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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

#771

Post by mlyle »

differentView wrote: post #635
whoanow wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If bitcoin price continues to rise, wouldn't the power cost become relatively smaller? Wouldn't miners care less?

The amount of money for a given amount of energy spent mining you get is effectively Bitcoin price / difficulty.

If Bitcoin price goes up, then the return on energy gets greater. Therefore, it's worth it to spend more energy mining. Then difficulty rises and takes this incentive away, reaching a new equilibrium with more energy spent.

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

#772

Post by cromka »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #317
kungito wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup, same. Hell if I put in money now and it did 2x and went to $100k, I'd get out, too. There's just no way I see myself not getting out at $100k or say $200k. And I'm not risking my money on an investment that can 'only' do 2x or 4x. Bitcoin was cool as it could do 10x or 100x in the span of 1-2 years. But with the numbers where they're at and knowing myself, I'd cash out way before that. In the end because bitcoin…

I made 30k in ETH this year and cashed out at $1275. "Lost" $13k by not waiting longer. Do I regret? I had no way of knowing. I just pulled the trigger, with my guts telling me "this is probably ripe for a blow up now". There's no way of knowing what the "collective mind" decides once the big players start selling off.

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

#773

Post by selestify »

graeme wrote: post #554
tippytippytango wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want an answer to that question? Feels more like your are taking the temperature of the top minds of HN to decide if it's cool to like bitcoin yet.

HN loved bitcoin circa 2011 and in the few years after that. Wish I’d paid attention. As you have made a totally new account you probably weren’t around for this.

When did the shift happen and why?

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

#774

Post by vinger »

jodrellblank wrote: post #745
vinger wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you bought 11 months ago at 5,000 you would have made 10x cashing out today. It's never too late to buy in and if so there are other coins.

You could have made 10x on Tesla (TSLA) last year from March to December from ~$85 to ~$860 and at least Tesla has a factory, employees, a product, plans for future products and expansion of some kind, exists within a legal system, is on an exchange with some regulation, etc.

I feel safer with bitcoin. The reasons for it to exist are more solid than if Musk's helicopter goes down tomorrow.

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

#775

Post by DSingularity »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #616
DSingularity wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider fundamental value? Seems to me that people are willing to pay 50,000$ a BTC and companies are willing to hoard it. How is that not evidence that it has value?

Productive capital. Financial speculation is fun and all but it has to remain a sideshow to the real economy, since we fundamentally rely on individuals and companies investing in the creation of more productive capital. If it ever came to pass that hodling Bitcoin was actually the best use of money because it somehow became a universal deflationary currency, then the government would have to step in and deploy its m…

Overall a good answer but I wonder if this direction of thought applies to something like BTC or can even be broadly applied in general. It seems to me that it is difficult to measure the productivity of a decentralized asset like BTC. Maybe it’s even harder to compare it to asset classes which produce physically consumable products as we are talking about a new way to define value in the digital era.

There is some truth to the meme whose idea is that — in the end — you won’t care what the dollar value of BTC is. What happens when .25 BTC becomes a model s? To churn a profit in this trade Tesla needs to acquire the materials an labor for less than .25 BTC. Full stop. This is a paradigm shift because this has never happened before for decentralized, algorithmically sound digital money.

I’m just a lay person but that is, to me, the fundamental value. Who knows, maybe this will have a broad effect across industries the same way that the internet came and effected everything.

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

#777

Post by ad31mar »

peteretep wrote: post #489
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…

“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

Nopes. Full nodes.

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

#778

Post by didibus »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #619
didibus wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge for Tesla and Elon is that I don't see the exit strategy? If Elon sells off his Tesla shares in any sizable quantity, it seems the stock would drop massively. If Elon steps down his involvement or passed away, same thing. So it seems it needs to keep on the show until Tesla can actually sustain its value somehow through normal business operations.

Execs in any public company routinely sell shares at a pre-determined rate every quarter. Execs besides Elon have been selling as part of the plan, and company employees are free to sell as well. According to SEC filings, Elon himself hasn't sold any recently, but he owns 20% of Tesla, worth about $10B today. Even if Tesla drops 10x, he would have $100M worth of shares. Not to mention all his other assets, shares in…

> He has more money than he will ever need

Sure, he also probably takes a salary for his role at the companies as well. Still, there's a reason he continues to work I'd assume? It might be he truly wants to get electric car on the road, or it could be he wants more money. In both cases you could ask: "Can Tesla survive his inevitable exit?"

So ignoring Elon's motivations here, as maybe he just has fun running Tesla, who knows, still the question is relevant to other investors into the Tesla stock, and for Tesla's employees.

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

#779

Post by ad31mar »

tylerhou wrote: post #443
disruptalot wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Bitcoiners talk about "inflation" they don't mean inflation of prices. They mean loss of purchasing power. Demand-pull inflation in fact is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin and bitcoiners would agree. There's huge demand for bitcoin and an ever reduction of circulating supply. What that means is that it can maintain/increase purchasing power incredibly relative to other assets that have unconstrained and e…

Demand-pull inflation is not happening with Bitcoin. Again, inflation refers to the devaluation of currency. If the purchasing power of Bitcoin goes up, Bitcoin is deflating, not inflating. Maybe you are trying to say that the USD is inflating (w/ demand-pull inflation) because USD is becoming less valuable, relative to Bitcoin. But that theory is still problematic, since you can't measure inflation against just one…

> But that theory is still problematic, since you can't measure inflation against just one asset.

How about another two? Like equities and real estate. Still not inflation?

CPI is a scam - it now includes 80,000+ items muting the shit out of the dramatic price changes in the stuff you actually want and need.

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

#780

Post by ad31mar »

tylerhou wrote: post #338
oraphalous wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The demand for USD is robust because people need USD to pay taxes..." You cite this a priori - but it's so much more complicated than this. Demand is intimately connected with supply in many cases. Soemtimes this can be because demand is latent. If production of food goes through the roof - and people were previously starving because the price of food was too high, then that latent demand will be released when suppl…

Citing "latent demand" or "induced demand" as counter-evidence to my original statement shows your (mis)understanding of basic economics. In fact, basic economics predicts "latent demand" for ordinary goods! > But currency is different - opposite even. If supply goes through the roof - then demand will respond inversely. This is terrible reasoning. It depends on why that supply is going through the roof. Maybe the su…

> Hint: increased demand for the USD is why the Fed is increasing the supply -- to keep the price stable.

Oh yeah, good luck taking vacations in Europe this year.

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