Is there any good information on what set off this current bull run? The timing with the US election seems odd, but I can't see any causal mechanism that could link the two.
Is it Robinhood adding crypto?
Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
51–60 of 115 posts
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distribution of capital allocation doesn’t change by adopting a non-central bank based monetary system. The thing you can choose is who is doing the capital allocation: Satoshi / Winklewoss brothers / Chamath / Elon Musk / Michael Saylor, or Trump / Biden / Putin / Christine Lagarde. If you like Biden and Jerome Powell, keep your money in USD. If you like Putin, buy RUB. If you prefer the libertarian crowd, buy B…
Currency is not a fandom.
And Bitcoin isn't a currency
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#53It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…
All the "what if" is always pegged to another currency. I don't know anyone that prices anything in just BTC (it's all BTC converted from USD or whatever, because anything else would be madness) - and I don't know anyone that doesn't peg their bitcoin to what they'd get if they sold it for "real money". Which makes me think any endgame isn't going to be the utopian, governmentless, money-freedom future I keep hearing…
Not sure if it means anything, but the first thing I do when reading about the price of say some huge tunnel built in Europe is mentally convert the quoted Euro price to USD. Doesn't make the Euro any less real as a currency.
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your problem with this hypothetical endgame is an appeal to fairness. I understand why you'd want that, fairness is a strong human instinct, but I don't see where it has any bearing on the likelihood of this future occurring. People don't enjoy having a high number in their accounting system, they enjoy being wealthy. If, say, African central banks start purchasing BTC, and India joins them, early adopters will cash…
> Is it really that different from buying the first iPod, and thinking to yourself, "y'know this is a brand new Apple, I'm putting a few thousand bucks into their stock"? Yes, the former is just straight up gambling, the latter is investing in a company that makes good products.
Based on the fairness argument of OP, this seems even more dystopian:
1. Buy a 'good product' which only wealthy people can afford
2. Buy stock because exposure to 'good product' implies you could improve your fortune
3. ... hodl
4. Profit
40% of the US can't afford a 400$ emergency. Someone who had arguably more than that has improved their position from hodling... by 400x.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#55Call me old fashioned but I feel like bitcoin is similar to fiat currencies simply because it's not backed by anything. It has invented scarcity. If I just created giraffe coin and there were only 5 coins it doesn't mean it has any value. Would someone please explain why on earth I want to own bitcoin? I really don't understand the bull case for it.
The US Dollar is backed by 20 aircraft carriers, thousands of nuclear weapons, 350 million Americans who think they have a manifest destiny, and a government with a long history of invading countries that threaten the dollar.
What's bitcoin backed by?
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#56Call me old fashioned but I feel like bitcoin is similar to fiat currencies simply because it's not backed by anything. It has invented scarcity. If I just created giraffe coin and there were only 5 coins it doesn't mean it has any value. Would someone please explain why on earth I want to own bitcoin? I really don't understand the bull case for it.
Bitcoin is valuable as an investment in the same way that gold is valuable. It is scarce and the benefit it currently has over gold is it is completely portable and can be instantly be used as a means of exchange if necessary. Bitcoin has very little value as a currency.
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion that over 80% of millionaires in the world are self made is completely ridiculous. Just because you didn't receive large swathes of money doesn't make you self made. Growing up in a secure environment, where you don't have to worry about having a job while you finish high school, where you don't have to worry about not being able to go to college. Where you don't have to worry much at all about anything as…
That sounds like a classic "no true Scotsman". By poverty, do you mean under the United State poverty threshold over ~$12k/year? Because that's an average middle-class income in much of Eastern Europe. There the poverty threshold is much lower, but would also be considered middle-class in India. There's also a stronger social safety net in many countries that are poorer than the US, where you certainly don't have to…
> Because that's an average middle-class income in much of Eastern Europe. There the poverty threshold is much lower, but would also be considered middle-class in India.
I honestly wanted to believe you were making an off the cuff uninformed remark, so I did a little digging and found this gem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Holy Christ it is worse than I imagined. Wow I never realized there was such a STARK difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe with regard to wages. WOW.
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#58It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…
> Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Yes. So what? I don't think the typical Bitcoin proponent is the kind of person to get outraged at Pareto distributions. They are against governments, they don't hate wealthy people just for being wealthy. > The problem with that hypothetical endgame is that…
> store of wealth
It's funny how people keep saying this as if it's true. 99% of the market isn't buying crypto to "store value". This along with the idea that somehow it's a great currency bcs "no gov't" etc. is also a lie no one believes. Most of the market isn't actually making real-world transactions or storing value but somehow other people will start doing it in the future for some reason so gainz etc.
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has no relation to transaction volume. It is related to the price of BTC and the block reward every 10 minutes. The higher the price, the more miners compete to find a block. Transaction volume can never increase because they have capped the block size at 1mb.
Good to know, appreciate the explanation. So these estimates that it uses about the same energy as Argentina are probably based on a rather old price and we could get to many multiples of that if the price keeps increasing?
It also depends on the available market for asics. In bear markets, asics are very affordable as miners go out of business but the price can go up quite a lot in bull markets which affects the profitability of buying new machines.
Re: Bitcoin hits $1T in market value
#60It will be interesting to see Bitcoin sentiment shift as newcomers realize that the bulk of Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies. Cryptocurrency proponents are trying to get ahead of this by reframing Bitcoin as the people's currency, or an opportunity for average people to get rich while sticking…
> not to mention completely disconnecting wealth from societal value creation.
You forget to mention that a lot of early adopters are actual criminals. Yeah, go make them the rulers of the world. Let's see how this ends.