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

The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 161 posts

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#121

Post by omio »

beefield wrote: post #98
omio wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin may be a finite supply but cryptocurrencies in general are infinite. So can you really say it is a fixed monetary system?

Each one of the cryptocurrencies I have encountered relies on the idea that the supply is somehow predefined. Give me a cryptocurrency whose supply is adjusted based on the needs of their users and I am interested. Give me a cryptocurrency that allows heavily negative interest rates for savings to embrace current consumption in the economy over hoarding of "money" and I am interested. But these are complete anathema…

It can be done easily. I would say it will be done in the future by governments and forced on us. The amount of control a government would have with a forced cryptocurrency is the only problem I see.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#122

Post by _pdp_ »

gberger wrote: post #117
_pdp_ wrote: post #115

Not sure if this is true but I heard that currently less then 1% of the world population holds bitcoin deposits. Only a handful of people are holding large bitcoin deposits. Now if you believe that Bitcoin will get widely adopted then why is it so difficult to believe that the price will go up? And why do you care how much a single bitcoin is worth? As if we are going to be trading in whole bitcoin numbers. Fractions…

1%? I would have guessed 0.1 - 0.2%.

I thought about this too when I was writing my comment but then I was also hoping that someone else will correct me.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#123

Post by thisisit »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #11

Frankly I'm astounded by the vitriol toward Bitcoin on HN. Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world (unlike most of the BS startups coming out of SV), and yet all these voices on HN poo-pooing Bitcoin appear (to me at least) to outweigh those who are willing to give it a shot. Why is this? Do people fear what they don't understand? Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? Does Bitcoin's succ…

There are both sides to this argument, there have been posts which ask the opposite - why does every bitcoin post gets voted up so quickly. And frankly no thread goes without someone asking - but what is the "world changing" use case for bitcoin? There are no straight forward answers.

Then there is the constant use of strawman like you did here with internet question.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#124

Post by BLanen »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #11

Frankly I'm astounded by the vitriol toward Bitcoin on HN. Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world (unlike most of the BS startups coming out of SV), and yet all these voices on HN poo-pooing Bitcoin appear (to me at least) to outweigh those who are willing to give it a shot. Why is this? Do people fear what they don't understand? Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? Does Bitcoin's succ…

The fact that you believe it can change the world is the reason of the hatred.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#125

Post by BLanen »

krupan wrote: post #99
UncleMeat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses like seven orders of magnitude less per transaction.

Citation? And remember a Bitcoin transaction is cash moving from my account to yours. Not just a promise of cash, after a few days of settlement, if no chargeback happens

You really think that a wire transfer takes a week's household of energy(Because that's the current energy per btc transaction)...?

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#126

Post by madisfun »

craigc wrote: post #113
adrianveidt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would volatility decrease in case of mass adoption?

When Bitcoin was $10 a $1 move in price was a 10% change. When Bitcoin was $100 then a $1 move in price was a 1% change. When Bitcoin was $1000 then a $1 move in price was a 0.1% change. If Bitcoin gets mass adoption then the price per Bitcoin could be $50,000 (assume $1 trillion market cap) or higher. At that point a $1 market movement would be a 0.002% change. To get the same 10% movement as at $100 would require a…

> If Bitcoin gets mass adoption

That a big IF. And with the transaction costs it has, I don't see it getting mass adoption any time soon.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#127

Post by quickben »

mbrock wrote: post #75
quickben wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably wouldn't. You need something that scales if all are to use it. Bitcoin, in the current form doesn't at a level to replace Visa tap pay. For example, for a country of 20 million buying bagels on their way to work.

By this standard, gold and USD also don't really scale, because you can't send them fast enough. Interbank clearing is pretty slow. We already have exchanges and clearinghouses like Coinbase for example. It's easy to imagine a Bitcoin-backed payment infrastructure offered by Coinbase or a Visa-like consortium of exchanges. Of course this taps into a huge and messy ideological debate about what kind of thing Bitcoin o…

Whatever it ought to be, it should start by supporting more than 25M transactions a day.

I hear people preaching wider adoption by all means, but none tackles the limits.

I apologize, but it looks like the proponents want money in, and scarcity remaining.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#128

Post by mywittyname »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #11

Frankly I'm astounded by the vitriol toward Bitcoin on HN. Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world (unlike most of the BS startups coming out of SV), and yet all these voices on HN poo-pooing Bitcoin appear (to me at least) to outweigh those who are willing to give it a shot. Why is this? Do people fear what they don't understand? Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? Does Bitcoin's succ…

> Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world

Statements like this are, IHMO, the driver behind the BTC hate. It's the pure hyperbole typical of the tech scene.

It's not world-changing, it's just a payment processing platform. The decentralized aspect is interesting, but doesn't add value for most use cases. Venmo is free, super easy to use and there's little risk of my Mom permanently losing all of her funds from the account.

For the general public, the only thing BTC has changed in the world is it has given hackers the facilities to extort them.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#129

Post by conanbatt »

flunhat wrote: post #93
krupan wrote: post #79

The "blockchain" hype right now feels so much like "internet" hype in the late 1990's. Was that a bubble? Yes, but successful companies and technologies did emerge from it. People did make money too: those who started companies (even the companies that aren't around anymore), those who got lucky and invested in the few winners (like Yahoo), and those who invested broadly across the whole "internet" market.

I want to believe this argument so badly, but it's been 7 years and we still don't have a widely used application related to it. How much longer do we have to wait? While we're on this topic, why are all Ethereum projects so damn meta? Like, the top dapps are all recursively related to Ethereum in some way (like wallets for ethereum, different ways of spending ethereum etc.) If a technology is new and exciting, shoul…

I share the anxiety. Bitcoin has such a beautiful potential to move money from country to country, but you cant use it for that comfortably yet.

If only that use case were to become successful, it would provide tremendous value.

Re: The Bitcoin bubble – Greater fool theory

#130

Post by tom_mellior »

howlin wrote: post #119
tom_mellior wrote: post #112

Nothing in this article is new, but OK. Here is its conclusion: > If everyone tried to realise their Bitcoin wealth for millions, the market would dry up and the price would crash; [...]. And because investors know that could happen, there is every incentive to sell first. When the crash comes, and it cannot be too far away, it will be dramatic. Let's try this with something else: If everyone tried to realise their G…

Google shares represent a stake in Google's revenue stream. It has an intrinsic value beyond what you could currently sell a share at on the stock market. Likewise gold has some intrinsic value in manufacturing and ornamentation. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Its value is just what you can trade it for at the moment.

> Google shares represent a stake in Google's revenue stream. It has an intrinsic value [...]

I'm not up to date on Google specifically, but for a long time in its existence, it did not pay a dividend, so its shares did not represent a meaningful stake in Google's revenue stream. Did they have an intrinsic value anyway?

But regardless of your answer to that, my statement stands. If everyone holding Google stocks suddenly started selling them off, the price would crash. It's just very unlikely that it would happen. More likely for Bitcoin? Maybe, but people have made this doomsday argument for quite a while now, and so far it's not proven right.

Post reply on HN