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Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

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Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#71
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key.

This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:

The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.

The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

And why are/were they used as currency?

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#73
post #17

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede? But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncracka…

Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#74
post #44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you. The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.

A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.

How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking?

History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#75
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

And why are/were they used as currency?

They’re durable, resistant to corruption, relatively rare, pretty… Titanium or gems would’ve been equally used if they were equally convenient. Not to mention that coinage could be minted or mixed with, say, copper. Gold makes good alloys and can be recovered later.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#76
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

And why are/were they used as currency?

> And why are/were they used as currency?

Because there was no useful alternative and/or we didn't know better.

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency and jewelry for a long time.

> Gold and silver, besides industrial uses, have been used both as currency […]

So has credit, with documented uses earlier (Ur III, 3000BC) than gold (Lydians, 600BC).

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#78
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate. How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up. Gold is currently priced way above th…

Gold is also one of the best heat conductors so if it got really cheap it could be used a lot in industry and electronics. Anything from cookware to heat sinks!

Re: Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

#79
post #59
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up. Gold is currently priced way above th…

> A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)

I read 7% of 2024 demand is industrial. Gold ended 2024 at $2600.
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