One of the great things about living in a liberal economic system is that you, I, or anyone else can bet on something that's right, but unpopular.
A lot of people started off not understanding Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, and were annoyed by those who did. As more data accumulates suggesting they might have missed something, they seem to only grow more livid, rather than more curious.
It's a funny pattern. I'm glad that I live in an economic environment in which I don't have to waste time convincing them, but can instead simply put my own skin in the game and get back to work.
Critics are getting caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, the evidence is mounting that bitcoin is here to stay and will become an increasingly important part of civilization. This means they severely missed out on the investment opportunity of a lifetime. There's still tons of upside, but you're probably not going to get absurdly rich from it.
On the other hand, they still don't fully understand why it's not some kind of scam/ponzi scheme/tulip mania and don't want to buy in and be the sucker left holding the bag when it all collapses.
I suspect this cognitive dissonance is what causes long term critics to become increasingly livid and frantic in their criticism.
I'm openly a skeptic, and this is a great mental reframe for me.
I knew about bitcoin since it was shared at defcon as a 30/40 minute presentation in the middle of an afternoon. I want to guess around 2010, sub $1 for sure. As I have watched it be a bad buy(in my opinion) year after year and repeatedly being wrong to the tune of multiple retirement opportunities, I still think it is a bad buy.
Why? Not anger, but fear. Fear not that I've been wrong, but that I've been right. I don't want to be left holding the bag, and the $20k I might or might have thrown at bitcoin I would sell shortly after making a 20% profit, same as I would have regardless of the price.
I just don't get it. I probably won't ever get it. And I hope those making fortunes with it put the money behind things more worthwhile than NFTs and other energy intensive proofing "products."
I saw you were downvoted, but thanks for helping me better understand, and in the future articulate, my no-coiner stance.
And this is the problem. You shouldn't buy in if you don't understand why you would want to hold it for years and decades. If you're just looking to scalp some gains off the mania, then you're very likely to exit at a loss when you experience your first 30% correction that happens over a couple days.
The best explanation I've ever read about why smart, well educated people can be so diametrically opposed in their opinion on bitcoin, is the level of trust they have in the establishment system. For various reasons in my personal experience and resulting philosophy on life, I have severe issues in relying on systems of human trust. As much as feasible, I don't want to give others power to abuse and use me without my consent, and bitcoin is a vessel of that need. I see bitcoin as a new, incorruptible foundation of trust from which human cooperation can build off and flourish.
If you don't have a similar kind of lived experience, you might not ever understand the value of bitcoin.
Or at least, you won't realize the value until it's too late.
Generally in investment it's helpful to recognise we're not infallible and ask: what is the probability I'm wrong on this? And that's generally a good way to size positions for things you don't want to own, but that the market is telling you to.
If I was in you're position, I'd think there's at least a 0.1% chance I'll be proven wrong (after all money is based on social consensus). So I'll take 0.1% of my investable assets and dump it into Bitcoin to hedge myself, and then forget about it.
Read the Bitcoin Standard book. It was created for openly sceptic people as yourself. And you're right, you shouldn't buy Bitcoin until you understand why you would buy it.
> There's still tons of upside, but you're probably not going to get absurdly rich from it.
There's still about 100x potential upside, which is absurdly rich for people who at this point decide to sell their house for BTC or put all their money in some other way. But sure, it's not the same as people holding since under $10K
You think Bitcoin could be 10x as valuable as gold? On what basis? 100x from here would be an aggregate value of $100 trillion (20m coins * $5m per coin), while all the gold in the world is only valued at $10 trillion.
If it actually someday achieves adoption as a currency that's used in at least many nations then the total aggregate value would have to be a significant amount larger than gold. I think many people have a very US centric point of view where they sort of take it for granted that their currency is used as a global currency standard for trade and is relatively stable and strong, but this isn't the case for many countries on the planet. So it's not entirely implausible that someday this sort of adoption could occur.
It is of course, still quite a longshot, but then again I thought $10,000 Bitcoin was a longshot and somehow it's at $60,000 now.
If this ever occurred this would likely be something many years off, but my guess is that a lot of the larger institutions moving in see this sort of possible incredible future return so they're putting small amounts in since it's a reasonably good asymmetric bet. Even if you think the actual chance for success is something like 20%, if you believe that if this actually did occur that it would give you 20X or 50X returns then it's still considered a reasonable bet, you'd just bet a small amount of the money you have. And that's pretty much what you're seeing the braver companies do now.
