Bitcoin hits $1T in market value • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#31

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #26

raziel2701 wrote: post #19

~2.3% of addresses own ~95% of all bitcoins. [1] How is a cryptocurrency with this type of wealth inequality supposed to help the common person? It's already centralized, thus easy to manipulate. Bitcoin is reproducing the same type of wealth distribution we see in real life. What exactly does btc offer? I don't understand how one can look at this distribution of bitcoins, where essentially the 1% owns most of it and…

The distribution of capital allocation doesn’t change by adopting a non-central bank based monetary system. The thing you can choose is who is doing the capital allocation: Satoshi / Winklewoss brothers / Chamath / Elon Musk / Michael Saylor, or Trump / Biden / Putin / Christine Lagarde. If you like Biden and Jerome Powell, keep your money in USD. If you like Putin, buy RUB. If you prefer the libertarian crowd, buy B…

Currency is not a fandom.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#32

Post by notwedtm » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

t0mbstone wrote: post #8

ratsmack wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the Gamestop fiasco to Bitcoin, Gamestop just looks like normal market activity, where Bitcoin looks like criminal pump and dump activity... in my opinion.

But bitcoin has been "pumped and dumped" so many times now that most of the people who were early investors have already cashed out long ago. What you are left with now is all the people who bought the bitcoin after it had already been pumped and dumped, and they aren't willing to sell it for less than they bought it for. This means that the perceived value of the asset is now based on the notions held by millions of…

How does this track with the fact that it's at the ATH right now, and has been steadily going up for some time?

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#33

Post by adhoc32 » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #21

bpodgursky wrote: post #10

Calculation of market cap is interesting, because we (almost certainly) know that a good fraction — as much as 20% — of mined bitcoins are lost forever through accidental key destruction. So you have to adjust this market cap by the remaining, probably liquid, pool.

There are some indexing sites that do that.

How? It's impossible to know if someone has lost his private keys or the address is dormant.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#34

Post by 627467 » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

raziel2701 wrote: post #19

~2.3% of addresses own ~95% of all bitcoins. [1] How is a cryptocurrency with this type of wealth inequality supposed to help the common person? It's already centralized, thus easy to manipulate. Bitcoin is reproducing the same type of wealth distribution we see in real life. What exactly does btc offer? I don't understand how one can look at this distribution of bitcoins, where essentially the 1% owns most of it and…

I'm wondering what is the wealth distribution of Fiat, using the criteria you set.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#35

Post by GoldenMonkey » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…

Oh, it's a lot more than $1,000 to $1,300 in a week. If you had invested your $1,200 stimulus check in Bitcoin. It would now be worth $7,200.

Where else can the average person make 6x's their money. And, it has already made plenty of average people. Millionaires.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#36

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

hntrader wrote: post #14

Question about energy usage: roughly how much does it increase as a function of transaction volume? If 10x the number of people start getting involved and transaction volume increases 10x as a result, will the network use 10x the energy?

Transaction volume on-chain is capped by block size, I thought?

"Fortunately", most transactions aren't on the chain and are done in exchanges by good old RDBMS-column-of-numbers technology.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#37

Post by hntrader » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

jonathanaird wrote: post #23

hntrader wrote: post #14

Question about energy usage: roughly how much does it increase as a function of transaction volume? If 10x the number of people start getting involved and transaction volume increases 10x as a result, will the network use 10x the energy?

It has no relation to transaction volume. It is related to the price of BTC and the block reward every 10 minutes. The higher the price, the more miners compete to find a block. Transaction volume can never increase because they have capped the block size at 1mb.

Good to know, appreciate the explanation. So these estimates that it uses about the same energy as Argentina are probably based on a rather old price and we could get to many multiples of that if the price keeps increasing?

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#38

Post by vmception » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

adhoc32 wrote: post #33

vmception wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some indexing sites that do that.

How? It's impossible to know if someone has lost his private keys or the address is dormant.

They guess/assume with some addresses, like Satoshi's or the EC2 instance that was destroyed with the private key and all the customer's funds haven't moved since 2012

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#39

Post by iamben » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…

All the "what if" is always pegged to another currency.

I don't know anyone that prices anything in just BTC (it's all BTC converted from USD or whatever, because anything else would be madness) - and I don't know anyone that doesn't peg their bitcoin to what they'd get if they sold it for "real money".

Which makes me think any endgame isn't going to be the utopian, governmentless, money-freedom future I keep hearing promised.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#40

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

GoldenMonkey wrote: post #35

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…

Oh, it's a lot more than $1,000 to $1,300 in a week. If you had invested your $1,200 stimulus check in Bitcoin. It would now be worth $7,200. Where else can the average person make 6x's their money. And, it has already made plenty of average people. Millionaires.

People were saying this about Gamestop, and I need to remind you that the value can go down as well as up: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9219447/GameStop-lo...