So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?
According to Gresham's Law, people will always spend the worst money first.
Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
161–170 of 343 posts
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I use bitcoin and crypto pretty interchangeably) > Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware. The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all ro…
> Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools As of today the top 3 pools are 26%, 11%, 10%
> As of today the top 3 pools are 26%, 11%, 10%
Which is 47%. Add in the fourth on that list and you're >50%.
And over time the concentration of mining has increased:
* https://www.investopedia.com/investing/why-centralized-crypt...
Seems like more of an oligopoly to me as opposed to the 'for the people' kind of thing some folks talk about.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#163On top of a pro-bitcoin president and the ETF approvals there is a new commitment from MicroStrategy of $42B in bitcoin over the next 4 years
I think you will see this headline a lot
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any scenario where you're sufficiently careful with your private keys.
What happens when they bust out the $5 wrench?
They would need 300 million wrenches, one for each citizen. That leaves society in a much better position than letting them do it at scale with an sql query.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#165It has in dollar terms but it still hasn't on an inflation adjusted basis. One bitcoin today has less purchasing power than at its peak in November 2021. The dollar has lost about 12.5% since then so the true all time high would be around $79250.
This depends on one's consumer preferences. The CPI includes depreciating items that does not scale with income, like healthcare , cars, clothes, and food. Someone with a net worth of millions of dollars incurs likely a smaller opportunity cost.
But I agree despite the hype Bitcoin's returns are still poor and easily surpassed by the S&P 500.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#166[dead]
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have it charted against the Malaysian Ringgit. It was 347k BTC/MYR high this year, compared to 326k today.
this should be the real headline. I am certain and beyond any doubt that I speak for all of us hackernews readers when I say that I have no frame of reference on the value of cryptocurrencies without comparing first with the Malaysian Ringgit
Compare it to gold or silver. It has very stable price for centuries or even millennia, when compared to daily salary of skilled worker.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet?
> What's the scenario where the government can take the digital money from your bank accounts but can't take the digital money from your crypto wallet? In cryptocurrency's defense (I am not a Bitcoiner), it not as easy for them to do that, because they can't just order a bank to transfer it/freeze it....assuming the owner is going through a lot of elaborate, inconvenient, and easy to footgun security measures. If you…
These threads always leave me baffled. Some people say that only drug dealers use bitcoin. Others say the ratio of normal dudes to drug dealers is 1,000:1 or more. I guess it depends what sounds convenient at the time.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dividends provide a real income stream people live off of, bitcoins need buyers. It’s the difference between owning a farm and a gold bar.
There are plenty of companies whose stock is sought after but that never paid dividends (I think Tesla and Amazon are some example, or used to be at least)
It’s not really about dividends. If you buy a share of Amazon stock, you’re getting a cut of the value that a million+ people are producing every day by writing code or moving stuff around. The value most workers create for their employers’ shareholders is much bigger than their rent check, and capturing that value is even easier than being a landlord. Dividends are just moving money from one pocket to the other, the value created by people’s work is where the returns come from. Financial returns without value creation are an anomaly, though not necessarily a rare or short-lived one.
Re: Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not downvote you, but I want to respond to your question instead of taking the approach of weaponizing hn votes to simply suppress perspectives I disagree with, and I'd encourage my pro-crypto friends to do the same. We have to treat dissenters and critics with the same open-minded, good-faith, respectful dialogue we want them to offer us. I don't mean to suggest I'm not a biased partisan, but I will be a good-…
(I use bitcoin and crypto pretty interchangeably) > Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware. The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all ro…
Thank you for offering your criticisms respectfully and in good faith.
>Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin network?
No. Another thing I love about Bitcoin is that it's totally open source, and the open source ethos carries through the whole ecosystem. Because all transactions conducted onchain are relatively transparent compared to say, SWIFT exchanges, there are a lot of resources online to verify things like this. At the time of writing, the largest pool (Digital Foundry) currently has less than 1/3 of the total network hashrate. See for yourself here. https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin
>It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware.
This is a fair criticism, the average individual is not the typical profile of a miner. In truth, companies are the typical profiles of miners. For better or worse, this is how most of humanity collectively organizes efforts that require scale beyond what one person can offer, and that's increasingly true regardless of whether you're in a communist country or a capitalist one. A state-run enterprise is still an enterprise, after all. But it's not impossible for individuals to educate themselves for free, save up money for dedicated hardware, and participate. It may be financially restrictive to buy top of the line machines for people living in third world countries, but there are USB-scale ASIC miners that offer similar efficiency for under $100 USD. Now, the expected yield on these after electricity costs are factored in may be negative, so I'm not encouraging anyone to do this without doing their homework. A search engine query for "BTC mining profitability calculator" will bring you to many tools that let you specify your mining hardware and electricity prices for more precise estimates.
>The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all rose tinted theory.
Like I said, I am a biased partisan here, and I do tend to focus on the strongest presentation of what Bitcoin can be, this is a fair criticism.
>In theory, bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. In reality it’s just another thing, akin to a collectible, that is bought and sold. Its value is based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what you can do with a bitcoin.
I'm buying, even at all time highs, and I'm willing to pay, because I believe in what Bitcoin can be. If you think I'm the metaphorical "fool being parted from his money", I'd invite you to take the other side of the trade and profit from my willingness to buy what I see value in. That's how markets set prices, that's how we're supposed to do this.
>In theory, bitcoin is government proof, in reality governments all over the world place restrictions on trading crypto. It’s so difficult to trade bitcoin for fiat without going through some kind of bank, that governments still have enough control as to make the “government proof” argument moot.
I am sorry if I gave the impression that Bitcoin is completely and impregnably government proof. When I said that "Bitcoin makes it fundamentally and systemically difficult to exercise force against the network to shove in changes that the actual users of Bitcoin do not want", I didn't mean to suggest that makes it impossible, just fundamentally and systemically difficult - i.e. it has been deliberately designed to resist that pressure.
>Just look at the price of monero after being delisted from Coinbase in anticipation of US regulation.
Monero is a very different idea than Bitcoin, and while I am also a big fan of Monero, it is outside the scope of my advocacy for Bitcoin in the comment section of a post about Bitcoin.
>At worst, bitcoin (and crypto) is a greater fools game. You gain bitcoin with the only utility being that its price swings so much that you can sell it for a profit.
That's not the only utility I find in it. I will keep being the fool. I am buying at $75k+, I will be buying at $750k+, I will be buying at $7.5m+.
>At best, it’s just another payment system owned by very wealthy people. (Like ethereum)
This may be true from an objective point of view, but it's also true that the current alternative, the US dollar, is definitely not just owned, but controlled by the very wealthy, and is also used to coerce and internationally bully, in ways that Bitcoin does not allow.
>There’s a lot of theoretical benefits to decentralized currencies and governance free economies, but crypto (at least the cryptocurrencies we have today) embodies none of that and practically is a vehicle for gaming and scamming, as we’ve seen.
I'm familiar with Bitcoin's historical connection with scammers and bad actors. New technology tends to be adopted early by those who will profit from it. Pagers and cell phones were huge with drug dealers and sex workers. That isn't a condemnation of pagers and cell phones, is it?
By 'gaming', do you mean like 'gaming the system' / fraud, or like video games? If the latter, I'm not familiar with that. Could you please elaborate further?