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

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#111

Post by icedchai » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #108

icedchai wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're defining "self made" to fit a very narrow definition. All the things you say are true to an extent, but it's not black-and-white. Would you consider Bill Gates self made, considering the magnitude of his achievements, etc?

Not only did he have the advantages that access to a computer in the 70s had, his dad's lawyer helped him with a good contract, and his mom set him up with the chairman of IBM But the key thing is if he'd failed, he had a cushion to fall back on. Had Microsoft gone the same way as many other computer companies, he could be confident he wouldn't end up on the streets.

But he succeeded... and created something worth many orders of magnitude in value compared to what he started with... I think that still counts as self made.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#112

Post by weird-eye-issue » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

raziel2701 wrote: post #28

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it is "supposed to help the common person"? That seems like a weird assumption to start at.

Because its proponents claim it's gonna make you rich. That you gotta board this rocket before it takes off to the moon. A lot of the propaganda I remember about bitcoin is that it was going to help bank the unbanked. What I see about btc is that people will tell you anything to get you to buy. The goalposts get moved and depending on who you talk to: "it's a store of value, no it's like a stock! No it's a currency!…

Yeah and people were saying that about GME at $400 or about every penny stock ever. You need to learn to sort through the noise.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#113

Post by axiosgunnar » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

iamben wrote: post #39

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…

I have thought about this as well but realised the following:

Let's say you are Swiss and are trying to buy something from Amazon and everything is priced in Euro - you also have to convert all the prices in your head. Is the Swiss Franc not a real currency anymore?

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#114

Post by noxer » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

iamben wrote: post #39

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…

To "measure" value we need to know the purchase power. People have no feeling for the purchase power of a highly volatile asset. hence most people convert the value to their local currency. We do this with gold/stocks/crypto. there is hardly any "deeper" meaning in that. its just how our brain can grasp what could be bought with X amount of asset Y. If the stable currency would loos this property we would use another. Like if the USD would become highly volatile or if there would be hyperinflation people would no longer convert to USD. there are plenty places where the local currency isn't stable and people convert asset value to something else usually a foreign currency like the USD or EUR.

Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value

#115

Post by loceng » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #48

loceng wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or they could lose it all when BTC crashes to the natural value of any completely hypothetical asset, which is zero." It'll be interesting who's left "holding the bag" once its the end of the MLM-ponzi scheme of who you can convince to buy into it - save regulatory capture somehow forcing the rest of society to buy into it.

> save regulatory capture somehow forcing the rest of society to buy into it. That's what happens, some little scheme gets too big to fail, so the taxpayer bails it out. Those that are in the schemes win, those that felt the scheme was stupid lose. I remember seeing adverts on the London underground for icelandic banks offer 5% more than any other savings account. I chuckled and thought "surely nobody's that gullible…

And this is exactly the attitude I have encountered before that's disgusting. Two wrongs don't make a right, you're happy to take advantage of a system that's broken instead of fixing the actual problems - because that takes actual work - instead of just buying Bitcoin which then aligns a whole bunch of financially incentivized MLM propagandists.