I'm a skeptic not in that I think the price will tank but that the Bitcoin ordeal won't result in a net win for people. It's just a vehicle for speculation and a drain on computing resources, along with a tool for illicit trade. I can be correct that it's a bad investment for humanity while it remains a good investment for individuals.
Really well said! In the sale of saving myself from FOMO and investment into speculative vehicles, I keep resisting to any investment into any coin.
We are still living in age of resource sacristy and power we use is not unlimited and certainly not free, as free of environmental impact. I just refuse to be part of movement that simply uses electricity to create something virtually worthless. Yes, there is a significant monetary value to coin mining but these resources could have been spent to make society a better place.
People save their entire lives with their time and health and then the government debases everything they worked for. We just printed something like 6 trillion. Thats why people around the world like bitcoin. Governments and central banks have no self control, they answer to politicians who want to stay in power and therefore spend.
> People save their entire lives with their time and health and then the government debases everything they worked for. We just printed something like 6 trillion. Thats why people around the world like bitcoin. Governments and central banks have no self control, they answer to politicians who want to stay in power and therefore spend.
Even if that was a serious concern, there's no need for a glorified ledger that consumes the power of a moderately sized country to solve it. Literally any non-cash asset is a hedge against inflation, including things like stocks and real estate.
Can't stocks be dilluted? And real estate is much more difficult to buy or evaluate. Bitcoin (or some other cryptocurrencies) you can simply buy without much hassle.
That's a good point that didn't make it into my terse, reductive description. Still, I remain skeptical that all the proof of work mining is worth what it buys in terms of a trustworthy ledger.
A 51% attack on the Bitcoin network currently would cost about 5.5 billion, and you realistically cant even get than many ASICS in a reasonable amount of time. A network that holds a large proportion of the worlds wealth needs to be this secure.
Something like 65%. Locating and coordinating all entrepreneurs (thousands dispersed and not broadcasting a location) to attack the network would be highly unlikely and a bit of a tin foil hat scenario. If a 51% attack occurred it would need to be sustained and in the end would likely result in a fork of the chain.
>> How many ASICs are located within territory controlled by the Chinese Communist Party?
> Something like 65%. Locating and coordinating all entrepreneurs (thousands dispersed and not broadcasting a location) to attack the network would be highly unlikely and a bit of a tin foil hat scenario. If a 51% attack occurred it would need to be sustained and in the end would likely result in a fork of the chain.
You forget that the Chinese internet is heavily monitored, run by state-owned businesses, with all external traffic going through government-controlled choke points running a big famous firewall. Literally every network connection and online account is required to be linked to someone's official ID.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese government could track down every Bitcoin miner in China in fairly short order. They just need to program the great firewall to detect bitcoin protocol traffic (they already detect VPN protocols), then cross reference that with their telecom account records. These are things they already do on a regular basis, as part of the current monitoring efforts. If they want to be really sure they're targeting miners, they could probably cross reference that again with data from the state-owned power companies, but I'd guess that they don't do that often so it would take more work.
> You sound pretty confident so Ill let you explain step by step how that goes.
Did you see where I already outlined it?
The Chinese government already clearly has the tools and capabilities they'd need to track down Bitcoin miners already in-place and used for similar tasks. Probably the only thing stopping them is that they don't care about Bitcoin to bother.
Theres a lot of energy usage in China that eclipses btc energy usage by several orders of magnitude (factories, etc). Much of the mining is from small operations. Locating and coordinating thousands or tens of thousands would be very difficult and also pointless. This has been a topic for 8ish years and goes along with the people who talk of a global power outage.
> It's just a vehicle for speculation and a drain on computing resources, along with a tool for illicit trade.
Speculating against an endless money printer? They literally just printed 2x Bitcoin's market cap in the last stimulus bill. Illicit trade is magnitude smaller on the public easily traceable Bitcoin blockchain compared to dollars.
Is price a good metric for whether bitcoin is dead or not? It seems trivial to imagine a thing that is very expensive but still has ~no value as a currency.
I think you need to remember that at the end of the day Bitcoin is software running on the hardware of the internet, so assuming that it stays static in it's capabilities doesn't really make good sense. I mean when we used 14.4kbps modems for dialup to access AOL or Prodigy the sort of bandwidth we had then wasn't very good, but assuming that this would always be the state of the internet would have been made you very wrong. It's the sort of prediction Paul Krugman made when he proclaimed that the internet would be no more important than fax machines.
