Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 163 posts

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#71

Post by kromokromo »

Bitcoin as a digital store of value is fine. It makes sense to store money in something digital and secure to hedge against local instabilities in currencies, governments etc. People store money in it because it currently secure and it been battle tested, nobody has been able to hack it.

However, I am concerned about the security model on a 5-10+ year perspective. Miners secure the blockchain and get paid for it in bitcoins. We have seen that the mining has become more and more sentralized as the mining gets progressively harder (as by design). Progressively harder mining means that the price of bitcoin must rise in pararell to cover the expenses of the miners securing the network.

Here are my concerns:

- Increasingly centralized mining means a higher risk of a 51% attack (controlling 51% means you control the entire network).

- Bitcoin not able to maintain a constant price growth that will lower the incentive to keep mining as the difficulity increases.

- Quantum Computing actually cracking the encryptions which will kill the entire network instantly.

- Instability in the world might lead to spikes in electricity prices, which will affect the incentive to secure the network with mining.

I also think spending so much energy on security, when there are other viable options available is insane in our current age.

Transitioning to a Proof of Stake model like Ethereum instead of a Proof of Work model would be much more robust with a fraction of the power consumption, but thats just my opinion.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#72

Post by shadowmanif »

devjab wrote: post #22
the_duke wrote: post #8

Are there theories why Trump getting elected caused such a spike? Expected sanctions devaluing other currencies, higher risk of conflict (eg Iran -Israel/US war) causing economic instability, ... ?

Weren’t the last spike in crypto prices mostly done by major holders who needed to unload? I admit I don’t follow it very closely but I seem to recall some Danish articles about it essentially being a form of market manipulation largely unrelated to anything that was actually happening in the world. I’m probably wrong though.

You are probably partially right but there are many levels to this game.

Microstrategy is also running a pyramid scheme. Surely, there are also hedge funds in the space playing all kinds of games.

It is interesting how the digital Yuan is rolling out right now as part of HarmonyOS NEXT while the stupid west waste time with these digital currencies that can't function well as actual currency.

At the highest level, I suspect this is a brilliant game of currency Kung Fu.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#73

Post by [deleted] »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #50
TrackerFF wrote: post #7

Duplicate comment from the other thread: 11 years ago I sold 100 BTC, and made pretty good money. With that said, the more I think about BTC, the less sense it makes to me. Exceedingly few people actually use it for anything practical. The “store of value” functionality has completely eclipsed the practical use that Bitcoin maxis were preaching back then. Since 2016-2017, it seems like people have bought it for the s…

BTC was designed as a drop-in replacement for both the USD and SWIFT for processing transactions. If it were successful, it would be a grave threat to the US financial position. Trump recently issued threats to BRICS nations for contemplating issuing a common currency with precisely those same aims.[1] If BTC was on the verge of realizing its purpose, Trump would work equally hard to burn it down. So, who knows if BT…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#74

Post by wslh »

TrackerFF wrote: post #7

Duplicate comment from the other thread: 11 years ago I sold 100 BTC, and made pretty good money. With that said, the more I think about BTC, the less sense it makes to me. Exceedingly few people actually use it for anything practical. The “store of value” functionality has completely eclipsed the practical use that Bitcoin maxis were preaching back then. Since 2016-2017, it seems like people have bought it for the s…

In 2015, we paid 20.4 bitcoins for a comic book [1] signed by several key contributors to the cryptocurrency space, including Nick Szabo (known for his work on smart contracts) and Adam Back (the inventor of Proof of Work). A glimpse of these signatures is available on page 4 of this whitepaper [2].

Today, I view cryptocurrency prices as just another signal within the broader economy. While some of my companies focus on cryptocurrency research, security, and development I am not obsessed with trading.

[1] https://bitcoinist.com/meet-the-guys-who-paid-10-thousand-do...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#75

Post by api »

bsenftner wrote: post #57
api wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is full of engineers, founders, etc. who kind of resent that there’s a large class of people who got rich doing nothing and creating no value. I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value). There's a lot of value-fre…

As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this…

Devils advocate / steel man reply: isn't that what all currencies are?

Why does the Federal Reserve US dollar have value? Because people trust other smart people who say they've done the work and trust other smart people who work for the Federal Reserve.

Money is a thing people agree upon as a medium of exchange. It is not value itself. Value is the people, places, and things that make up the actual economy. Bitcoin has no value but neither does the USD. Can't eat them. Can't build a house with them.

My problem with Bitcoin is that I don't think a hyper-deflationary currency is a good idea. Bitcoin is even more deflationary than gold due to breakage (loss of keys) and a hard mining limit.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#76

Post by gbnwl »

Retric wrote: post #67
gbnwl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s huge fears around AGI, but that’s not what people are building. Everyone is trying to build this.

“Trying” is an overly generous interpretation of what’s going on. Training an LLM is not actually working on AGI just as people building skyscrapers aren’t getting to the moon. It’s an inherent limitation on the approach.

Training LLMs is not the only thing people are trying. They dominate the public attention right now but there are people everywhere trying all kinds of approaches. Here's one from IBM: https://research.ibm.com/topics/neuro-symbolic-ai

First sentence: "We see Neuro-symbolic AI as a pathway to achieve artificial general intelligence"

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#78

Post by echoangle »

vasco wrote: post #62
echoangle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s still a clear opposite for many predictions. If someone says he’s betting on stock X, the opposite would be to go short. And if someone says the stock is overpriced, you buy it.

No, that is literally the fallacy. If someone says he's betting on stock X, the opposite is not to go short. That's one way of doing "not what he did". Another way of doing "not what he did" is to for example sell a PUT, because maybe you think it's just going to stay flat. Another way is to not do anything, and instead wait, because going short costs money (you're borrowing a stock and borrowing fees on it), and so…

Isn’t selling puts „going short“? I understand „going short“ as „betting the stock is going down“, not literally selling shorts. But I’m also not a daytrader, so I’m not clear on the words used.

And not doing anything clearly isn’t the opposite. If someone says he’s going North, what’s the opposite of that? It would be going south, even though you could go west or east too, or just do nothing. Just because it’s a spectrum with more than one dimension doesn’t mean that some actions don’t have an opposite action.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#79

Post by bondarchuk »

Retric wrote: post #44
zadler wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this way about AI. Oh wait, AI is actually an existential risk to humanity, also.

Generative AI is hardly an existential risk. There’s huge fears around AGI, but that’s not what people are building.

Look at (the comments on) the Genie announcement on the front page today or yesterday, and earlier generative "world models". People are itching to use those kind of models for the internal world representation of autonomous robots. More generally the fact that a model is "generative" does not mean it can not become an effective component in or pathway to AGI.
Post reply on HN