Earlier quoted context omitted.
>in the last 10 years Bitcoin has only gone up It was $19k in Dec 2017 and $3k in Dec 2018.
if you haven't sold*
It really depends on your definition of "only".
Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
821–830 of 830 posts
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#822Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Is 25% change in total money a modest change?
In perspective, yes it is. In a normal year you might expect M2 increase by 5%. Last year was special, of course. People are acting as if hyperinflation was right around the corner because M1 just doubled, ignoring that M1 quadrupled in the ten years before 2020 and that it didn't cause hyperinflation then either.
So, we just print 5x normal amount (which is also a big why) and it is all good.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you suggest hedging against the death of fiat currency without buying a non fiat currency?
Nigera is suffering from high inflation and their problem is that they aren't mechanizing their agriculture sector. The end result is that they import a lot of food and fail to export their cash crops. If the government borrowed/printed money and used it to grow the agriculture sector they could actually stave off inflation despite increasing the money supply.
As per usual, the major issue with fiat currency is how poorly the government is managing the country.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#824So 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…
When "the market" does something that somebody considers to be irrational, the explanation is almost certainly that they either simply don't understand it, or that they do understand it and they're just being judgemental about the motives at play. The reason it has value is because people have demand for it. People have demand for it for a variety of reasons. I think it's reasonable to presume that a non-trivial port…
And yet shorting exists and is hard, yet quite profitable. Sometimes the market gets it wrong because humans are fallible to herd mentality.
The question to ask is, do the fundamentals you mentioned justify the valuation?
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
In perspective, yes it is. In a normal year you might expect M2 increase by 5%. Last year was special, of course. People are acting as if hyperinflation was right around the corner because M1 just doubled, ignoring that M1 quadrupled in the ten years before 2020 and that it didn't cause hyperinflation then either.
So, we just print 5x normal amount (which is also a big why) and it is all good.
You can have a pandemic, or you can have liquidity crisis on top of a pandemic. Choose wisely.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#826Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amusing to see people on "Hacker" News afraid of the spooky tech that is Bitcoin :)
You are confusing skepticism with fear.
Thinking that merely using BTC is "like voluntarily adding yourself to a watch list" sounds more like fear than reasonable skepticism to me.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#827Earlier 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…
> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense. Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy. Is that even legal? It sounds like pumping and dumping.
Its bitcoin, there is no legal framework.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#828Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not what I meant, and that you're thinking this kinda proves my point. People holding onto Bitcoin hoping to get rich don't contribute to Bitcoin as a technology. They're making Bitcoin a speculative asset. Bitcoin is supposed to be used as currency. The vast majority of Bitcoin owners don't do that.
Of course they don't contribute to Bitcoin's technology, they are not coders. Using Bitcoin as a speculative asset is part of the adoption process. It is not yet a currency, it will take many years to be completely adopted. It's a natural process, I cannot imagine any other way for a decentralized currency like Bitcoin to become a global reserve currency. Can you?
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, we just print 5x normal amount (which is also a big why) and it is all good.
You can have a pandemic, or you can have liquidity crisis on top of a pandemic. Choose wisely.
Is that so? People have lived through pandemics when they were using gold as a medium of exchange. The pandemic is an excuse for printing money. I would prefer that debasing of fiat would not exist, i.e. there is only limited supply which can not be inflated arbitrarily.
Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto
#830Earlier quoted context omitted.
When "the market" does something that somebody considers to be irrational, the explanation is almost certainly that they either simply don't understand it, or that they do understand it and they're just being judgemental about the motives at play. The reason it has value is because people have demand for it. People have demand for it for a variety of reasons. I think it's reasonable to presume that a non-trivial port…
And yet shorting exists and is hard, yet quite profitable. Sometimes the market gets it wrong because humans are fallible to herd mentality. The question to ask is, do the fundamentals you mentioned justify the valuation?
> The question to ask is, do the fundamentals you mentioned justify the valuation?
Your mistake is to think that it should. The valuation is exclusively a result of the demand for the shares. Under typical circumstances that valuation will reflect "the market's" sentiment on the underlying business, in the context of the broader economy. But there are situations where the demand for shares can be temporarily influenced by factors other than the nature of the underlying business. The short sellers had contractually committed to having a certain level of demand in the future, and other market participants exploited this fact for their own benefit.
For that reason the price was temporarily misaligned with the underlying value. These temporary price fluctuations are a perfectly ordinary feature of any market, and can be caused by any number of different inefficiencies exerting a temporary influence on price before the market has time to correct itself. There's not much insight in commenting that a market is not perfectly efficient, because no market is. Events like this are remarkable because of their scale, but also because of how infrequently they occur. You could count all short squeezes of this scale on one hand. So what is the point of your comment? That massively inefficient pricing, while possible, almost never occurs?