Bitcoin will have changes made to it's core software that will allow significant scaling improvements-some of that foundation is being laid this year via taproot and we're really talking about a foundational piece that will take years for the benefits to be fully realized with additional future improvements. But there's little reason to believe that the current state of Bitcoin where it's an asset that can't function as a currency will be a permanent one.
At the moment people already have easy to use currencies they can use on their smartphones, so Bitcoin being an easy to use digital currency adds nothing to their lives. What Bitcoin does provide is simply the fact that it's not a fiat currency. This may not seem valuable to people who've grown up in a nation with relatively stable currency value and a sophisticated economic system. But just look at the value of currencies in numerous nations around the world over the last 2 years. Whether you look at Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Lebanon (street value), Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc. what you see are nations where the currency has dropped in value by double digits per year. So if you live in the US or Canada or a EU nation you may not feel the sort of urgency to find a solution to this problem, but people elsewhere aren't as lucky. You also have to remember that people in these countries can't just buy reputable US securities via a smartphone app like people in most advanced nations can. Their choices for storing their wealth come down to literally their native currency that's tanking in value, blackmarket US dollars, precious metals, and Bitcoin.
I honestly think if you think outside of your own life experiences and look at the experience elsewhere in the world then the actual true value of Bitcoin becomes much more apparent. Then the energy use stops looking so plainly wasteful and in fact you might start wondering whether the fact that video game consoles like the Xbox actually use significantly more power than Bitcoin (and significantly less renewables) makes Bill Gates a bit of a hypocrite when he attacks Bitcoin.
It takes time for assets to start functioning as currencies. Bitcoin needs about 10 more years to get adopted by enough people to function as a currency.
Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Nick Szabo's Shelling Out blog entry to see how new money is usually adopted. Bitcoin has about 200%/year growth rate, right now at about 100M users (1% adoption, maybe somewhat less). In 10 years it has a good chance to be adopted by billions of people (there's no guarantee though of course).
Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency. That was the original vision. So far it hasn’t done very well. Maybe lightning network will fix it? It’s not dead yet, but it also never really got started.
This is your bias projecting onto it what you thought it should be. It is not Bitcoin's fault you were mistaken and it certainly does not equate to failure.
It is easy to see in hindsight that a blockchain is and was always going to be inefficient as a transaction mechanism, moreover a finite "money" also can never compete with "easy" fiat money in expandable supply for commerce.
Whatever people (mistakenly) thought it was going to be, it is so far succeeding wildly at (long term, with great volatility) store of value asset.
> This is your bias projecting onto it what you thought it should be.
"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"
Sounds a lot like the original project was intended to be an electronic version of cash, which would make it an electronic currency.
Really? Because Satoshi's whitepaper is literally titled “Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", not "Bitcoin a 'store of value'". It seems to me the real answer is Bitcoin was sequestered by Blockstream and purposely sabotaged in order to promote their offchain solutions. BCH had to hard fork away to maintain the original intention of the project. Thus BCH can be transferred quickly and for mere fractions of the fees in BTC. So bitcoin is a currency, but that currency is now BCH. Whereas BTC exists to serve Blockstream and its for-profit offchain solution, which conveniently solve the limits they fought to impose.
Bitcoin's main purpose was to create an unattackable (by govt or private entities) decentralized consensus. It was best perceived to have been created by the a currency on it. This currency can still be used on layer 2 for smaller transactions.
If you and your buddy opened a tab between each other to have bitcoin settlement at the end of the day, that wouldn't be saying "But you aren't using bitcoin".
I believe you are mistaken, the purpose of Bitcoin was very clear from the whitepaper title. It was to create "a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin Cash is the real, continued implementation of bitcoin, as it was designed in its whitepaper. BTC is simply an attempt (rather good one at that) by bad actors, to purposely hamper the protocol and then sell offchain solutions to solve those issues they introduced.
Imagine if for some reason the word "bitcoin" turns out to be problematic (maybe it means "Shit/fart/poop" in Spanish and Chinese, which means most people in these countries wouldn't wanna use it, so the bitcoin people decide to rename the project to "Cryptocoin", are you going to say that clearly this violates the fundamental principles of bitcoin because Satoshi called it "bitcoin"?
Because based on what I read on Satoshi's communication, he would take 2 mins to change the name to something else (look how easily he applied the block size limit when the need arrived).
Similarly, there are essential attributes to what bitcoin is, and there are accidental attributes to it. Clearly the name of bitcoin is not necessary for it to be bitcoin.
What about the 'cash system' part? Clearly you and I disagree on this. I believe that cash part doesn't mean that the basic token must be trasnferable on layer 1.
Changing the name or updating implementation details is not the same thing as completely abandoning the technology.
