Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#601

Post by graeme » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

Geee wrote: post #109

fogihujy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Cryptocurrencies in general seem to have potential for being used in day-to-day transactions in the future, but Bitcoin itself mostly seem to be used to store value. The planned limit on the total amount of Bitcoin in circulation, transaction fees and long transaction times seem to be quite a blocker for using it to buy a cup of coffee.

Money has to be first established as a store of value, before it can be used as a medium of exchange. As Bitcoin finds a more stable price point, it will become more interesting as a medium of exchange and an unit of account.

Rubbish. This is a misreading of Jevons being passed around as myth in the bitcoin world. There is no “four stages of value of currency adoption” and in Jevons’ framing gold was an exception in that it was a store of value first.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#602

Post by xur17 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #557

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but no real valid reason to do so yet (that I’ve heard). I hold because i expect us to continue approaching the game-theoretic attractor. I've held for years and will keep holding. Every year, i see more and more people coming around to my perspective. How many years can you watch the price keep going up before you'll eventually consider that you might be missing something? > We know transactions are slow and expen…

> lightning network obviates this problem I first heard someone mention this circa 2014. What happened? If anything fewer people try to use bitcoin for transactions since then. And if the point is to hold and never sell why buy anything with bitcoin?

Lightning network usage is alive and growing. Numerous merchants and exchanges all accept it.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#603

Post by ardy42 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #189

azinman2 wrote: post #120

So it sounds like lemming group think. It seems like someone one should hold “just in case,” but no real valid reason to do so yet (that I’ve heard). We know transactions are slow and expensive, so it’s not a good replacement for ordinary commerce. It can be used to transfer across borders, but there often is asymmetry in capital movement that makes this difficult in the places you need it most (poor countries with r…

The forefront of the Bitcoin frenzy isn't even on the blockchain, it's at the exchanges. Hardcore tech people and those who don't (or can't) trust institutions with their Bitcoin will pay the transaction fees to get their money out of exchanges and into their own wallet. The average retail investor, however, doesn't want to be their own bank. They just want in on the price action, while letting the exchange manage th…

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense. Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy.

Is that even legal? It sounds like pumping and dumping.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#604

Post by graeme » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

efwfwef wrote: post #591

graeme wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be flat out false. According to this 78% of gold globally is used in jewelry. Some other portion is used in electronics of industry. https://goldprice.com/project/facts-about-gold/ There’s no such reserve value for Bitcoin. You can’t look at it or hold it or do anything with it other than as a currency. I’ve seen widely varying stats estimating gold’s jewelry share but all of them are large.

That's a moot point, Gold actual usage has no relation with its usage as a store of value. It's used as a store of value because it's shiny and people associates it with "value". Think: why are diamonds so expensive?

Maybe I don’t follow you but if more than half of gold use is jewelry then it seems the use has a lot to do with it’s value. People trade gold on top of that but it’s linked to use. If jewelry demand dropped 98% it would surely affect the price of gold.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#605

Post by dodobirdlord » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

tippytippytango wrote: post #478

Jochim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in what you find lame about the climate change arguments? They seem fairly appealing to me, cryptocurrency is a fraction of the size of current payment processors and is already consuming a small country's worth of power. How much more power will it consume if scaled further? How will power efficiency strategies affect the utility of the network? I think there are some reasonable arguments for mining f…

The energy is used to provide security for the value the network stores. The energy consumed by the actual transaction processing is incidental. If bitcoin used a traditional database to store value it would need physical security (people with guns and/or lawyers) to ensure its integrity. To decide if bitcoin is actually wasteful you'd have to compare it to the energy consumption of the physical security that would b…

The Fed building isn't all that well protected, and "stores" essentially an arbitrarily large amount of USD. It helps that it's impossible to steal, since if you somehow "robbed" the Fed all it would take is a court order to retroactively clarify that your robbery never happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building

I'm happy to call Bitcoin wasteful because we already know what's going to replace it. Proof of work is a dead end and with it all coins that are anchored on PoW and aren't working on migrating to proof of stake. The writing is on the wall that proof of stake is the future.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#606

Post by FFRefresh » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #570

rohitb91 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s not even remotely true. People’s standard of living is better than ever before and their chances of success higher than ever. The narratives we craft define how we move in this world. This is a toxic way of thinking. It takes about $500/month throughout a working life to retire comfortably investing in just VTSAX.

Household debt increased is past pre-2007 levels. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html People have certainly paid for a better standard of living, but they didn't get there with just wages.

Here's some related data that may help expand our understanding:

Household debt service payments as a percent of disposable personal income are as low as they have ever been: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

Personal savings rate has never been better: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

Household debt to GDP saw a spike at the beginning of the pandemic, but still is much lower than we were coming out of the last recession: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

Disposable income has never been higher: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPI

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#607

Post by bitexploder » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #580

bitexploder wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinker with that by force of mining power and you will destabilize the currency. Maybe they want that, but it would probably end the currency if it was done by force.

> it would probably end the currency if it was done by force Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to?

I think it’s more they changes are generally done with some form of consensus. Trying to make a change by flexing your muscle as the biggest holder of mining power could have unpredictable and counterproductive results. I think mostly it would just cause more miners to be brought online though. I basically don’t think you can change Bitcoin this way, and if you could it would more or less change it a lot. I think invested institutions would not let that happen.

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#608

Post by bitexploder » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #560

bitexploder wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinker with that by force of mining power and you will destabilize the currency. Maybe they want that, but it would probably end the currency if it was done by force.

I'd not call it stable as it is now.

It’s stable in the technology sense. The price... who knows :)

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#609

Post by 2020aj » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

fbelzile wrote: post #558

lph wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

I'm just guessing here but they might be hedging against future trade restrictions set by China against US companies like Tesla. If another trade war was to happen, people in China might be able to buy a Tesla using Bitcoin vs having to buy a NIO.

Cars are regulated beyond just the point of sale. I believe it would be rather difficult to get said car registered (presuming there's a Chinese equivalent to vehicle registration), if you could even arrange receipt in the first place ;)

Re: Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

#610

Post by bitcoinmoney » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

behringer wrote: post #504

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other stores of trust. You could buy index funds or government bonds or any number of other things, and the price will be less volatile than Bitcoin to boot. I know a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts are skeptical of traditional institutions, but really, if all the world's governments go bankrupt you're going to have bigger problems. Heck, if you must use a cryptocurrency, at least pick one of the newer…

If all the world's governments go bankrupt I don't see any other currency than bitcoins working!

We’d go to a barter system and BTC would be useless. Are you able to envision a scenario where all governments at banklkrupt but internet is still there to process BTC txns?