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It can all go to zero

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Re: It can all go to zero

#351

Post by dang »

adamnemecek wrote: post #216
virgilp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you a story. My parents, before I was born, worked as teachers in Africa. They were sent via an agreement of our (communist) state with the Belgian government and were paid "expat" money. Only problem is, they knew that when they came back the government would take all their money (coerce them to exchange it at shit exchange rate, for a currency that was basically worthless). So they invested - they bough…

Let me preface this story by saying that your parents did a shit thing and I'm glad they were duly punished. Fuck ivory. But I'm getting distracted. Bitcoin is unlike your situation as with ivory you have to have physical contact with the shady person. With BTC you don't. People online don't care as much about dealing with shady people. It's also kinda hard to tell who's a shady person online.

What a nasty comment. You can't do that here. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

These cryptocurrency threads are reliably causing people to lose both their manners and their minds, and we're going to start moderating them down for a while until this madness blows over.

Re: It can all go to zero

#352

Post by gspetr »

adamnemecek wrote: post #245
softawre wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is so divisive you've managed to shit on his parents to win an argument. An argument that you then concede, saying that it doesn't matter whether BTC is legal or not because you can always sell it online. If it's illegal, doesn't it's value go way down? If you literally risk jailtime to sell it (or more accurate, to convert it to fiat eventually)

> Bitcoin is so divisive you've managed to shit on his parents to win an argument. Not really, I dislike the fact that he volunteers this information. Replace ivory with child pornography (ethically they aren't that different). Would you still defend op's parents? Also note, it was a side note, I didn't say it to win an argument. > If it's illegal, doesn't it's value go way down? If you literally risk jailtime to sel…

> ethically they aren't that different

Not the best things to compare. Builtin and culturally acquired anthropocentrism shall not be denied:

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Re: It can all go to zero

#353

Post by gspetr »

oreo81 wrote: post #163
Joeri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bug is discovered allowing fraudulent creation of bitcoins, and no easy or timely fix is possible. That or governments outlaw it entirely.

Governments outlawing numbers, that'll be the day.

In 2017, far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating 1,488 euro to a charity.

Re: It can all go to zero

#354

Post by adamnemecek »

dang wrote: post #351
adamnemecek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface this story by saying that your parents did a shit thing and I'm glad they were duly punished. Fuck ivory. But I'm getting distracted. Bitcoin is unlike your situation as with ivory you have to have physical contact with the shady person. With BTC you don't. People online don't care as much about dealing with shady people. It's also kinda hard to tell who's a shady person online.

What a nasty comment. You can't do that here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html These cryptocurrency threads are reliably causing people to lose both their manners and their minds, and we're going to start moderating them down for a while until this madness blows over.

I didn't say that due to crypto, I said it due to the poster bragging about his parents buying ivory.

Re: It can all go to zero

#355

Post by [deleted] »

akvadrako wrote: post #345
MichaelGG wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to zero. I'd personally pay $1, probably more, for even 10% of all Bitcoins, just for the novelty. If there were no miners, maybe not much more than that, and I'd want the current private keys. I'm guessing there's at least someone that'd pay a few million for all of Bitcoin, so maybe a $0.10-1.0 floor, easily? Would be illiquid and hard for small holders to sell though. Also, quantum computers do not break Bitco…

But if it did go to $1, mining would become unprofitable until the next adjustment. So the only way forward is the network to fork. Then you wouldn't own "the Bitcoins", just "a Bitcoins".

[deleted]

Re: It can all go to zero

#356

Post by prostoalex »

chocolatebunny wrote: post #92
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we talking about Bitcoin or all crypto? Either. Spinning up a cryptocurrency may become as mundane as creating up a database, as silly (or illegal) as trying to market a Ponzi-based hedge fund, or simply a pedagogical tool for CS students. There is nothing inherent to crypto that says it must hold value. Markets are moody.

There's nothing inherent to anything that says that anything must hold value.

It’s not about holding, it’s about backstop.

A company’s stock (or bond) is a right to get some compensation in case of dissolution, bankruptcy, or liquidation sale. A precious metal like gold still has a backstop value - it can be sold to electronics manufacturers to make those beautiful gold-plated audio cables. Diamonds have a backstop value of being used in boring and drilling. Vacated real estate can be converted to other uses.

All of those assets (when owned outright and not pledged) are unlikely to go to $0.

Re: It can all go to zero

#357

Post by gspetr »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

The comparison with the other company makes no sense. A company has a "single point of failure". At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who want Bitcoin to succeed. The market is huge at this point. Like NASDAQ is like 7T IIRC. Crypto is today ~550B. It was like ~750B not too long ago. Note how there's no glue joining the idea of the company and crypto. It could go down but it could also go really up…

> No buying or purchasing happens when things are priced at zero.

One could make a good argument that the air is worth zero.

Yet one would be wrong: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1205135...

Re: It can all go to zero

#358

Post by dang »

adamnemecek wrote: post #354
dang wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a nasty comment. You can't do that here. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html These cryptocurrency threads are reliably causing people to lose both their manners and their minds, and we're going to start moderating them down for a while until this madness blows over.

I didn't say that due to crypto, I said it due to the poster bragging about his parents buying ivory.

Yes, but that doesn't change anything.

Re: It can all go to zero

#359

Post by cableshaft »

CPLX wrote: post #343
cableshaft wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very insightful. It's all too easy to assume there's no use for something because you haven't seen it yet. There was a time when it didn't seem like there was going to be any commercial use for the internet either. In fact, I read a book written in back in 1914, about the history of aviation up to that point, that was talking about planes being used in WWI, and a sentence struck out at me that said something like "It…

This is patent nonsense. In 1911 the US government started extensive trials of using planes for air mail delivery which were an obvious success by the following year. The benefits of manned flight to the military, and having a spotter above the battlefield, let alone flying weapons, were massive and immediately apparent to a child. Maybe some writer was trying and failing to make some kind of point. I don't know the…

You're right, I misremembered the quote. I looked for the quote and I think I found it. This was in the book "Aircraft and Submarines The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons" by Willis J. Abbot.

"In 1917, at the time of writing this book, there are probably thirty distinct types of airplanes being manufactured for commercial and military use, and not less than fifty thousand are being used daily over the battlefields of Europe. No invention save possibly the telephone and the automobile ever attained so prodigious a development in so brief a time. Wise observers hold that the demand for these machines is yet in its infancy, and that when the end of the war shall lead manufacturers and designers to turn their attention to the commercial value of the airplane the flying craft will be as common in the air as the automobiles at least on our country roads."

I think what happened is that I was marveling that I was reading a book where it was talking about the history of aviation before there were actual airports and consumer uses for planes, and I was essentially tying that in with 'commercial' in my memory of the passage. Up until this point in the book he hadn't mentioned any real commercial uses, but further investigation revealed that there were actual commercial flights as early as 1914, so I was wrong about that as well.

Nevertheless, most people back in 1917 would not even begin to imagine where commercial flight would lead us to one hundred years later, especially with space flight, jumbo jets, super sonic jets, drones, etc. Give crypto one hundred years and I don't think anyone will still be saying "cryptocurrency is only good for contraband and speculation". Give people the chance to build the infrastructure around it.

Re: It can all go to zero

#360

Post by georgeecollins »

ejanus wrote: post #242
georgeecollins wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth currency

Some math ?

Total wealth of US households = 84.9 T http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-reco...

Total amount of US currency in circulation = 1.2 T https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html

Any way you want to figure it, the amount of wealth that exists does not correspond to the amount of currency in circulation. Both can go up and down independently of each other.

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