You're talking about building a completely separate payment system that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, that suffers from all of the original privacy and centralization problems as regular cash, but just because the funds get converted to Bitcoin after some purchases we're still going to pretend it's using the same technology and that it still aligns with Satoshi's original goals?
If we're doing that, then I'm declaring that my credit card is a Bitcoin system, because I can buy Bitcoin from Coinbase using a credit card. I'm declaring that Visa is already just a layer 1 payment system on top of a Bitcoin backend.
As another commenter mentioned to you: "Changing the name or updating implementation details is not the same thing as completely abandoning the technology.". I agree with them, your comparison doesn't make much sense in this context.
> Of all the minerals mined from the Earth, none is more useful than gold. Its usefulness is derived from a diversity of special properties. Gold conducts electricity, does not tarnish, is very easy to work, can be drawn into wire, can be hammered into thin sheets, alloys with many other metals, can be melted and cast into highly detailed shapes, has a wonderful color and a brilliant luster.
Your point would make sense if the world was going to try to shoe-horn finite assets into the role of currency transactions, but again, this is a mistaken assumption. There is historical support for the idea of "two monies", soft/weak money, credit, fiat etc that is very good for commerce and day to day transactions, and as unit of account.
And hard money for long term savings, and best for settling trade between foreign regimes. There's a reason central banks all hold gold as a primary reserve asset.
Give this a read [0] it discusses in detail the idea that there isn't one type (hard or soft) money that best serves both competing use cases of currency and store of value, but that two different monies work best.
> and best for settling trade between foreign regimes. There's a reason central banks all hold gold as a primary reserve asset.
> both competing use cases of currency and store of value
An action can be both rational for an individual to take, and still be a net negative to the world.
I am argueing that the gold in a vault use case, which sometimes people call "store of value" is a net negative upon the world, while still possibly being individually rational.
That is my point. I agree that gold serves the use case of a store of value, and could be rational for an individual to take.
And I am saying that this is still a net negative, that causes more harm than good, because you have a bunch of resources doing nothing.
Considering that it was touted as the future digital CURRENCY until up to about 2 years ago, it has failed horribly in that regard. Its no longer being used on darknet either, that place has been taken by monero.
Bitcoin failed as a currency. Bad UX, high fees, high volatility. All things you dont want for a currency.
Now for a store of value, thats something else. If everyone "believes" it to be worth something, thats what it'll be.
Yeah seems ridiculous. When skimming through the earliest articles they mostly seems to be about Bitcoin as a currency. Btc turning in to a speculative asset underscore their point if anything.
Hal Finney has early quotes speculating that BTC would best serve as a reserve asset like gold, predicting that transactions would be inefficient at scale.
If you're willing to accept that Bitcoin is not viable as a currency, you can then embrace that it's a better store of value than fiat currencies because the monetary policy is static and it is scarce. Bitcoin is digital gold, not a currency.
There is some implication that the only alternatives are fiat currencies. Anyone in finance will tell you: "do not to hold a lot of cash as an asset or store of value". Buying real assets is the general advice.
Bitcoin is a deflationary currency with high barriers-to-transact (rendering it nearly useless as a currency), backed by consensus trust in two assumptions:
• Enough people are burning enough electricity using enough computer processors that no one entity has control over enough computer power to become the majority burner of processing power.
• That's the only way to violate the axioms of blockchain transactions.
Assuming these two points, Bitcoin is a reasonably good “financial asset”, albeit one that's rendered GPUs almost impossible to buy and is rapidly becoming a major contributor to the anthropocentric climate change that's rendering our planet a harder place to not-die.
>Bitcoin has the most predictable, mathematically-provable, strictest scarcity of any asset ever conceived. It has the potential to be the most useful form of money ever invented (it is already a far more useful means of storing and transferring value than a bank account for some). Every day that passes - with every new/added user of the network, developer, liquidity, applications - Bitcoin’s utility increases exponentially.
>Bitcoin has intrinsic value because it holds both required properties of scarcity and utility, and with every passing day this intrinsic value grows.
Bitcoin has scarcity for sure, but the utility I still don't get it. transaction fees are still high, cannot be easily transferred to and from fiat money, merchant adoption is low. I get the scarcity but I don't see where the utility is. and for it to have intrinsic value it must have both
The utility is predicated on scarcity. If you're interested in trying to understand how there might be utility in a technology like Bitcoin, which it sounds like you genuinely are, consider the following.
