blockchain effectively ordering the new transactions.

If the miner increases the supply or doesn't follow any other consensus rule, other nodes won't accept it. So the miner has not much power. He orders transactions

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

#763

Post by chillacy »

audunw wrote: post #103
TeeWEE wrote: post #73

Bitcoin itself has its value, but the current price surge is a bubble, it can be easily explained why the growth is exponential: 1. BTC price increases 4. There is media attention about the price raise 5. More people buy BTC, because FOMO 6. Back to point 1, but now a bigger group This loop is a pump, increasing the price as long as the loop isn't broken. The same pump can reverse, very quickly. Once the loop is pump…

> The fact that there is a limited supply will ensure the prices keeps raising, because nobody can "make more bitcoin".. This is a common claim, but nothing is ensured here. Almost everything else we put a value to has a more real underlying value that's also growing. Gold has uses in technology, with stocks most companies have real assets that could be sold off, even with art I think most people would be willing to…

If you own a Monet you had better hope the value doesn’t one day crash down to he price of used canvas and recycled heavy metals from paint pigments.

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

#764

Post by bhupy »

graeme wrote: post #758
bhupy wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter; the lender doesn't get to enjoy the appreciation of the underlying collateral. The underlying collateral is simply meant to de-risk an anonymous loan with 0 credit check.

How does the sale work. My impression is smart contracts execute automatically. But if I have say apple stock to sell the market price differs moment by moment. An exchange would be specified, and trade type, and the whole collateral sold then proceeds divided?

I haven't read the full contract yet, but I think it just automatically converts the collateral to the right amount of the coin that's being lent.

If you open the markets, you'll see that you earn the highest APY by lending USD-pegged stablecoins like DAI, USDT, etc: https://compound.finance/markets

It's possible to use Uniswap (or some other decentralized exchange) to convert X amount of ETH to Y amount of DAI. The smart contract has access to Uniswap as well as knowledge of Y.

Honestly, if you have like $100 to play with, I recommend messing around with it on your own. My $50 loan that cost me $80 was effectively $130 of personal hands-on R&D. If you already invested a little bit into BTC/ETH over the last few years, you might also have "house money" to play with.

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

#765

Post by dodobirdlord »

adhoc32 wrote: post #689
dodobirdlord wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning the exchanges is about all it would take. Besides, the current chorus is that large companies moving a share of their cash holdings into Bitcoin will drive the price way up. If the government bans Bitcoin then that's not going to happen.

Most probably a US ban will crash the price, but it will recover in time. Also it will establish a black market in the US which is the worst possible scenario for the authorities as they would have absolutely no control over it.

There already is a black market in for Bitcoin in the United States, that's basically all Bitcoin is used for these days aside from speculation. The fact that it would become a black market for Bitcoin itself doesn't change much. Almost all Bitcoin purchases these days are done through exchanges and held on exchanges, managing Bitcoin wallets is enough of a technical challenge that it will never be in any way widespread without the support of exchanges.

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

#766

Post by millstone »

tsimionescu wrote: post #756
vmception wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because a lot of energy is not utilized if it will be lost in transit. they don't send it and there is extra capacity on site and from the specific source of energy. there are gigawatts of energy that can only be used at the source, which has never had a use until the mining machines showed up.

Then why not stop producing it, instead of using it on Bitcoin? Even 'clean' energy production has environmental costs, from environment destruction for hydro to maintenance/production costs for solar and wind.

Excess electricity can be a real problem, and is getting worse with renewables. But surplus energy would be better used to desalinate seawater, or produce hydrogen through electrolysis, or storage.

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

#767

Post by mewpmewp2 »

imtringued wrote: post #680
noch wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to? Please learn how the Nakamoto Consensus works and how nodes protect the Bitcoin network while miners are slaves to the network. There's a rich history of this being tested by adversaries. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26089898

I once had the idea to run a decentralized (technically federated) crud app. It's just a regular database with a central authority but users can access the database and its indices with IPFS. In theory nothing could take it down. The practical problem is that users have to download the entire dataset. There are a lot of queries that cannot be done exclusively through an index and require downloading a substantial amo…

You can still own your value as long as you have private keys. There's layers of abstractions built on top of it to make it comfortable for every day use and these may be owned by local institutions, but you retain the possibility to own your value no matter where you are located or where you move to without having to depend on some single entity.

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

#768

Post by adhoc32 »

mrpopo wrote: post #725
adhoc32 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is correct, my mistake. Anyway, Bitcoin is neither of them.

As long as the vast majority of Bitcoin owners are HODLing and not using it, it's behaving as a Ponzi. Bitcoin has a few uses, but getting rich speculating on it isn't one.

Bitcoin bubbles burst all the time. Everyone have the opportunity to buy "cheap". Why do you care if some people take the risk to "hodl"? You can still get in (and take the same risk) without buying _their_ coins.

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

#769

Post by namelessone »

boublepop wrote: post #709
Lorin wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bitcoin is not a viable hedge against a global economic downturn. Just because people push these narratives doesn’t make them true. There is absolutely no evidence that Bitcoin would not crash just as fast or faster than the economy. There are other viable assets that have well studied and well documented track histories. Crypto currencies are best compared to pink sheets prior to increased regulation, and no one in…

>There are other viable assets that have well studied and well documented track histories.

can you expand on that?

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

#770

Post by xapata »

imtringued wrote: post #701
xapata wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a static rather than unconstrained supply make something a LESS good store of value? Because a healthy capitalist economy needs an incentive to invest. A steady, low, positive inflation rate is essential to encouraging those with capital to rent that capital out to those who need it for productive uses.

You're absolutely correct. USD is a poor store of value, by design, because productive activity is better than unproductive activity. However, this doesn't say anything about Bitcoin, other than that it fails to be relevant as a currency. The reason why Bitcoin is a poor store of value is that owning Bitcoin doesn't guarantee that there will be an economy in the future that actually provides value equivalent to the v…

The question was about "static rather than unconstrained supply" not the relation to real wealth.
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