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Bitcoin is over $100k

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Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#112
post #25
post #10

Important to remember that while income and wealth inequality is at record highs, the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still floating around among the top. People are getting more and more creative with investments (see luxury watches, sneakers, trading cards, collectibles, meme stocks all seeing a significant bump in value in recent years). Bitcoin's price is simply another symptom of this. What I…

I just struggle to see it's utility

What is the utility of a baseball trading card or a piece of art sitting in a bank vault?

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#113
$1k, $10k, $100k. Watching this nonsensical hype at every stage left me in disbelief. Funny thing is after all these years I’m finally realizing there’s no reason whatsoever why it couldn’t hit $1M, $1B, or go back to $1.

Anytime we see a dollar symbol we assume something has value like a traditional asset, tied to tangible or measurable things like material costs, a company’s quarterly earnings, etc. But cryptocurrencies are totally different. This thing’s dollar value per unit wildly fluctuates literally hourly, because it’s based purely on human emotion and speculation.

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#114

I just don't understand why you'd choose Bitcoin over gold. Gold, like Bitcoin, was criticized for just being a stupid store of value, but that wasn't completely true as it undoubtedly had some utility in the economy. Worst case comes and the market crashes, you know there's at least someone somewhere buying. What does Bitcoin get you over gold? The same "it's scarce and therefore valuable" narrative so you can store…

To follow up on the idea.

It HAS a physical tie: it is the energy spent to run the chain, which is, however, backward to gold being a material. And it's not to the advantage of the owners, but of the miners.

I can easily see a catastrophic scenario out of this: a downward spiral of value happens for XY reason, and then a halving happens. That makes the mining of it suddenly highly costly, which makes it uninteresting, or less and less profitable to mine, which renders the chain slower and less popular, etc.

However, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin is still on the rise, and we won't see such a downward spiral before many halvings (20 years? That's a lot of GWh lost to useless computing...)

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#117
Whatever your theory of Bitcoin is, it has to incorporate that its 50% price increase is directly tied to the US election outcome.

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#118
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire economy outside of agriculture and real estate is basically "bullshit", if you really think about it. The ratio of bullshit to everything else seems to increase over time, though, as a general trend. It's probably correlated to technology.

Agriculture and real estate would not exist in their current forms without the mammoth apparatus of the entire economy surrounding them. Maybe you mean food and shelter are the only non-bull parts of the economy. Nomadic bands might find them bullshittish. And grain stores require soldiers to guard them, soldiers require weapons, weapons require metallurgy, mining, surveying, transport, etc. Pretty soon there’s a who…

Even with nomads, they had territory they could live in or not live in, based on the existence of other tribes. I was clumping that in with real estate. Even animals do this (for example wolves). And obviously in the feudal system land was a big deal.

And yes technological arms races exist but they are often power games between governments, although in some cases a tribe could become a genocide victim if nobody wants to participate in the military effort. So in that case I agree it's maybe not bullshit, but it depends on the behavior of the neighbors.

Energy is a free source of energy from the sun plus it gets stored for free in various ways (such as vegetation). So that doesn't really have to be factored into the discussion.

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#119

Why hell does this keep going up? Can you pretty much just buy at any point in time and be guaranteed a 10x return?

A part of the valuation comes from miners who gets their returns cut by half every ~4 years. They have an interest in having the price (at least) double by then.

So how do they do it? How do they just keep doubling the price?

Re: Bitcoin is over $100k

#120
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polymarket, Bitrefill, Stake

Gambling, money laundering, and more gambling. This is just a repeat of all the companies that promised people could get rich using them, then the price collapsed and they all died.

Question was asking for companies doing well that weren’t exchanges.
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