231–240 of 350 posts
I remember when people used to first talk about Bitcoin on HN back in early 2011 or so. The price was only $2 then. Congrats to anyone who had some and held onto it this long - personally I sold off mine in 2015 (big mistake in hindsight).
big mistake in hindsight
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…
> it is a speculative investment and nothing more. Mostly yes. The only true value I see is that Bitcoin is the new Swiss banking. So if you don’t trust your government then you get yourself some Bitcoins. I realized this while reading a book about Swiss banking. It also used to involve elaborate schemes to preserve client privacy.
Just like many bitcoins got irrevocably lost on broken hard drives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember that this is a zero-sum game, for every winner that made it big, they are thousands more that had to pay up for their success.
Markets are not a zero sum game. When the price goes up, it goes up for all holders.
Sounds like btc is good for large amount of transfer as relatively low cost but not really ready for day to day expenses like gas/grocery. Yes?
People gave up on using BTC as an actual currency long ago. It's solely an investment vehicle now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly does BTC store any more value than an NFT?
Fungibility is one of the important properties of money. So a non-fungible token has less ability to accrue monetary value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Properties
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did it fail at being P2P e-cash? You can use bitcoin completely/as anonymously as cash if you wanted to, the same way you’d have to put in a bit of effort to have a completely anonymous cash transaction. Monero (XMR) which is a fork of bitcoin, is much closer to actual cash
Monero is fine. But how can you even use bitcoin anonymously now? Even wasabi and samourai wallet are shut down as far as i know. Seems highly risky to use any tool like that since i dont know what the consequences will be in the future. Joinmarket? I'm sure it is possible but it is error-prone, takes so much effort, time and fees that i see it as a failure
Sounds like btc is good for large amount of transfer as relatively low cost but not really ready for day to day expenses like gas/grocery. Yes?
The idea that everyone will run custodial BTC/Lightning wallets is also rubbish. In the future, there will be institutions that do what banks do today: Give out accounts, which are non-custodial wallets like your todays online banking, and settle transfers with other banks in bulk by doing actual BTC onchain transactions.
Average Joe in 2040 will not run his own wallet but use an external service provider - just as Joe is not a member of the SWIFT transaction network, he will not be settling debt with BTC transactions but rather have an "account" and pay with whatever L2/L3 technology we will come up with.
It will be like in the gold-standard days. You had the right to exchange your paper dollars for gold, but no-one ever did. Yet every transaction was backend by gold, just as every L2/L3 transaction will be backed by bitcoin, though no onchain transaction will happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it has been a bubble and popped/crashed/recovered 4(?) times now - it seem fair to start considering it as a cycle rather than a bubble. I don’t know much about crypto or finance, so maybe I’m completely wrong
I wonder if it is something about it feeling like the digital future. As long as the future never arrives, there's always some potential? Other bubbles were pegged to more well-defined trends?