Imagine two perfect simulations of our universe. In one, people are allowed to use currency to trade things. In the other, people are not. Press play and watch civilizations in the former develop much more quickly than civilizations in the latter.
I haven't gotten to Bitcoin yet, but if you agree then we've established that currency can be useful because when you eliminate the use of currency while holding all else equal, people are worse off. Now, I don't like to think of Bitcoin as a currency, but in much the same way that the technology of currency makes it easier for people to reliably and rapidly transact, the technology of a mathematically defined, elegant, widely deployed store of value can help a civilization. To descend far beyond this into the particulars might require several volumes, but hopefully I've put forth an argument you can extrapolate from as you consider where the "utility" of Bitcoin and projects like it might be found.
Anyone who made money on bitcoin certainly can’t be criticized for being lucky. You had to have a very strong conviction to hold this long and in the face of universal criticism from orthodox economists, academics, business leaders, and HN commentators.
Right now its market cap is around one tenth of gold. Bitcoin is not dead and wont be but it seems like soon it will be dead forever for most people after loosing almost all of their investments. For this type of markets it is unavoidable.
At this point bitcoin is just one implementation of its software and it is being used for gambling.
To my Grandmother, owning "gold/silver etf" is as silly/stupid as owning NFT to me. If I can't understand why would anyone buy NFT, how would she understand non-physical gold/silver etf. Maybe my kids would understand the value of NFT. At the end we are gonna own something we feel valuable to us or others.
I don't own any crypto, but do own gold/silver etf. Almost everyone around me own bitcoin (probably other crypto too). I hope few(or most) would successfully exit with good profit.
Maybe gold/silver was just useless piece of rock before enough people realized/accepted that this shiny rock can be used as medium of exchange or jewelry. Just like now people are slowly accepting bitcoin as digital gold.
At the end I'll never understand value/price of bitcoin or NFT, my Grandmother would never understand "gold/silver etf", and my kids would value bitcoin and NFT.
Bitcoins only true value is that it is the biggest/first, and it's limited. If any of the other cryptocurrencies catch up with it in terms of market capitalization/popularity then bitcoin might also lose a lot of its value.
Whatever the believers say, it still is not useful as money, and in terms of ridiculously high energy use and impact on the graphics card market, is even harmful. That's a zombie currency. Looks like money, walks like money, quacks like money, but not money.
It will take decades for Bitcoin to become the global reserve currency. Until then people will speculate on the price and won't use it as a currency. It's a natural process, I cannot imagine another way for Bitcoin to be globally adopted.
Even if Bitcoin succeeds, whatever that means, what will it have accomplished? For one to not be skeptical don’t you need an objective to be accomplished? Unless the objective of Bitcoin is simply to increase its value in perpetuity?
The value of bitcoin is zero if you are bargaining with me. I'll trade a chicken for bitcoin when the state allows me to pay my taxes in bitcoin. Until then enjoy your fairy money.
> The value of bitcoin is zero if you are bargaining with me. I'll trade a chicken for bitcoin when the state allows me to pay my taxes in bitcoin. Until then enjoy your fairy money.
Not sure how literally you mean this, but I don't think it makes any sense, unless you're willing to pass up free money just to make a point. If I offer you 100x the usual price, on condition you let me pay in bitcoin, are you really turning that down? (You don't have to hold the bitcoin for any significant time, you can immediately swap them for dollars at the market rate.)
And do you extend this policy to everything that (lacks intrinsic value and) can't be used to pay taxes? The state won't let you pay your taxes in winning lottery tickets either...
I'm no bitcoin fan, fwiw. But I think you're conflating 'bitcoin sucks as a currency' with 'bitcoins are worthless'.
You know the federal government of the biggest world economy who also finances the world's largest military have their own ponzi scheme going on right?
I'm pretty sure they can knock at any bitcoin billionaire door at night and fly them to a 5 star resort in Guantanamo whenever they want.
The Emperor mints the coin. It has and always will be like that. No amount of crypto wishful thinking will change that.
I mean, companies you can see they have new products coming, if they sold well, if there's innovation. Commodities you can see production, consumption - people actually eat wheat, use copper to build things, etc.
Most people I know (a small and biased sample size) that are buying bitcoin, they are buying because "that sucker's goin'up", like the Peter Lynch video.
A lot of people started off not understanding Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, and were annoyed by those who did. As more data accumulates suggesting they might have missed something, they seem to only grow more livid, rather than more curious.
It's a funny pattern. I'm glad that I live in an economic environment in which I don't have to waste time convincing them, but can instead simply put my own skin in the game and get back to work.