Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless? • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless?

#81

Post by edoo » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 8:43 AM UTC

lokedhs wrote: post #78

edoo wrote: post #36

Bitcoins' value is in its utility at the moment. Until it stabilizes it is poor as a money (a store of value) while still quite handy as a currency (exchange of value). If it becomes a more stable store of value than competing fiat currencies it will have even more value added.

How would it ever stabilise? There is a hard limit to the number of coins issued, and unless the market is static, the value of bitcoin has to go up. I haven't seen a good explanation to that problem.

Stabilize as in not so volatile. You could have a 1% deflation rate per year and that would be much more stable than the USD.

Re: Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless?

#82

Post by decentralised » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

prostoalex wrote: post #80

decentralised wrote: post #75

Counterargument: actors aren't rational and will continue mining at a loss because of the sunken cost fallacy. Mining will always continue because it's what keeps the current canonical ledger safe so if nothing else the exchanges and market makers are still economically incentivised to mine.

Can't that sunken cost be repurposed to mine Monero / ETH / ZCash / whatever else is in vogue nowadays?

Some of it yes. ASICs usually can only do one mining algorithm (nakamoto, hashimoto, etc) and can't easily upgrade their firmware.

Re: Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless?

#83

Post by fabizeid » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #25

fabizeid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2013 most people didn't know about bitcoin. A big part of the spike in 2017 was from people who never heard about it before. Today everyone knows about bitcoin.

People said the same thing in 2014

Not true! If you integrate the following chart you'll discover that most people learned about bitcoin end of 2017: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2007-11-07%202...